Manhattan Transfer

It is 1986 and my father has just bought home that weeks latest comics. Amongst them is the eagerly awaited Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons interpretation of the superhero archetype, the Watchmen. This is one year after the end of the Silver Age of comics, heralded by the death of its first champion, the Barry Allen incarnation of the Flash in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths. It is the dawn of what some will later label as the Dark Age of Comics - which included such note worthy events as the radical reimagining of Bat Man as sparked by Miller's ground breaking work on The Dark Knight Returns, the rise of The Punisher from B List Spider-Man bad guy to four color cultural poster boy of Reaganomic vigilante values and John Byrne has begun his reboot of the continuity behind Superman - creating a severely depowered interpretation of the Man of Steel while stripping the Kryptonian franchise of much of its more fantastic excesses (bye-bye Krypto, Fortress of Solitude and robot doubles). All around the comic book multiverses, the heroes are becoming grimmer, darker, morally ambivalent masked men, all in the name of 'realism' (as if by becoming realistic they could also become that much more possible in our own world)... but none will define this new pop culture zeitgeist more so than Moore and Gibbons doomsday epic of the day the superheroes could not, would not save the world. ( Read more... )