Andrew Hoberek

Andrew Hoberek writes Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics primarily in response to Sara J. Van Ness’s “Watchmen” as Literature: a Critical Study of the Graphic Novel, which he argues did not sufficiently address the nature of literature and took for granted that the forms of comics should be grouped among primarily prose works, using the example of omitting film from lists of the best recent works of literature. He further wishes to demonstrate that works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen find an easier place among this list due to the ability of readers to portray them as having a single author (or as a collaboration between one author and one illustrator, in the case of Watchmen), which reinforces a preference toward auteurs. Referencing the nature of the business, Hoberek argues that the rise in auteurs was only possible through the shift to a direct market for comics sales as opposed to the older, newsstand based model. He argues, “Moore and [Dave] Gibbon’s story has been – both covertly and overtly – enormously influential on what has very recently become the newly genre-positive mainstream of contemporary literary fiction” (pg. 30).
Hoberek writes, “Comic book modernism necessarily works differently from early twentieth-century literary modernism, insofar as the former is not a revolt against an ossified realism but rather a revolt that employs realism in the service of remaking a medium known for irrealistic genres” (pg. 75). Further, “Moore and Gibbons engage, in Watchmen, in strategies of self-conscious complexity and formal play that make the series the heir, within the comics medium, of earlier modernist movements” (pg. 99). In this way, “Watchmen’s status as a multilayered work of formally experimental art did not come about, that is, through its projection as a finished, autonomous piece but rather emerged in the midst of (and in some instances because of) its production as a serial” (pg. 101). According to Hoberek, “Watchmen’s self-conscious account of its creation within a very different cultural field, one that might be celebrated because of its marginality, makes a case not only for the graphic novel’s inclusion in the body of works to which we give serious attention but also for the rethinking of our aesthetic standards that would necessarily ensue from such inclusion” (pg. 117). Discussing the Cold War, Hoberek writes, “Watchmen…surreptitiously reproduces a key tenet of Thatcher’s own rhetoric, in the process demonstrating the link between the postwar countercultures, literary and social, in which Moore cut his teeth and the emergent neoliberalism of the mid-1980s” (pg. 120). He continues, “Both the Thatcher and Reagan eras were, of course, replete with ‘modified visions’ – differently coded for their respective national frameworks – ‘of a half-imagined past,’ and here Moore seems to comment on the nostalgia of eighties conservatism, describing it as a shield against Cold War anxiety” (pg. 140-141). In this way, “In critiquing eighties conservatism as a form of totalitarianism, Moore misses the way in which this conservatism itself mobilized the critique of totalitarianism in the interest of neoliberal capitalism” (pg. 155). Hoberek concludes, “Watchmen, like [Citizen] Kane in transcending the constraints of its medium, not only remade the world of comics but also helped transform the cognate medium of print fiction. It was and always will remain a comic book, but it also, we might say, becomes literature retroactively, by expanding our understanding of what literature can do and be” (pg. 183).
Hoberek’s work serves not only as a valued contribution to comics studies, but a primer in the theory that underlies that work. He interweaves elements of literary criticism with interviews of Alan Moore and others in the comics industry to paint a complex picture that demonstrates how comics can be both literature and a distinct medium.… (plus d'informations)