Watchmen Strikes Again: Minutemen #1 Review

Minutemen, the first issue of the first book of Before Watchmen, by Darwyn Cooke, will, if it’s done even remotely correctly, be impossible to review objectively and completely until all six issues have been released. I say this, because after having read it four times back to back now, I went back and read just the first issue of Alan Moore’s and David Gibbons’s original Watchmen, and I realized that it is impossible for me to read that issue objectively because all I know is the complete work.

Here’s just a quick example of what I’m talking about: in the first issue of Watchmen, there’s a panel right after Rorschach leaves Dr. Manhattan and Laurie, where Laurie is on the phone with Dan Dreiberg, and in the foreground, Dr. Manhattan is smiling. Having read the whole series, I understand that Manhattan, who can see through time like Dr. Who or a common mescaline head, is smiling because he knows that Laurie will wind up with Dan and find happiness. There is no way I could know that having read just the first issue.

So when I see things in Minutemen #1 like Hooded Justice somehow disappearing a goon on one side of a block-wide warehouse, and then somehow within instants moving unseen to the other side of the block-wide warehouse and stalking across a catwalk up to the remaining goon, making the goon piss himself in abject terror as if Hooded Justice were Angry Jesus as opposed to a stocky BDSM freak in a homemade lucha libre outfit just fucking walking toward him, I need to calm my standard, “This is a Thing That Should Not Be” rage and remind myself that Cooke might have a goal for this story that is not currently apparent. And hopefully that goal is something beyond, “I like lots of money.”

Look: this is not a comic book that can be judged on its own merits. For good or ill, it is a prequel to arguably the greatest comic miniseries ever written. This means that we comics writers are forced to review a single issue within the scope of the book’s own incomplete story, and within the scope of Watchmen itself. How the fuck can you do that? It’s like trying to review the first chapter of a new gospel of the New Testament detailing Jesus’s 21st birthday kegger. Even if it was written by God himself, if you were raised in the Catholic faith, you’d have to wonder, “Is this shit really necessary?”

And the answer is that, sweet, sweet Darwyn Cooke art or not, so far, this comic is in no way necessary. Some of it is entertaining, in a “Lookit him try to be Alan Moore in 1987” kinda way. And some of it is even interesting, in a “Wow… based on what little we know about this ancillary character from Moore’s Under The Hood backmatter, these new details make total sense” kinda way. And yet others are compelling in a negative, “Huh… what if someone decided that reality-based character suddenly learned to move like Batman in a John Woo flick” kinda horrifying way.

We get “introductions” to all the Minutemen here, but from back in their prime, before the creation of the team. Everyone gets a page or two, which doesn’t give a ton of real estate to anyone, but in some cases fleshes out characters that were only given broader strokes in Watchmen or in that book’s Under The Hood backmatter. And some of it is extremely effective in beefing up those characters; Cooke shows Mothman as someone playing hero with a flying suit that could potentially kill him whenever he used it, giving a quick and believable reason for the alcoholism shown in Moore’s original. And Cooke gives The Silhouette four action pages to show her as a driven, well-trained and committed adventurer, which is about four times the characterization of Moore’s original, “murdered lesbian.”

However, the depiction of other characters simply don’t seem to even remotely fit in the original Watchmen universe. As previously stated, Hooded Justice is shown as having skills that put in him the level of Batman with a noose around his neck, and the Nite Owl sequence is even worse. In Watchmen, Hollis Mason related that he trained as Nite Owl in the police gym, and in his early days was almost taken out by a drunk with a knife. Here, he witnesses an armored car robbery, chucks his police uniform in the street, and singlehandedly goes full Daredevil on the speeding truck.

Not only does the sequence put Mason in a skill level not shown by anyone in the Watchmen universe before last Wednesday, but it makes no sense; why bother going vigilante when you already have a badge and a gun right there with you? And what cop is gonna leave his uniform… and his gun… in an alley for anyone to find while he fucks around as a superhero? How many times must Mason have said, “Yeah Sergeant; lost another uniform… yeah, and another sidearm… don’t worry; I’m sure no one will get to to any shenanigans with it; it’s only the Great Depression after all…”

Cooks’s art is, as always, a perfect match for stories taking place in the pre-Kennedy era. Hist style is simple and reminiscent of early comic strips, with simple lines, realistic figures, and a flat-out command of early 20th Century Americana. In this book, he eschews Dave Gibbons’s nine-panel layout from Watchmen for a more modern and conventional layout, but all panels are squared and sequential so as not to completely diverge from the look of the original. Early in the book, Cooke shoots for the kind of organic transitions based on dialogue that Gibbons and Moore did so often and so well in the original, and he certainly shows enough clocks to remind us that, “yup: this is Watchmen.” On the whole, if you need an artist to do a story about a 1930’s superteam, Cooke’s who you want… I’m just not sure that we need another story about this superteam.

DC Comics has put me in an untenable position, in that I’m gong to be forced to review these Before Watchmen comics on an issue-by-issue basis, when I am no longer capable of reading the original as anything but a whole (The first print of the Watchmen trade paperback came out right as I got my driver’s license, and was able to graduate from buying comics off the supermarket spinner rack, which didn’t carry the individual Watchmen issues, to the comic stores in my nearest city).

But like any comic geek who came of age along with comics in the 80s, Watchmen is in my DNA, man. I know it backwards and forwards, and for a guy like me, if you’re gonna sequelize it, you’d better not fuck it it. And while there is some promising stuff in Minutemen, there are also a few missteps. And while the whole work might bear those out, it’s not the best start for a book that is a prequel to a story that doesn’t have any.

But, for good or bad, I’m going to be forced to wait for the story to be completed to see if this – or any of the other Before Watchmen books – meet the sequel heights of The Empire Strikes Back… or the depths of The Dark Knight Strikes Again.