Father's Day: The Comedian and Silk Spectre

[cyberghostface]

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:





And from the Watchmen RPG book 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

[icon_uk]

This is not a father/daughter relationship I would choose to celebrate

[cyberghostface]

I liked it.

[alicemacher]

It's... complicated. As with so much in both the original Watchmen and the better-written of the prequels. (For the following, I'll stick to the original so as to keep things simpler.)

On the one hand, Blake's wish for Laurie to be part of his life is one of his only humanizing traits prior to his breakdown after discovering Veidt's plan. We see this in the 1966 scene where he tries to connect with her and looks genuinely sad when Sally pushes her into the car and tells him to stay away from her. Similarly, in the 1973 scene where she meets him again only, having since read Hollis's memoir, to tell him off, helooks genuinely hurt.

On the other hand, Blake has no one to blame but himself for Sally's and, later, Laurie's shutting him out of his daughter's life. It doesn't help that in both cases his moral stuntedness (to put it mildly) leads him to trivialize his rape attempt ("Sally, listen, I though we'd settled all that a long time ago." "Only once.").

Eddie does in the end succeed at reaching his daughter, but it's only in a figurative and one-sided sense, since he's over two months dead by that point. I'm referring to Laurie's final bit of dialogue, in which she reveals her acceptance of being the Comedian's daughter by expressing the desire to dress and arm herself like him when she returns to crimefighting. So... there is a certain poignancy to that father-daughter relationship, yeah, but it's fraught with difficulty. Especially if one considers the chilling possibility that Laurie may choose to embrace her father's legacy in other ways. (Not through sexual assault, mind, but through a more brutal approach to adventuring.)

[icon_uk]

Any sympathy for Blake I might have had (and there was vanishingly little to being with) is sort of messed up by the above scene though, which shows Blake getting all warm and fuzzy seeing that Laurie has one of his old symbols, following on from Blake basically kidnapping Laurie's boyfriend (who he didn't approve of for being involved in drug parties) and who was just recovering himself from an accidental overdose, and offering him the "choice" to either write a breakup letter to Laurie and enlist to seve in Vietnam, or he'd murder him then and there.

That's not how you be a father, IMHO.

[cyberghostface]

That was because Sally Jupiter told him to get rid of him.

[alicemacher]

What Sally wanted was for Laurie to come home. She first asked Hollis to bring her home, but he declined, saying it'd be best for her to discover for herself her running away was a bad idea. (It helped, no doubt, that he'd already visited her and met her roommates and, while not agreeing with their lifestyle, decided to keep the line of communication open.) Sally said if Hollis wasn't "man enough" to do the job, she'd call someone who was.

That turns out, of course, to be Blake, but because we don't see her conversation with him, we don't know she specifically asked him to "get rid of" the boyfriend. Maybe she just asked the same thing she'd asked of Hollis: bring her home, whether she wants to go or not. And that's not what Blake did. Full responsibility: Blake's.

[icon_uk]

I don't think we saw her say that, and even if she had, it doesn't excuse him one iota for his actions.

[cyberghostface]

Not saying it did.

[icon_uk]

I'm not sure of the relevance of the statement then.

[cyberghostface]

Because it was in context.

[icon_uk]

Since we don't know what Sally asked him to do, in what sense does it give context?

[cyberghostface]

Context in that he’s acting as a result of Sally asking him to help as opposed to going out and doing it just by himself.

And if he was going against whah Sally told him to do the story would have presented it as such.

[icon_uk]

I'll agree with the first part (Though that, to me at least, negates the idea that thisis concerned paternal involvement, since he kept no track of her until Sally called him in), but not the second.

Aside from not knowing what Sally asked for, we get no clue that Sally ever found out, or cared, what happened to the boyfriend one way or the other. Sally is usually written to be very single minded and selfish and care for Laurie but only on HER terms. She wants Laurie back for HER, whether it's a good idea for Laurie to be with her or not (and it's probably not).

[cyberghostface]

"negates the idea that thisis concerned paternal involvement, since he kept no track of her until Sally called him in)"

Well I think he wanted to be involved with her but Sally forbid it. Him trying to talk to her as well as the letter he wrote to her before he died (which is part of Moore's canon) indicate that he did want to be in her life.

[deh_tommy]

Bleeehhh, I really didn’t like him (nor Sally) in Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre and I was annoyed that the book seemed to treat his terrible behaviour as something noble. I don’t remember, did anyone ever actually call the Comedian out on his various wrongdoings?

[alicemacher]

Hollis Mason sure did. In the original Watchmen, the second excerpt from his memoir mentions the attempted rape and says that although many Americans consider the Comedian a hero, surely they deserve a better class of hero than that. In Before Watchmen: Minutemen, Hollis calls him out to his face at least twice over the decades. And although he mostly heeds Blake's warning (on penalty of death) not to publish the dirt on the Minutemen that he'd been planning to, he decides to include the rape attempt and is prepared to accept the consequences if Blake doesn't like it. Of course, as we know from the original, the Comedian never retaliated against him for that, so maybe that was the one misdeed he actually felt guilty for. Sometimes, sort of.

[silverhammerman]

I'll never find Dawyn Cooke's weird attempt to retroactively position the Comedian as some paragon of old school masculinity to be anything but repugnant, a black mark on an otherwise impressive career.

[alicemacher]

Darwyn Cooke? I think you either have the wrong Before Watchmen in mind (it was Brian Azzarello who wrote the indeed repugnant BW: The Comedian) or you may have misinterpreted BW: Minutemen and Silk Spectre. Because in those latter two minis, Blake does NOT come off sympathetically at all.

[silverhammerman]

No, I mean Silk Spectre and Minutemen, across the two stories Darwyn Cooke basically writes the Comedian as an admittedly morally compromised Nick Fury, turning him into a hyper competent paragon of Masculinity Gone By, and straying substantially from the text of Watchmen. It's weird rape apologism and I loathe it entirely.

To start with Minutemen, yes he does end up playing a villainous role at the end, but consider how he's presented throughout the rest of the mini. He's established in passing as having a rough upbringing which justifies his personality. He easily beats up Hooded Justice in a rematch, holds him at gunpoint, and lectures the assembled Minutemen on their hypocrisy. He Goes Off To War And Returns A Man, after which he carries on an extended and enthusiastic affair with Sally Jupiter (which pretty directly contradicts the framing of Laurie's conception from Watchmen as an ill advised one time tryst). And his final villainous turn establishes him as a master manipulator who's outplayed and outwitted everyone else, untouchable by virtue of his skill and cunning, as opposed to his role in Watchmen where he's a highly competent government operative but still light more than a glorified thug on the right payroll.

I can't speak to Silk Spectre, having skipped the book, but the very idea that Sally Jupiter would turn to the Comedian because she needs a Real Man to go out and protect her daughter, is itself off base. It wildly revises his relationship with Laurie, turning him from her scummy biological father who has been judiciously kept out of her life, to a distant but protective papa there to swoop in whenever a Real Man is needed.

Cooke's Before Watchmen stuff was more competently made than the rest, but in many ways I find it to be the most politically regressive on top of being the most actively disrespectful of the source material.

[cyberghostface]

I can’t speak for the other stuff but I think Moore wrote the father/daughter angle more sympathetically (or at least not so black and white) than you’re giving it credit for.

[silverhammerman]

Moore definitely does, I oversimplified a touch. Watchmen doesn't define Blake's relationship with Laurie as him strictly being her crappy estranged biological dad. While they don't have a relationship to speak of his affection for Laurie and desire to be a father to her is one of the humanizing elements of his character. After all, the whole point of Blake, I've always felt, is that as awful as he is he's still a human being.

Cooke overplays that dramatically in casting him as some sort of spurned protector looking out for his little girl. Based on Watchmen I think one could argue that that's how Blake would like to be that kind of father figure, but it's manifestly not what he actually is.