Marvel Cinematic Universe

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The issue with comics and american media in general is corporatism. Whenever American creators manage to strike out big, they create massive structures around the media to kill any potential competition and convince the populace that there is no alternative.

So with comics DC and Marvel stuck it big with Superheroes and then proceeded to spend the next century having stores limit non DC/Marvel media, and having every reference to comics either be about super heroes or joke about non American comics.

With or without social justice modern American comics suck and are just another iteration of the same fucking stories. Social Justice didn't kill comics, they were already dead.

And stories like Watchmen are exercises in fart sniffing. "An idealistic setting doesn't mesh well in real life" holy shit what a meaningful message! It's just an edgier pointless take to make some nerds feel superior to other nerds.

 

[Wot Zit Too Yah0996]

I think a lot of Marvel's nonsense is more attitude and reactions then one-liners, like someone giving a dramatic speech only for a character to make a stupid joke in response: like in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 with that "welcome to the frickin guardians, only he didn't say frickin" line after the blue dude said something serious.

That said, I heard "that just happened" in an episode of Psych recently. I bring it up because there were redditors saying they couldn't find any instance of that ever being used and it was just made up by critics of quirky, random humor.

I like Guardians of the Galaxy, and I'm curious as to what they'll do with Vol. 4. The rest of the MCU by now, can piss off. However, if they made Guardians a bit... darker, and cooled it the stoned teenager-y jokes a little, that'd be great.

The stuff with Ego in Vol. 2 was really good. Haven't seen Vol. 3, and I don't know anything about it other than Rocket is shown to be an abused "child", running from a narcisstic, megalomaniacal dickhead ("Dad"), and uses his snippy humour and standoffishness as a coping mechanism, and Peter reuniting with his Grandpa.

Actually, thinking about Ego: Why in that diorama, did he use the same "Human" avatar in every one of 'em? It was a cool missed opportunity that it wasn't varied. You know, he does a sort of variation of that Galactus-Eye-of-the-Beholder thing, where the beings of the planets he attacks, see him in the shape of, or as a physical avatar of one of them, but the difference is, that, again, is how he's seen by individual species, but Ego actually built a physical body around himself, like how he formed the Living Planet around himself. He mated with some squid-octopus-plant thing, a yellow, pointy eared Humanoid, a Kree, the last two I included, 'cos of where we see he planted those seeds besides Missouri, and so on, so I would have made it so he resembled a member of their race.

Yeah, I'm wrapping up my gabbing now, but here's an example of how Galactus is perceived:

 

[dick brain]

I'm curious now, outside watchmen is there literally ANY superhero comic that could be considered a standalone classic that transcends the medium?

I don't really want to have this whole conversation again but I'm obligated to point out that Watchmen wasn't initially intended to be a standalone intellectual property or even a standalone continuity, it was pitched to DC as a mainline in-universe story using recently acquired characters like Captain Atom and The Question. It only became it's own thing because DC didn't like the idea of fucking with their mainline continuity and IPs that much. If Moore wasn't forced to rewrite it, it would just be another Crisis.

The operative word in your question is "standalone", not "classic". There are tons of classics, they're just not as accessible because capeshit is largely a tradition of shared storytelling spanning almost a century now and that's really intimidating for people who don't have a foot in the door, so they don't "transcend the medium". Nobody walks in with a brand new story in a brand new setting with brand new characters and knocks it out of the park and then retires the IP -- not even Alan Moore.

No, I don't consider Garth Ennis and Mark Millar subverting capeshit tropes with edge knocking it out of the park.

 

[Overly Serious]

The issue with comics and american media in general is corporatism. Whenever American creators manage to strike out big, they create massive structures around the media to kill any potential competition and convince the populace that there is no alternative.

Corporatism is a Left-wing system of big government in which the State is organised along the lines of industry segmentation. You mean the problem is monopolies.

Corporatism and Corporations share a common root word: corpus meaning body, but are otherwise not related.

I like Guardians of the Galaxy, and I'm curious as to what they'll do with Vol. 4. The rest of the MCU by now, can piss off. However, if they made Guardians a bit... darker, and cooled it the stoned teenager-y jokes a little, that'd be great.

Vol. 3 is flawed. Which is a term I'm using increasingly as the movie industry becomes ever more polished in execution and ever worse in concept and writing. The actor playing the villain in it is actually excellent. Lots of energy, lots of pzazz. Some of the creature stuff from Rocket's childhood is, if crudely and obvious in it is intent, still kind of touching, mainly through the SFX on his fellow lab animals. But the film as a whole is fairly meh and the writing gets worse for Mantis and Gamora especially as Mantis starts turning people gay and Gamora after her "reset" is frankly not likeable. And the whole romantic arc between her and Quill is (a) killed stone dead and (b) passed off as a good thing that he just moves on and gives up on it. It's got some heavy "leave the woman alone" messaging to it when in the previous movies he was the one who taught her how love after her abusive childhood.

Actually, thinking about Ego: Why in that diorama, did he use the same "Human" avatar in every one of 'em? It was a cool missed opportunity that it wasn't varied.

I'm fairly sure I remember one of his avatars had tentacles. There was variation from species to species. And in his defence, you've watched these movies - how many of the alien species aren't just bipedal hominds of roughly human size?

You know, he does a sort of variation of that Galactus-Eye-of-the-Beholder thing, where the beings of the planets he attacks, see him in the shape, or as a physical avatar of one of them, but the difference is, that, again, is how he's seen by individual species, but Ego actually built a physical body around himself, like how he formed the Living Planet around himself. He mated with some squid-octopus-plant thing, a yellow, pointy eared Humanoid, a Kree, the last two included 'cos of where we see he planted those seeds besides Earth, and so on, so I would have made it so he resembled a member of their race.

Yeah, I'm wrapping up my gabbing now, but here's an example of how Galactus is perceived:

You missed one. When he is defeated by Squirrel Girl she asked Tippy (her sidekick) how Galactus appears to him.

 

[Overly Serious]

Apologies for double-post but it's a different sub-topic and I don't want to go back and edit it into an older post about Giant Squirrel Galactus just because nobody else has happened to post since.

Anyway:

I'm curious now, outside watchmen is there literally ANY superhero comic that could be considered a standalone classic that transcends the medium?

I think you make a very strong argument here, also with your subsequent comments about not blaming the comics code et al. I had to give this one some thought and struggled to come up with an example that met your criteria. First I thought of maybe Conan comics but I'd rule that one out myself as cheating - it's just an adaptation of epics from another medium. They're iconic but that's from the iconic books. There's not really anything that is inherently from the medium about them.

I then thought perhaps about a couple of those Batman runs that deal with his Year One or similar (there are a few like this). But though in theory they should be able to be standalone in practice they are not - they're littered with Easter Eggs and foreshadowing that depends upon knowledge of the wider canon. Also while I've enjoyed some of them such as Batman: Death by Design I can't hand on heart say they "transcend the medium" in anything like the way Watchmen does.

V for Vendetta is something special. I know it's cool to hate on Alan Moore for whatever reason but he got lightning in a bottle twice. It qualifies as standalone. I think I would say it does maybe "transcend the medium". But it's an open question if it qualifies as a superhero comic. V does have low-grade better-than-human qualities a bit but no - if you were to push me on this I would concede the point that it's probably not.

Which left me with one. And even a second exception to the rule really does little to diminish your point. And like V for Vendetta it's not something I can argue is a superhero comic against someone who really wants to challenge it. But it most definitely does "transcend the medium", is definitely a comic. And if I wanted to get technical Wolverine does kind of appear in it. I'm talking of course of Cerebus the Aardvark. A magnum opus that is hard to do justice in a few words. It's possibly the most extraordinary comic I've ever read. At times it reaches James Joyce levels of unreadability. At other times it's some of the funniest writing I've ever read. And the art is a delight.

If you let me have "Western Comics" rather than "Superhero Comics", I'd put it in there. Depends how strict you want to be with me. But even if you accepted it, I wouldn't feel it really undercuts your general point.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

I mean it depends what you consider a western comic book. I'd consider Cerebus and Asterix pretty good, but they aren't capeshit.

When I'm talking about comics in this specific context I'm talking about the american capeshit industry and all its spinoffs. Marvel, dc and all the assorted groups.

Franco Belgian comics have always been good. I have most of Goscinny's stuff in my library. Though Bande Dessinee at this point may as well be an entirely different medium because the only thing it has in common with american comics is that it uses images and words.

Dark Phoenix and Kingdom Come off the top of my head. Watchmen only gets as much praise as it does because critics are faggots who prefer 3edgy5u misery pornand naval gazing to anything with a happy or cathartic ending.

This is exactly what I'm talking about though. You say dark phoenix because its popular among comic books, when a normal person actually starts reading it, it just a reference fest filled with dumb tropes that are only considered acceptable in comics, gets its gravitas purely from several dozens worth of stories that came before it that create the illusion of weight, without which 90% of its importance is lost. Its several dozen mediocre things pretending to be one good thing.

Its basically comic book endgame.

Also, isn't kingdom come literally 3edgy5u misery porn and naval gazing? Its literally "what if le super heroes were...LE BAD?" where superman literally operates a gulag.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Corporatism is a Left-wing system of big government in which the State is organised along the lines of industry segmentation. You mean the problem is monopolies.

Corporatism and Corporations share a common root word: corpus meaning body, but are otherwise not related.

I looked up the term and google said it's about government control by interest groups which felt more correct than monopolies.

It's not just that DC and Marvel are large by themselves, it's the incest between different industries as well as politicians that create a media dark age after a golden age.

People like to justify it either by "artists don't get enough freedom" or "it's full of politics", but the truth is that you could have the most anti political right wing dude with total freedom but that Spiderman comic would still recycle the same ideas.

 

[Overly Serious]

I looked up the term and google said it's about government control by interest groups which felt more correct than monopolies.

Corporatism was an approached favoured by the Nazis so academia is extremely keen to say it is not a Left Wing approach. But it's wholly focused on Big State control of industry. Perhaps it's now being revised in the same way as other embarrassing historical facts but that's really backwards. It's not government control by interest groups - that makes it sound like oligarchy and corrupt interests running the state. It's the opposite way around - when the Nazis abolished the unions they incorporated industry representatives into the government as the spokespeople in order to manage them, not for the sake of those industries' profits.

Anyway, the word has nothing to do with corporations which felt how your post was meaning it. And DC and Marvel's duopoly and anti-competitive behaviour, for all that may be true, has little to do with how the government structuring which is where corporatism exists. There's no Department of Comics in Washington. No DC representative in DC (that sentence works either way around so I wont expand terms).

No offence meant by any of this. But I see the word commonly misused and it's not a descriptor for anti-competitive behaviour in an industry. It's a mode of government of a state.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Also, isn't kingdom come literally 3edgy5u misery porn and naval gazing? Its literally "what if le super heroes were...LE BAD?" where superman literally operates a gulag.

It's more "what if super heroes went LE BAD," as opposed to "what if superheroes were LE BAD." The fact that Superman, the shining beacon of Truth, Justice, and the Americam Way gives up on superheroing because of a coarsening world and returns to try and fix things after the consequences of that decline blow up in everyone's faces, is a more nuanced take than "superheroes suck because reality sucks because everything sucks." Especially since it ends on a redemptive note, with heroes working to heal the damage their fall from grace caused.

This is exactly what I'm talking about though. You say dark phoenix because its popular among comic books, when a normal person actually starts reading it, it just a reference fest filled with dumb tropes that are only considered acceptable in comics,

Okay, now do Watchmen. Guys in spandex running around with only one super-being (until Moore pulls wuxia and psionics out of his ass for the climax), science that's more at home in Star Trek than Cold War America, the list goes on. If this was a novel where an S&M gay couple put on tight clothes and ran around beating up purse snatches to get hard, @White-Kettle Shufflepunk would be writing a review/synopsis for general entertainment. But because it deploys the genre conventions cleverly, we let it fly.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

"transcend the medium" in anything like the way Watchmen does.

even Watchmen isn't really a "superhero" book, obviously dr.manhattan is a superpowered being but there is way less action than you'd expect from a miniseries about superheroes and he's the only one with powers. If DC demanded Alan not have them in costumes he could have easily written around that too, or made it about a gang of vigilantes like the Guardian Angels or an elite group of police. It reminds me of how technically Les Misérables could be considered the first superhero book because the main character has super strength and its what most of his arc revolves around. But because it doesn't dwell on it, most people just consider it a great work of literature. Even Watchmen, Roschbloch is the only one in a "costume" for most of the present day plot and he's just playing "private detective" you could easily take off the mask and have 99% of the same story. Watchmen really is amazing just based on the character dynamics alone, very little "adventure" to the story but it uses the usual "backgrounds" of superheros to play into them. its a superhero story not about beating up villians or saving the day. a shitload of the pages are just people talking over a dinner table.

but when shitty writing isnt involved its usually because the status quo never changes and interesting ideas are not explored.

this is easily 99% of it. imagine trying to make Death Note but it had to take place in the Naruto universe "because it just has to okay" then you also have to keep all the characters alive because "they could be used in a crossover!" and other shit from editors that grinds the entire story down more and more.

Thats a big reason why 1960s marvel is so iconic, that decade they not only made things mostly grounded and realistic but kept the clock moving too. people got older, and people's ability to use their powers grew or waned. The "regenerate from a drop of blood" bullshit didn't happen until the 80s. People forget the reason Gwen Stacey died was because of physics, thats how "realistic" Marvel was compared to DC, people didn't just fly without explanations and if you fuck up with your powers, it has consequences. no "speed force lol" bullshit. If you don't factor in the speed of gravity you end up killing your girlfriend. the superheros weren't all moralistic and always did the right thing. Peter was giving off major school shooter vibes and immediately tried to become famous with his powers instead of helping people.

also the cast in the 1960s was way less than it is in modern comic books. There were less than 100 heroes overall and crime was so bad they only had time to focus on a couple street blocks. Marvel and DC are notorious for overstretching themselves and thats another reason the quality is so crappy. thats why they started really slow with only a half dozen titles by the end of the 60s.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

My opinion on Superhero comic book quality visualized as Soyjack meme

Comic books became gay when the authors decided that having an easy good versus evil conflict is for children/right wingers, and either made everything convoluted for no reason, "deconstructing" ideas or just inserted political takes.

 

[Michael Wade]

I think the old what if marvel books really illustrate the problem because they are actually allowed to move the clock forward and have consequences. Often leading to better storylines then what we have now. Also I noticed the world felt a lot more alive because they could use anybody they wanted without being constrained because some other writer is doing something.

Also the more obscure comics heros and villains nobody knows about now felt a lot more interesting and cool. You'd have this weird team ups that felt organic and furthered the world a bit. Like it didn't feel like shilling, it just kinda happened. Stuff like the new fantastic 4 or spider man building a coalition of heros to take out Carnage.

Dark Phoenix and Kingdom Come off the top of my head. Watchmen only gets as much praise as it does because critics are faggots who prefer 3edgy5u misery pornand naval gazing to anything with a happy or cathartic ending.

When interesting ideas are explored in western comics, they're usually in the context of what's come before, e.g. Blackest Night. That tends to make them inaccessible to outsiders, though.


Manga in the west benefits strongly from both the import filter (nobody's going to bother licensing or translating whatever the Japanese version of the 77th attempt making Ms. Marvel a thing) and the fact that the business of manga is run as a business, ruthlessly trimming the fat and focusing on the bottom line. Western comics, in contrast, are just IP farms for conglomerated parent companies, so it doesn't matter how badly they're run. As a result, they get taken over by people who prefer office politics to putting out product. This is why perennial underperformers like Mags Visaggio can hang around for years despite never putting out anything that could be reasonably considered a success.

You are absolutely right about continuity. It's really bad. Contrasted with the old days a lot of stories can't stand on their own or don't have a good hook.

To give an example, when DC did a he man vs new 52 comic it had wayyyyy too much continuity and weird shit. Enough that even if you had basic knowledge of he man and the Justice League it wouldn't be enough. ( in addition to being badly written) . injustice vs he man by contrast had a decent amount of continuity but you can ride by and enjoy the concept, which is batman desperate enough to get he man to fight an evil Superman.


A good or fun idea stands on its own and doesn't use continuity as a crutch.

 

[Overly Serious]

My opinion on Superhero comic book quality visualized as Soyjack meme
View attachment 6405860
Comic books became gay when the authors decided that having an easy good versus evil conflict is for children/right wingers, and either made everything convoluted for no reason, "deconstructing" ideas or just inserted political takes.

Watchman has what I call the "Sylvia Plath Problem". Now this analogy may fall flat on the KF because I imagine she's not held in high regard by many here, but I'll stick with it because the principle is clear enough. A critic wrote of Sylvia Plath that he hated her, not for her own work but because she opened the door to what he called the "I am a garden of red and black sausages" school of poetry. Her own work is (imho) very good. But it is undeniably weirdly abstract and this led to a lot of imitators with less talent who thought they could just superficially do the same surrealistic imagery and that would make them profound. You see the same with Picasso who actually was a very skilled artist. But he's most famous for all that two eyes on one side of the face crap. And like with Plath, following the success of an actual innovator you get the slew of people after who imitate the style without the substance.

Now that's just my take. It may be that you mean the meme as is and genuinely regard Watchmen as for the midwits. There's certainly stuff to criticise in it and I have personally come to enjoy the near apoplectic rage that results when I tell a fan that I think the movie's changes improved the plot. But I feel the chief problem with Watchmen is not what it is, but what it did. Everything after became a deconstruction and typically a poor one that became merely "hey, these heroes are assholes."

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Watchman has what I call the "Sylvia Plath Problem". Now this analogy may fall flat on the KF because I imagine she's not held in high regard by many here, but I'll stick with it because the principle is clear enough. A critic wrote of Sylvia Plath that he hated her, not for her own work but because she opened the door to what he called the "I am a garden of red and black sausages" school of poetry. Her own work is (imho) very good. But it is undeniably weirdly abstract and this led to a lot of imitators with less talent who thought they could just superficially do the same surrealistic imagery and that would make them profound. You see the same with Picasso who actually was a very skilled artist. But he's most famous for all that two eyes on one side of the face crap. And like with Plath, following the success of an actual innovator you get the slew of people after who imitate the style without the substance.

Now that's just my take. It may be that you mean the meme as is and genuinely regard Watchmen as for the midwits. There's certainly stuff to criticise in it and I have personally come to enjoy the near apoplectic rage that results when I tell a fan that I think the movie's changes improved the plot. But I feel the chief problem with Watchmen is not what it is, but what it did. Everything after became a deconstruction and typically a poor one that became merely "hey, these heroes are assholes."

Watchmen isn't bad but it is bad as a superhero comic, and it ends up saying very little on the genre itself.

The issue for me is that Watchmen's fame and cultural position put it as the "best superhero comic" despite being a pretty miserable read. Meanwhile the essence of Superhero comics is just simple fun in itself (ie Superman beating up a villain) but is considered as bad because it lacks depth (which would have been a valid criticism had the supposed depth wasn't deep as a puddle).

And you see the same thing in other media. Like Ghibli films being labeled as the best anime media, but shonen shows had inspired and added more good to the world than anything that studio ever made.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

I don't really want to have this whole conversation again but I'm obligated to point out that Watchmen wasn't initially intended to be a standalone intellectual property or even a standalone continuity, it was pitched to DC as a mainline in-universe story using recently acquired characters like Captain Atom and The Question. It only became it's own thing because DC didn't like the idea of fucking with their mainline continuity and IPs that much. If Moore wasn't forced to rewrite it, it would just be another Crisis.

That is what I called watchmen a sheer divine providence, though in this case its more like a cosmic coincidence. So many things had to fuck up for it to happen its practically a miracle it even exists.

And yeah marvel did milk the everloving fuck out of it with prequels and sequels and all that shit, but you can't blame the original for that.

Comic books became gay when the authors decided that having an easy good versus evil conflict is for children/right wingers, and either made everything convoluted for no reason, "deconstructing" ideas or just inserted political takes.

Watchmen isn't bad but it is bad as a superhero comic, and it ends up saying very little on the genre itself.

The issue for me is that Watchmen's fame and cultural position put it as the "best superhero comic" despite being a pretty miserable read.

You can have good vs evil conflict for kids and you can have good vs evil conflict for adults.

Comics just swapped good vs evil conflict for kids with moraly gray conflict for kids, both are slop, just a different variety of it.

Like someone else said, watchmen is barely a superhero story. Its a noir murder mystery with a superhero backdrop, you can easily remove all the superhero elements and the story barely changes.

Which makes the whole thing even more ironic because it means that using this logic to exclude watchmen, there still hasn't been a single "good" superhero comic.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

V for Vendetta is something special. I know it's cool to hate on Alan Moore for whatever reason

Lost Girls:Alan Moore :: Cuties:Netflix

but he got lightning in a bottle twice. It qualifies as standalone. I think I would say it does maybe "transcend the medium". But it's an open question if it qualifies as a superhero comic. V does have low-grade better-than-human qualities a bit but no - if you were to push me on this I would concede the point that it's probably not.

Moore is proof that accidential genius exists. I think the secret sauce is that he writes everything on the fly, so when characters get away from him he rolls with it and integrates it into the story, which is how Rorschach went from the "smelly Truth Exists man with no GF" caricature that he intended into the only real hero in the entire story. This is what makes so much of his commentary on his own work retard-tier: he's talking about the story he intended, not the one that actually exists.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Okay, now do Watchmen. Guys in spandex running around with only one super-being (until Moore pulls wuxia and psionics out of his ass for the climax), science that's more at home in Star Trek than Cold War America, the list goes on. If this was a novel where an S&M gay couple put on tight clothes and ran around beating up purse snatches to get hard, @White-Kettle Shufflepunk would be writing a review/synopsis for general entertainment. But because it deploys the genre conventions cleverly, we let it fly.

Watchmen is barely a superhero comic:

Watchmen isn't really a "superhero" book, obviously dr.manhattan is a superpowered being but there is way less action than you'd expect from a miniseries about superheroes and he's the only one with powers. If DC demanded Alan not have them in costumes he could have easily written around that too, or made it about a gang of vigilantes like the Guardian Angels or an elite group of police. It reminds me of how technically Les Misérables could be considered the first superhero book because the main character has super strength and its what most of his arc revolves around. But because it doesn't dwell on it, most people just consider it a great work of literature. Even Watchmen, Roschbloch is the only one in a "costume" for most of the present day plot and he's just playing "private detective" you could easily take off the mask and have 99% of the same story. Watchmen really is amazing just based on the character dynamics alone, very little "adventure" to the story but it uses the usual "backgrounds" of superheros to play into them. its a superhero story not about beating up villians or saving the day. a shitload of the pages are just people talking over a dinner table.

For the most part its a neo noir murder mystery with a superhero backdrop, as Macaulay said, you can easily remove the spandex and nobody would notice.

Wuxia in the finale is odd, but it doesn't really affect the plot in any significant capacity and its more blink and you'll miss it throwaway scene. You can call it a misstep and I'd agree, but ultimately it doesn't change anything and is irrelevant.

As for psionics, you're blowing them way the fuck out of proportion. None of the main characters can just lift shit with their mind except for manhattan which is the main point of manhattan. Its also not even remotely as absurd as comics do. "Some humans have hidden psionic potential they don't know about and I, a multimillionare megagenious figured that out."

People with unknown psionic potential isn't even a superhero trope, its literally a trope that goes as far back as recorded human history.

All this does is raise the question, is Watchmen good in spite of the superhero things in it, or regardless of them?

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

As for psionics, you're blowing them way the fuck out of proportion. None of the main characters can just lift shit with their mind except for manhattan which is the main point of manhattan. Its also not even remotely as absurd as comics do. "Some humans have hidden psionic potential they don't know about and I, a multimillionare megagenious figured that out."

That's actually a problem, because it fucks the internal consistency and verisimilitude. If this is a world where psionics and flying kung fu exist, and have always existed, cool. But that world would be different from the grounded, realistic setting Watchmen tries to present itself as. The fact is, these things effectively don't exist in the story until the ending needs them to, much like Spiritbending and other famous ass pulls. And if the excuse is that Veidt is so impossibly, transcendantly intelligent that he can basically invent comic book nonsense (nonsense that has been heavily investigated IRL and doesn't pan out because it's not real) by sciencing that fucking hard, then we've crossed the Sherlock threshold of "smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards." Intelligence that incredible would be no less supernatural than Dr. Manhattan's molecular abilities, just less overt.

All this does is raise the question, is Watchmen good in spite of the superhero things in it, or regardless of them?

Because of. The fulcrum of this setting is Dr. Manhattan, an ordinary man who gained godlike power through a freak lab accident based on bullshit technobabble. No genre other than capeshit will even pretend to let you get away with this.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

is Watchmen good in spite of the superhero things in it, or regardless of them?

Watchmen could only happen with it being in the superhero genre. If Moore just said "fuck off" to DC and published the same stuff in say 2000 AD or got it commissioned on the BBC or it was a stage play no one would give a flying fuck. Because all those mediums have had good stories. Watchmen is so good because of the combination of 1. It hasn't been ruined by media sequels and other bullshit 2. No continuity to lock you out.

Which made it unique to the genre and caused it to have its amazing reputation.

The guy bringing up year one or dark Phoenix has a great point. Without all the backstory most of it doesn't matter, and it's why dark Phoenix doesn't work on screen. It would if this was the 10th movie in a long running series, like if Vin Diesel just decided to be the villain all along in the next fast and furious but even then it won't matter to people because heel face turns are so common, especially in that universe.

Watchmen might not be a "superhero film" but you need those trappings to get the full effect. It's like how Farhenheit 451 makes way more sense once you realize it was published as erotica in a porn magazine. The misogyny of the writing and the way everything is framed makes more sense when it's a porno but instead of sex you get this insane sci fi story.

Like Dr Manhattan, in a way his story is someone trying to show how realistically a "wimp who gets superpowers" story would go. The same inaction that led to him getting pushed around all his life also means he doesn't do anything once he's so great and powerful either. The superpowers don't change who he is inside.

All the characters in Watchmen have generic trope filled back stories that play into the story in a way that wouldnt make as much sense if they were just a group of vigilantes.

To use another medium. The soap opera Passions is considered on the same "above the cut" as watchmen is for comic books, but if it was made in any other medium it wouldn't be as good because part of what makes it good is that you need to accept certain things from the genre for it to work. Passions as a comic book franchise would die in the vine because anything it has to say has already been done in that medium.

The problem with superhero comics is the same reason you can't have a wrestling show with a "great story" or action movie. You need to dedicate a shitload of runtime to the action stuff that it ruins the momentum of the story.

Best thing you can do is have great action but it's like a comic book with great visuals, there are countless examples because that's what the medium is truly about.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

No genre other than capeshit will even pretend to let you get away with this.

Sorry to double post, but that's only a recent thing. Les Miserables literally stars a character with super strength. And him "saving the day" is a huge plot point and exposes his secret identity. Obviously they didn't have superheros back then to force the novel in but people will allow silly superpowers without question if told to.

As Alan Moore points out plenty of Victorian heroes would have been considered "superheros" if we had that idea back then