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On alternating Fridays, Leah Schnelbach waxes rhapsodic about comics, education, religion, film and postmodernity.

This week, a very interesting issue of The New Yorker hit the stands. It’s interesting first and foremost because of the excellent and heart-wrenching article on David Foster Wallace (my favorite writer) along with an excerpt from his last novel, which is being published posthumously. They also have one of the most frustrating movie reviews I’ve ever seen. The reason that I’m mentioning it on this site is that it’s a review of Watchmen.  Full disclosure – I haven’t seen Watchmen yet. [Ed.: Watchmen is released nationally today.] I’ll probably see it at some point next week, after the first throngs have strained and shuddered and spent themselves. So I’m not reviewing the review of the film, or disagreeing with it. Why bring it up, then, you may ask?  On reading this review, looking only for the writer’s opinion of the film, I found myself disturbed and eventually angered by the tone of distaste it shows, not for the film, but rather for comics culture as a whole.  Now, if the review simply expressed an opinion that the film wasn’t very good that would be fine  (Although, for the record, he seems to prefer The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a film to the adaptation of V for Vendetta, and while neither was great, there is a fucking yawning chasm between the two….)

My real problem is that the film, as a film, isn’t really reviewed.  The author discusses enjoying the opening credits, but from there contents himself in swipes at Alan Moore as a writer (even though he states early on that Moore had nothing to do with the film), itemizes the acts of violence in the film (as though containing scenes of violence disqualifies a film from also being interesting or at least dealing with interesting topics), and finally resorts to a creaky kids-these-days style rant against comics readers. At least, those comics readers who don’t mind if characters throw a cape over their shoulders now and then.

It’s this ranting that I found problematic, because it really is such a facile critique at this point. The condescending tone taken with Moore’s writing is particularly irritating to me. By all means, critique his style, but just dismissing him as a hack who doesn’t have “much grasp of what genuine, unhyped [sic] suffering might be like…” seems to indicate that the reviewer doesn’t have much grasp on Moore’s work as a whole.  And of course, this critique swings easily right into a larger swipe:

Watchmen, like V for Vendetta, harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

Ah, of course, the “comics are only read by sweaty, infantile boys” argument!  With a nice dollop of implied sexual incompetence.   I have my own issues with the military-industrial complex.  I don’t much care whether or not the Warren Commission was right or not, because, really, what the hell can I do either way?  But Watchmen, like V, is a dystopia, written during and about the Thatcher-and-Reagan-led 1980s, when Moore was afraid that the U.S. and Britain would give in to their most fascistic tendencies.

Dystopias – and I’ve read quite a few – are supposed to traffic in meticulously detailed paranoia, overblown human suffering, Worst Possible Scenarios coming true. They use this language specifically to hold a mirror up to society, usually with the goal of inspiring change. This is the genre Moore chose to work in; the medium he chose was comics. Both of these have rules, codes, and languages, and by accepting them he was able to push them, explore old ideas in new ways, and leave a few terrifying questions hanging in the air. Rather than using the review as an opportunity to educate readers about any of this, our reviewer gives away the ending (twice…) and concludes with what I think will become classic in the Comics-Going-Mainstream-Howler Hall of Fame:

Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, Watchmen marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?

I may have missed something.  I mean, I’m just a girl, after all, and am too busy having intelligent conversations to read such silly fluff as comic books – but when exactly did anyone say Watchmen was supposed to be funny?  Did the fact that one of the characters is named The Comedian confuse this reviewer? And when was it a comic strip?  Did my eyes, heavy from reading Proust and Kierkegaard, simply glaze over it, nestled in the corner of the paper beside “Family Circus?”  The reviewer commits the classic blunder of lumping all comics into one genre, one format, one mind-set – a categorization that has never been accurate. It was this line, this little throwaway at the end of the piece, that really worried me. I urge everyone who takes this medium seriously to read this review. Cut it out, tape it somewhere where you’ll see it every day.  Because this opinion of the medium is exactly what we all need to fight against, if comics are ever going to be taken seriously – on their own terms – as an art form, rather than constantly being contorted to fit into the ideas of how other art forms and media are supposed to work.

I am The New Yorker’s ideal reader: white, liberal, female, elitist, with a graduate degree and delusions of someday being a celebrated Writer of Literary Fiction of just the sort that The NY’er might someday deign to publish. And I know, because I’ve read him, that St. DFW tended to write hyperactive, wildly tangential, occasionally violent, ummm… dystopias. Featuring:

Radical political groups.
Uncaring, vaguely oppressive government.
Stories nested within stories, which mirror and comment upon the larger stories.
People who can fly, sort of.
Characters who drug themselves in a desperate attempt to have a sense of transcendence.
And in the center?  A few lonely, frightened people trying to convince themselves that they live in a moral universe.

But, since none of them wore tights, I guess it’s OK.

Leah Schnelbach is the Interim Director of the New York Center for Independent Publishing and Director of Publications for the Sequential Art Collective. In what passes for her free time these days, she chips away at her first novel and daydreams about hitting the flea market with Andy Warhol.

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