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See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.

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Take a look at M. Wolf-Meyer’s “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” in The Journal of Popular Culture 36.3 (Mar 2003). Wolf-Meyer discusses the restrained nature of the superhero relative to their superpowered abilities. In a way, I think this argument might resonate with some of the radical possibility that is open to us in the digital age. We have free reign to generate representations with great range, reach, and capacity, but they must subsist on some terrain of intelligibility. Wolf-Meyer discusses this from a Marxist perspective.

‐ Davin Heckman

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The film version of Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder, was released in 2009.

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Moore’s Promethea, on the other hand, is something akin to a theoretical text which gives a great deal of attention to Moore’s metaphysical views. Promethea starts as a superhero story, but quickly turns into a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. In a way, it reminds me of Yeats’ Golden Dawn years, but without the pretension… and it offers further insight into the meaning of an under language. In Promethea, the under langauge is not simply a technique that is available to the comic book writer, but it fits with some primordial sense of what language is and what consciousness does, and models it in a manner consistent with the sort of Hermetic (“as above, so below”) view that underpins Moore’s work. Promethea also picks up on apocalyptic themes developed in the Watchmen and From Hell, but suggests that transformations don’t have to be sinister… they can be utopian, too, if we learn how the proper spells of consciousness.

‐ Davin Heckman

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With regards to Bizarro World, it is worth noting that the absurd inversions in the Bizarro Superman comics of the 1950s and 60s typically anchored themselves to middle class American norms and institutions in order to achieve their comic purposes. Imperfection is always registered in relationship to an implicitly perfect ideal, thus Bizarro Superman has a wife, a dog, children. They live in a suburban neighborhood. Bizarro Lois cleans the house by making it dirty.

‐ Davin Heckman

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