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Chapter 6 interrogates Snyder’s aspirations to auteur status, arguing that they are in tension with his one-note style that always goes darker, grittier, and more violent, no matter what. Snyder’s self-aggrandizement and unwillingness to move beyond his comfort zone join his strong attachment to a toxic masculinity rooted in extreme violence and his routine misogyny to make him the archetypical toxic fanboy. Despite—or perhaps because of—these characteristics, Snyder has a powerfully invested following, which he engages and cultivates through social media, making him a highly polarizing figure who remains at the center of fannish discourse even years after leaving a franchise behind.

This chapter returns to the problem with which chapter 1 opened namely the nothingness that accompanies the sovereign’s authority. While Schmitt tried to fill this nothingness up with divine beneficence, this chapter maintains the nothingness as a limitless void and considers how sovereignty projects this void outwards, constructing it as an all-consuming threat that the sovereign must test itself against. Using the work of Georges Bataille and Francois Flahault the chapter shows how superhero comics address the dangers of such apocalyptic projections. Looking for an alternative angle on this nothingness that accompanies the sovereign the chapter then turns to the work of Heidegger to think sovereignty in terms of the never ending historical struggle to make sense of the world. This culminates in the argument posited by Cornelius Castoriadis that at the root of our world-building is our sovereign imagination creating worlds from nothing. These issues are discussed via Watchmen and Promethea amongst others.

Chapter Four looks at political cynicism, spurred by the war in Vietnam under President Lyndon Johnson and the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon, in conjunction with the Voting Rights Act of 1971. The Youth Movement was at the heart of a strange new comic series from DC in 1973: Prez: The First Teen President. With stories of corruption, environmental destruction, international strife, domestic terrorism, and impeachment, Prez, in just four issues, presented a bleak outlook on American politics, one that resonated across four decades with nine different iterations of the Prez character. Prez’s themes of alienation and disaffection, competing with themes of hope and commitment, further resonate throughout major deconstructionist comic works of the 1980s, such as Watchmen, and became integral to much of the work of writer Mark Russell in the 2010s.

This chapter examines spatiotemporal remediation in 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009) and textual remediation in American Splendor (2003). More specifically, it explores the comic book panel and the film frame in terms of spatiotemporal construction and representation as well as the relationship between image and text in the comic. The chapter first provides an overview of the taxonomy of stylistic remediation before discussing how space and time are remediated in 300 and Watchmen. It then analyzes textual remediation in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor, based on Harvey Pekar's comics (1976–2008). It also reconsiders the role of horizontal integration and conglomeration in the process of stylistic remediation, suggesting that media conglomerates can capitalize upon the added visibility and cultural capital of comic books and their adaptations both directly and indirectly (through licensing rights).

This chapter discusses how the superhero paradigm introduced by Marvel Comics in the 1960s evolved over the course of the twentieth century, ushering what many theorists refer to as a postmodern sensibility. Characterized by fluidity, plasticity, alienation, freedom, and a free reign of possibility, this new postmodern approach to superhero fiction pervaded the industry as a whole, and reflected the ways in which creators and fans oriented themselves toward the genre, toward their professional lives, and toward society in general. Increasingly cynical, the American superhero became a vehicle for expressing disgust with and disdain for the meta-narratives of American society. Even the narratives traditionally employed by superhero fiction came under attack by creators and audiences themselves, as evidenced by deconstructionist works like Alan Moore and David Gibbons's Watchmen, which aims to unveil the social dysfunctions that allegedly lie at the heart of superhero fiction.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen as a response not just to the neoliberal political climate of the 1970s and 1980s but specifically to the work and politics of Steve Ditko, as Watchmen is dependent upon Ditko’s work for a number of key themes. Keeping Watchmen’s historical context in mind, this chapter also presents instances and consequences of mystic liberalism in American political history, specifically with Ronald Reagan. Along with the discussion of Watchmen as a transitional work into the post-Ditko period of comics production, is a brief examination of some of Ditko’s most recent works which demonstrates his consistent interest in the occult and mysticism as narrative devices, bringing the reader full circle with Ditko’s earliest comics discussed in chapter two. The chapter closes with a discussion of the “Master Planner” story from Amazing Spider-Man.

This chapter examines apocalypse-cinema as that structural moment of the film when it all, after all, strips [s'effeuille]. It considers this stripping or leafing by looking at Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009). It focuses on the character Rorschach, whose face is almost always covered up with a piece of fabric on which forms and ink stains are constantly shifting and twisting as they pass from one into another in a permanent morphing. It suggests that against all the countdowns running toward the extinction of movement, Rorschach is the stubbornness of the infinitely confluent fluidity of contours. The major moment of leafing and stripping in the film is the nuclear explosion that will destroy New York. Not only does the impact of the shock wave expanding throughout the city's streets make posters and newspaper pages fly. But above all, the psychologist's briefcase opens under the effect of the electromagnetic impulsion, and we see all the Rorschach test plates scatter in a succession of discrete images, like the pages of a big flip-book quickly sliding by before general annihilation.

This chapter presents an excerpt from Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002). It suggests that the 1980s’so-called revisionary superhero movement—in particular its taproots texts The Dark Night Returns (1986), by Frank Miller, and Watchmen (1986–87), by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons—was the moment when the superhero genre crossed over from infantile “fantasy” to “literature.” These texts are the first to gather in, organize, and comment on the entire history of the genre: essentially, texts that reflexively pose allegorical arguments about the genre itself.

Sequentiality figures in many attempts to describe comics as a language. Gaps between sequential panels are supposed to constitute the “grammar” in comics, whereas the creation of larger narratives from successive panels is often compared to the cumulative meanings of words and sentences in language. The linguistic nature of sequential panels is vividly explained by Neil Cohn, whose conception of comics’ grammar is more rigorously linguistic than those of other critics, and who argues that systematic sequence, or syntax, distinguishes visual language from other kinds of visual signification. French critic Thierry Groensteen’s notion of arthrology describes the relationships, both linear and translinear, between panels. The importance of non-linear relationships is emphasized in both Cohn’s proposed grammar and Groensteen’s arthrology. This chapter examines non-linear plotting and resurgent motifs in two texts, Watchmen (1995) and Metronome (2008), and highlights the structural similarities between comics and films.

The ‘old’ police system was dynamic. Parish constables, played a variety of roles, and in densely populated areas could make a good living from fees. They were professional, competent, and entrepreneurial. An analysis of their manuals proves they were controlled by systems of legal incentives, warnings and (strengthening) immunities. The main form of oversight on them and limit on their power was the possibility that they might be subject to a lawsuit. Watchmen in towns were waged, with less legal power than constables, and subject to more supervision, including periods of definite duty. Some ‘old’ police organisations, notably in the City of London, introduced supervisory ranks over their watchmen in order to control them.

This chapter applies theoretical constructs from cognitive linguistics to multimodal visual texts, such as comics. In particular, it discusses the concept of cognitive modes of scanning found in Langacker’s cognitive grammar. Mental scanning relates to the way we build conceptual representations of complex scenes and events. These can be apprehended either holistically (summary scanning) or successively (sequential scanning). A distinctly multimodal medium, comics feature the sequential ordering of images as well as their holistic configuration on the comics page. Thus they involve both summary and sequential scanning processes. The chapter uses the example of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen to show how the conceptual distinction between summary and sequential scanning may provide new impulses for the analysis of graphic literature. A highly intricate text, Watchmen uses the tension of different modes of scanning to construct complex temporal configurations.

This chapter studies the graphic novel, Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, which utilizes metafictional devices to reflect on the genre of superhero fantasy. It investigates the medium by placing its costumed adventurers in a realistic world governed by power politics, rather than the juvenile idealized universe of moral certitudes, in which the upholders of truth and justice battle against the forces of darkness. It is impossible to identify whether the costumed adventurers in Watchmen are to be considered heroes or villains, as they either serve or are otherwise forced to settle with the brutal expansionist policies of a belligerent American administration. Watchmen makes full use of the strategic advantages provided by superheroes in prosecuting its wars and generating coups against uncooperative governments.

The original bunker fantasy had hinged around the Cuban Missile Crisis; its reemergence nearly two decades later was triggered by several new circumstances. By 1980, the threat of non-wartime nuclear accident had come to the forefront of the public imaginary in a newly immediate way. Ronald Reagan was elected president on a hardline stance towards the Soviet Union, escalating the Cold War to its hottest and most polarized moments since 1962. The nuclear condition now meant more than the omnipresent yet abstract risk of devastating war; by the early 1980s, it included the everyday fact of the infrastructure of electrical power, which became a focus of the antinuclear movement as it crystallized widespread suspicion over the military-industrial complex. The end still served to put the world in focus, but there was no longer any shelter to retreat to, rely upon, or even plead for; the bunker fantasy around 1983 afforded survival only by looking death in the face and protesting against it. Yet for all its stress on the linearity of survival, the fiction of the nuclear 1980s finds utopian moments in the brief opportunities it affords for thinking laterally, beyond or around the blinkered causality that had the world locked into an infinite play of near-annihilation inherited from 1962. In their very extremity, the self-regarding conventions of the ’80s open up their own critical perspective through the earlier Cold War onto the decade’s new survivalism.