Der PigDog's PigBlog

Recently I have been reading a lot of comics, including a lot of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Miracleman, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Watchmen, From Hell). A mixed bag, but he constantly opens up interesting topics. In this series of posts I'm going to go through each of his writings that I have read, in publication order. I'm particularly interested in Moore's treatment of race, sex, gender, and authority. I'll try to talk about art as I go, but I'm not well-educated on the topic. Consequently I'll be giving the artist short shrift, and probably assigning Moore too much responsibility in plotting and conceptualizing the comic.  V for Vendetta I first read this as a child, without any strong preconceptions for what comics "are like" or "should be". Therefore its innovative formal qualities were totally lost on me. I had no idea that comics didn't usually feature changed page orientations or musical interludes, a...

 I don't really read comic books. I read a good chunk of ultimate marvel as a child, and then V for Vendetta and Watchmen in middle school. None of it was super fascinating. The dialogue was stilted. The movies were more exciting. The Question is good.  There's a particular kind of grandstanding you see in superhero comics, and sometimes in action movies, a kind of moral self-indulgence. Usually you see it when the hero says "I DO NOT KILL... EVER!". I think it's a pretty good idea to avoid killing people. But the debate can't be about "can we sometimes kill" versus "can we ever kill", because that's pretty silly: yeah, we can sometimes kill. If you've come this far, if you've killed this many people, it's just not psychologically plausible for you to stop here. And it doesn't give you the moral high ground. I like the movie Road House for an example here. Peak nonsense. Bodhi from Point Break has killed his way through ...

An unexpected pleasure. The only movie I'd seen previous about a character named John Rambo was Rambo (2008), which was not very good. I hesitate to call this "the first in the Rambo franchise" because it so clearly is not the first movie in a franchise, and the spinoffs did it a lot of harm. This isn't an action movie (a movie about violence and acrobatics, which celebrates its material), it's a drama (a movie about human relationships and values) which features a lot of violence. This is a man's movie. There aren't any women in it. Seriously, I don't think there's a single speaking role for a woman. So it's a movie about masculinity. The masculinity here is pretty different than anything you'll see in a modern man's movie, I think. The men here cry. Sheriff Will Teasle, crying after his friend dies and he gets ambushed by Johnny Johnny crying, remembering a dead friend Johnny cries at the emotional climax of the movie. He lets out the...