The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore might be the most successful villains in the history of comic books. In 1986 and 1987, as they published their epic serial The Watchmen, they essentially destroyed the notion of superheroes. The Watchmen - a group of six generally well-intentioned super-powered individuals - certainly have their own archetypal catastrophe to fight against, as New York is under siege from an alien threat. But equally important are their existential battles against narcissism, apathy, and depression.

Eventually the twelve-part series was bound together, and a new genre (now somewhat bastardized) was created - The Graphic Novel. Since then The Watchmen has been named to Time's list of the "100 Best English-language Novels," and a blockbuster film is due out this coming spring. Recently, Gibbons - who illustrated the series - came out with Watching the Watchmen, a behind-the-scenes look at how exactly The Watchmen came to be (co-designed by Chip Kidd and Mike Essl). With its oversized glossy pages full of drafts and sketches, what emerges is part-comic, part-blueprint, and part-coffee-table-book. One imagines that it will soon become a must-have for any Watchmen enthusiast, but even passive fans or people new to the series will be impressed with the craftsmanship displayed herein, not to mention its alluring, somewhat voyeuristic nature.

The Rake caught up with Dave Gibbons via cellular telephonic device, and chatted a bit about the book.


The Rake: In creating The Watchmen, did you and Alan Moore proactively want to distance yourself from previous comics and their heroes?

Gibbons: The thing is, Alan and I had always loved superhero comics, and so what we wanted to do was look at them in a different way. It's a little like just getting to know somebody better. Getting past the superficial things that you take for granted.

The Watchmen asks a lot of fundamental questions. Like, if the world actually had superheroes or comic book characters, what would they really be like? And then you start to think, well why would you put a costume on, what are the reasons for doing it? Would the people who wore the costumes, who were gifted with these God-like powers, would they be the best people? That's always taken for granted in comics.

And the other thing is to examine what the world would be like. In all the previous superhero comics, the heroes make no difference to the way people live their lives. But clearly that's unrealistic. I'll try and give a recent example: You take the Beijing Olympics - what good is it to be the fastest runner when there's someone on the planet that can effortlessly run much, much faster? Who can throw the shot ten times the distance than you've just thrown it? So we wanted to explore that as well - just what kind of effect would it have on the rest of mankind and on society?

The Rake: It's interesting that The Watchmen weren't supposed to be your characters - they were supposed to be DC's Charlton characters (a ragtag group, since dissembled). Was it a blessing to find out you had to make everything up on your own?

Gibbons: Well, the Charlton characters were sort of second-string heroes, anyway, who conformed to existing archetypes. So when we were told we couldn't use them, it was a tremendous liberation. Now we could focus the archetypes much more precisely, and give them exactly the attributes we wanted, and not be bound to anything.

Certainly, we did find ourselves with an absolutely blank canvas, which we could paint with whatever we wanted. It was wonderful to be able to come up with our own characters and make up their personalities and the way they looked - those Charlton characters had some pretty clunky costumes, and I wouldn't have like to spend two years drawing those guys.

The Rake: And how did you go about actually coming up with your heroes?

Gibbons: It really started with the sort of story needs of the characters. Because Alan's original synopsis and treatment was based on the Charlton characters, you know, we didn't need to deviate very, very far from those types of characters.

So Alan had the names, and we knew what they had to do in terms of the story, and I really just went and did whole bunches of sketches and sent them to Alan and we batted them backwards and forwards...and they kind of came about like that.

Nite Owl was the only one that Alan didn't have a clear name for, or any thoughts about, and that happened just to be the one that I was able to supply, because I'd made the character up when I was a teenager. And Alan suggested that we change the name to the kind of American spelling, so it was N-I-T-E Owl, which had a nice resonance with some of the 1940s DC characters, like Dr. Midnite.

The Rake: Anything that didn't make the final cut?

Gibbons: If you look at Watching the Watchmen, you'll see that for a long, long time we had the idea of Rorschach having this whole-body blot, and having him appear sort of like The Flash, just by opening his coat. And I don't know why we thought that was such a good idea. Because now looking back, it seems like such a bad idea.

The Rake: Why, when everything else is so starkly different, did you decide to set it in New York - which is pretty much the same as Metropolis and Gotham, not to mention Spiderman's domain? Was your intent to recreate that, too?

Gibbons: I always thought that if a place was called Metropolis or Gotham or Central City, it really meant New York. What was really useful was that, because we were positing an alternative earth, it didn't have to be the real New York, it didn't have to be the real street furniture, the real buildings, the real cars in the street. And that was tremendously liberating. But for someone coming from England like Alan or me, New York was always a wonderful, mythical place anyway. It's always been a very comic book-y place to us.

I remember the first time I came to New York, which was many years ago, the things I was thrilled to see were not the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, but it was the fire plugs in the street, those wonderful things with the big bolts on them. We don't have anything like that in England, so it was like this amazing alien artifact.

The Rake: Beyond the text, the most captivating part of Watching the Watchmen is seeing how, frame-by-frame, the panels actually got created. You went through a lot of very detailed drafts for, it seems like, every single shot.

Gibbons: It's strange, because you think that to draw it once, on the final illustration board, would be the quickest way to do it. But actually, this preparation does save you time in the end, because it helps to clarify your thought process. So to begin with you're thinking about the Whole Story. Then you boil it down to the individual page. Then you think about each individual panel. And then the elements within that panel. And so you can isolate and concentrate your thoughts on just what you need to do.

The Rake: One of the reasons The Watchmen is so well regarded may be its metaphorical and symbolic complexity, which perhaps elevates it from the status of mere comic book. How did you guys develop the symbolic structure?

Gibbons: What's interesting is the way that the smiling face came about. The Comedian, originally, as you can see from the sketches - we had him in a much more military kind of look. He had an olive drab uniform that looked like camouflage or something. Camouflage always has a way of falling into the background. So we eventually hit upon this black leather look. And I thought, ‘Man, this looks really severe.' We need something to lighten it up a bit. So I put one of those 1960s smiley badges on it. That was just for a little splash of yellow on his costume. But when Alan saw that, he thought that's how we could open the thing up - that badge, lying in the gutter. That's the beginning, The Comedian having been killed.

And when we thought about it some more, we realized that this badge was a symbolist cartoon. I believe that when they used it in psychological tests, it was the minimum thing that a child would smile at. So it was the ultimate symbol-cartoon. And by putting blood across it, we really symbolized what we were doing with the whole series. We were taking these cartoon characters and putting them in a much more realistic context.