I'm Whats Wrong With Comics // Mask 4 Masc // No Mercy Hang The Rapists

"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me"

-pg 13, Watchmen Chapter VI, The Abyss Gazes Also

I genuinely remember my first encounter with that line. My engrossment with that whole scene, on first encounter, is clear in my memory. In all likelihood this is a problem. 

Social suicide (a fraught term, perhaps brief social scarification) is exceedingly easy in high school. Below is a picture of me almost a full year before the release of the Watchmen movie, using a “bring your favorite book to school” day celebration as a convenient excuse to cosplay as my favorite character.

Its fucked up that I idolized Rorschach instead of appreciating him as a character. Coincidentally, the year of that photograph is the same year of the publication of Oransky & Fischer’s Meanings of Adolescent Masculinity Scale, a study of the effect of hypermasculine conditioning on adolescent development processes. Dr. Jeffrey A. Brown, an anthropologist and scholar of modern American (popular)culture, writing about male teens' attraction to comic book characters, finds that “the split personality implied by the concept of a masquerade seems to be one of the most archetypal metaphors for the masculine condition in Western culture…the male identity in the twentieth century is perceived in extremes: man or mouse…the hyper-masculine ideal [contrasted with or masking] the skinny, socially inept failure”. I probably fell and fall more towards the latter aspect of that scale. 

Oransky & Fischer explore in depth how exposure to the social contagions of hypermasculinity build up a variety of psychosocial injuries in the host males: empty emotional stoicism, the programming of valorizing dominance and social manipulation, &c. The entire spectrum of characters in Watchmen deeply explore almost every facet of these concepts – it is one of Alan Moore’s many geniuses, to autopsy Western Man in all his guises on the page before us. But the intention of the author has little effect on what meaning the reader finds. I didn’t see Rorschach as a critical character, but rather in the language most available to me: as a role model. Literally, a model for a role I could play in society. While beneficial for a patriarchal society, the scientific literature overwhelmingly shows that  the wages of undertaking these social roles are psychological dysfunction, self-hatred/low self-esteem, internal and externalized homophobia, and being susceptible to committing acts of violence, sexual and otherwise.

Oransky and Fischer’s research relies heavily on R.W. Connell’s concept (building off of Gramsci, a philosopher deeply relevant to our day and age) of hegemonic masculinity. To enforce it, we end up holding psychologically contradictory ideas, a dissonance with measurable negative effects on ourselves and those around us. Rorschach, mask and all, is basically an avatar and accidental advertisement for that (and wow did I spend too much time working with my friend to make that literal mask, we literally taught ourselves to sew, which is perhaps a secret betrayal of normative masculinity). Rorschach’s gravely voice in the movie was widely praised, a sonic translation of the hard man who does what is right without remorse, moral absolutism being all he needs at the end of the day. His voice remains something of a cultural meme. My (small) friend group and I mimiced his voice with varying levels of irreverence and reverence, irony and aspiration. Ensconced in evangelical Florida, I associated his brand of right-wing cruelty with purity of cause. I was donning my own mask/masc. I read the Watchmen on my own, seeing it on classic lists, and with no other context (discussions in an English class, a non-toxic comic book store culture) I took a parodic tale for a mature audience to heart rather than head.

I’ve done a lot of self-work since then, but life is a becoming so I’m only something else insofar as it is built on what I have been. Many of the Rorschachian aspects of me remain. One of the most moving / memorable aspects of contemporary visual culture to me is the above image by

Aijaz Rahi, of a young girl protesting against India’s gang rape epidemic. It appeals to me in a way I need to fight against, if only because that sort of moral absolutism has few contexts which work outside of comics. But as a young and repeat reader, there is an undeniable part of me that delights in Walter Kovac’s origin story, the way in which Rorschach elides the complex world in order to just do what feels right. As I entered more radical left-wing spaces, the Rorschach answer has proved an impulse I still wrestle with – even with my relatively diminutive figure I have been the first on occasion to act as enforcer in punk spaces that have no tolerance rules against racist/sexism/homophobia, and in some situations I’ve been too weak to have the courage that compassion and empathy requires and instead found myself reifying overly-masculine coding and privileging my ability to think first of emotionless punishment in the name of a black-and-white justice. All that I have learned has lead me away from those narratives though, and yet each personal experience has only ever increased my appreciation of Moore & Gibbons work in Watchmen.

The evergreen appeal of the Watchmen is its embrace of these complexities, and its keen eye for the ugliness of all realities (although a reality in which Richard Nixon was President from ’69 to ’85 has a uniquely horrifying ugliness). Graphic novels are lucky to count it among their genre, and it deserves study not just as token but as fully legitimate literature. Ideally, as a teaching tool the conversations opened up by Moore's vision can lead us to the sort of in-depth understanding of power relations in a thick, non-ideal reality that we need for ethical living/action. Unfortunately, male nerd culture can be one of the most toxic places for the discussion of the actual justice issues of our day. One of the shortcomings, in my humble opinion, of contemporary critique is the unwillingness of the critic to explore the ways in which they are implicated and complicit in the processes that objects of art and literature describe. Far more than the hidden, fascistic apologia of The Dark Knight Returns, I think Watchmen can and does provide a productive tool to allow us to approach some incredibly difficult issues. Hopefully, communities capable of doing so continue to discover Moore's work.