Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #5 (2019) - "Watch, Part Five: A New Society" [series finale]

[laughing_tree]

A comic book reckoning that’s been 30 years coming… This is a more worthy successor to Watchmen than anything Watchmen’s publisher has attempted. -- Comicbook.com

I think this is probably the best superhero series I’ve ever done, which is nice, as it’s the only one I feel I’ve ever done almost entirely on my own terms. I dislike the “me” in that sentence, because the band aspect has been so powerful. Everyone on the team has been fantastic. -- Kieron Gillen

Comments

[leahandillyana]

I utterly hate the Watchmen-esque pacing. All cadres the same. It makes reading tiresome. Like a post where all sentences are the same length. (This)

[shadowpsykie]

I happen to like the homage to the Watchmen. It plays with the same ideas and themes. But it does so in a different way. This story seemed more about emotion. where as watchmen was about What if? So it might have been boring to you. You are not the only reader.

[leahandillyana]

I was not thinking about the content, I thinking about the graphic aspect. Six same size pictures per page. It leaves very little possibility for dynamic visual storytelling. I find this sameness of the visuals to be the tireing aspect.

[stubbleupdate]

Isn't the point of this literally that the villain is trapped by a nine panel grid and the hero breaks the boundaries of the rigid format?

[laughing_tree]

Yep.

[doodleboy]

I'm generally fine with Grid-systems depending on how they get used.

Alan Moore's nine-panels tend to be very flashy to make up for the lack of changing sizes. With match-cuts and layered storytelling and everything. It's also cool to see the amount of detail packed into it. Each of Alan Moore's panels usually has a foreground, middle-ground and background, he writes giant panel descriptions so the setting feels lived-in. Each panel is it's own shot of the camera, rather then doing the gutter-wankery that an artist like JH Williams III or Grant Morrison would do.

But when a grid-system (9-panel or otherwise) is used badly it's very plodding. Which is why I hate Tom King's use of it. 9 mid-shots of a talking head isn't very interesting.

I think it works the best when it provides a base-line that can be mixed up by the artist though. Wicked + Divine uses a standard 8-panel until say... an God transformation sequence happens. The Wild Storm mixes a 9-panel with Quitely's bajillion-panel sequences. The other advantage of a strict grid-system is that you get to control space. With all the panels being similar sizes, a panel that takes up half the page gets to have the same impact of a splash-page.

Also fun to note how Manga handles grids... by which I mean they hate grids. They purposefully avoid having gutters as "crosses" because it makes the storytelling less dynamic. Rachel Throne associate Prof. in Faculty of Manga, Kyoto Seika University and manga-translator had a fun thread on this.

https://twitter.com/rachel_thorn_en/status/954370209380368384

[wizardru]

I don't know if I like this, but I do appreciate it. And I agree that this seems more tonally, emotionally and intellectually closer the Moore's Watchmen than DC's own attempt at it. I'm not sure I can gauge how successful it is at it, but I have to admit that it's definitely trying to go beyond that template and try something, much like other work Gillen has done.

[doodleboy]

Peter Cannon knows of comic books that use subtext and they're all cowards.

There's an irony to a Watchmen homage that's entire point is to shout "Other comics exist!". I think that's the reason why there was the Alan Moore analogue in the last issue. Moore famously called Watchmen a bad mood he had 15 years ago. If you were to ask Alan Moore what his magnum opus is, he'd probably say Jerusalem or the Birth Caul. He's a different person from the writer of Watchmen. But Watchmen by the nature of the story he wrote, is a static object.

Liked the meta-joke of how Thunderbolt is killed. Didn't realize that Watchmen never had the gutters cut across a comic book scene until that page.

Beyond the commentary about superhero comics there are other things I liked about the series. It's entirely about a smart asshole learning to be kinder, realizing that empathy and humility are needed to actually become smarter. There's a line in Wicdiv about that "Do you want to be smart or do you want to know things?". So as much as this comic has an axe to grind about writers using Watchmen it's has an axe to grind against the Rick Grimes genius archetype.

This comic has me thinking back to Wicdiv and it's own Watchmen homages. The last page reminds me of Wicdiv's use of the 8-panel grid, Kieron did say it was an attempt to use Watchmen's technique of a grid-system without the screaming Alan Moore homage. And Wicdiv using the motif of the Tragic Cycle to mimic Watchmen's motif of the clock. Although Wicdiv had other influences too, part of the point of this comic is that it's fine to borrow techniques from Watchmen, just don't only use Watchmen as your guide.

Makes me wonder how the next writer/artist team will take Peter Cannon. Whether they'll keep Peter's meta-powers or not. I think my biggest criticism of the series is that Peter Cannon is a very utopian character, and Gillen's run only briefly touches on Peter's utopian nature before turning it into a commentary on superhero comics. That's probably the most fertile ground for the next writer to take over. Instead of a comic about how superhero comics could be better, it'd be interesting to see a comic about how our society could be better.