Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 - The Minutemen's Last Mission

[zapbiffpow]

In a departure from the classic saying, this is the one series I can believe no one's posted yet.

Not because the writing is terrible (it's not), or the art is sub-par (like hell it is), but because at all times the story's either so distrurbing or heartbreaking or controversial that it's hard to find which pages to post (i.e., the villain known only as The Friend of the Children.)

Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 gives us the team's last moment as a unit. Four pages after the cut:



Here's what's happened during the series:

Silhouette - Murdered, mourned. I love how Cooke really expanded her back-story - she's now one of my favorite characters.
Dollar Bill - Shot dead, revolving door incident.
Silk Spectre - Quit after having avenged Silhouette, by way of 'taking care' of the Liquidator.
Comedian - Currently wetworks operative for the U.S. government.

The remaining Minutemen are just about ready to end the whole thing when they get an S.O.S from Bluecoat and Scout, a pair of heroes straight from the funny books who warn them of a Japanese plan to cause a meltdown in New York.

The target turns out to be the Statue of Liberty and the resulting radiation poisoning casualties, Bluecoat reports, would number in the thousands.

The Minutemen, although skeptical of the two, head for the Statue after the threat gets confirmed.



As the Minutemen hold off enemy gunfire at the base of the statue, Bluecoat is shot and killed, leaving Scout and Nite Owl to disable the nuclear device.

Then, in a freak twist of fate, Nite Owl is pinned down the stairs by the enemy he had shot to save Scout, forcing the kid to defuse a heavily radiated machine on his own.



This tearjerking sequence of words and images then happens:




This series has been executed so well it doesn't feel like a prequel or a fanfic anymore. Here's to Darwyn Cooke!

 

Comments

[sadoeuphemist]

You're right, you're right, I've hosed up the timeline completely. But a plot by Japanese-Americans to plant a nuclear device in the Statue of Liberty does justify the internment camps, albeit retroactively. If they can and will do that after the war's over, it's a good thing that the government was keeping an eye on them during the war, isn't it?

What's frustrating to me is that Hollis' myopia seems to be objectively justified. Cooke creates this supervillain bomb threat tailored exclusively to the superheroes, and the heroes perform admirably. Unlike Watchmen, where there are legitimate reasons that the public turns against costumed vigilantes, their failure is imposed from the top down, with an absurd government conspiracy to hush up the whole thing. This is a government that is simultaneously too incompetent to stop a nuclear device from being brought into the Statue of Liberty, but competent enough to hush up the whole thing completely.

Traditional superhero stories, with their focus on the individual, rely on the premise that the police, the army, the government, the state, are incompetent. Society is powerless and inert, consisting largely of innocent bystanders, and it's up to the superhero to save the day. Watchmen turned this on its head by showing the superheroes crushed under the weight of sociopolitical forces beyond their capacity to deal with. When Cooke mourns that heroism goes unrewarded, he's not talking about people trying to do their best in a complex world. He's mourning the heroism of those old superhero comics, with contrived supervillain plots, where the authorities are useless and cities are in constant danger of being destroyed, and it all falls on a single individual in a goofy costume can save hundreds of thousands.

And sure, that's what superheroes are about. But as a prequel to Watchmen, this all just comes off as shallow and artificial and regressive.

[drexer]

I've got to thank you for so cleanly putting forward what has been bothering me since yesterday when I saw this post. I did see that there was merit in the story, but its superposition with the Watchmen characters and scenes seemed uncomfortable and inadequate to me, and it is much like you said, the message that it tells is the kind of message that Watchmen itself took to its job of deconstructing.

If I might add a small point upon which my thoughts rested, was that it was with a very powerful intent that in Watchmen the only 'proper superhero story' was that of Ozymandias and its appearance was so well timed. For various pages Watchmen keeps building its story and its universe and convincing us that there are no such plots or stories, no grand intergalactic battles and doomsday villains, that when the events are dropped upon us with the impact of aliens, psychics, mutant squids and who knows what else, it breaks our perception of the world and of the context of those plots. It brings them out to be examined as a tool of the genre and how they fit when in a different setting, how their consequences are far bigger and the needs that motivate them are far greater.

What Cooke does here, shatters that whole context if taken seriously, because now Ozymandia's plot exists in a world where the government would take it seriously. It's working principle is in the idea that Watchmen's world would never think of it, because there it would simply never be a 'real' possibility.

This is also in part why I've always been so ambivalent about the change of that part in the Watchmen movie, because while in part I did not agree with a change of such a fundamental part of the story, cinema(even nowadays post-Avengers and DK) simply put does not have the story and genre conventions in which such a shattering of concept has an impact.