Father's Day: The Comedian and Silk Spectre

[cyberghostface]

Don't know if there's any 'father's day' event going on or not but I figured now would be a good time to post this.

I have mixed feelings on the 'Before Watchmen' event as a whole given how its existence is effectively a giant middle finger to Alan Moore but it did have a few good moments.

The following scene comes from 'Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #3'.

The context of the scene is that Laurie's mother has called on the Comedian to help with a situation with her daughter. Afterwards, he pays her a small visit:




Not denying the Comedian's an asshole but I always found it sad he never got to really know his daughter. I liked the idea here that he would 'look after' her in his own way and the bit with the smiley face struck me as a nice way of tying the two together.

On a related note, I posted this before but this comes from Watchmen RPG book which contained writing from Moore.



In case it's hard to read:

Dear Laurie,
I don't really know what your mom has told you about me but [scribble]
Well, I think something terrible is going to happen soon, and before I die, I just wanted you to know I lo --

Comments

[darkknightjrk]

Then there's the scene where Comedian basically blackmails her boyfriend into letting himself get drafted, which is...not so nice.

Still a good scene--the smiley face thing also ties more into Laurie's future, since at the end of Watchmen, she starts thinking about redesigning her costume to be more like his.

[dcbanacek]

He sure didn't seem to worry about his offspring when he shot the Vietnamese woman carrying his kid.

[glprime]

I recall that, and the crass inhumanity of the moment, but I also recall the cold logic he hit Osterman with when he confronts Blake immediately after:

"Blake, she was pregnant. You gunned her down."

"Yeah, yeah, that's right[...] And y'know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury[...] ! But you didn't lift a goddamn finger! You don't really give a damn about human beings."

EDIT: taking it to mean, yes he was flying off the handle like mad as usual, but I think he also knew at any time around Jon Osterman, he could've been kept in check (or put down for good, just like those "crime circles" when Jon first debuted).

[captainbellman]

I do not consider any of Cooke's writing canon, partly because this series demonised Sally as an ireedeemable monster-character while making out that her non-relationship with her estranged father and surrogate father-figure (Hollis Mason? What the hell?) was more important as a positive development of Laurie's character than her relationship with her mother.

But also because he decided to 'redeem' the Comedian by rewriting continuity so that Sally and he we're having an affair right up to the day of their wedding rather than just hooking up one time; meanwhile, for the sin of being gay, Hooded Justice is turned into a torturer and Captain Metropolis his rape victim (if you will recall, in the source material, it was HJ who helped Sally while the Comedian was assaulting her).

I realise what day it is soon this week, but that does not change my stance that too many goddamned characters in modern media have their relationships with their fathers prioritised as a major character-defining aspect while their mothers just drift off into the background or get portrayed in a negative light or without any agency.

[lordultimus]

Well, IIRC, it was implied that the thing with H.J. and Metropolis was consensual, albeit definitely BDSM.

[halloweenjack]

As much as I wanted to like Conner and Cooke's work on BW--because I always thought that Laurie was the least-developed of the six main characters in Watchmen, and because I wanted to know more about the Minutemen than what we got in the back pages of the first few chapters--I was largely disappointed by what we got. But, I will say this: the bit where Blake just tilts his head a little and raises his eyebrow is unexpectedly sweet, and I appreciated the irony of how he got his smiley badge.