Twi-Nite: Nite Owl #1 Review

The problem we’ve run into a few times in the Before Watchmen books, and which I think we’re destined to keep running into and being annoyed by, are changes in character and established plot from the original Watchmen story. It’s been popping up since the first issue of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen, where we saw professional wrestler and noose enthusiast Hooded Justice suddenly able to disappear into shadows like the ghost of Bruce Lee. The worst offender (so far) has been Brian Azzarello’s Comedian, where Azzarello apparently decided that when Alan Moore wrote that Eddie Blake was working with Nixon in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination, what he really meant was that Blake was off somewhere fighting Moloch and whimpering over the shooting like a woman or some common hippie.

J. Michael Straczynski’s Nite Owl isn’t the worst offender in this vein – frankly, it would probably take seeing Rorschach gathering intel to take down Big Figure by going undercover at a glory hole outside a Chippendale’s to beat seeing The Comedian get all weepy over a millionaire Boston liberal – but JMS makes a fundamental mistake in Rorschach’s characterization that conflicted completely with Moore’s original work, and which popped me right out of the story. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Because despite that fundamental flaw that will be glaring to any hardcore fan of Moore’s original, there’s actually a lot to like about this comic book.

Strange as it seems four issues into Before Watchmen, this is the first fully self-contained superhero origin story of the series. We meet Dan Dreiberg… although interesting for an origin story, I went through the book three times and didn’t see the name “Dreiberg” anywhere in this issue. Which seems to be an odd choice for a superhero origin, although I’m guessing JMS was counting on the reader knowing who Nite Owl is based on having read the original Watchmen… but that just reminds me of the Rorschach problem again, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Anyway, we meet Dan as a teenager and get a glimpse of his relationship with his parents, which is always a key motivating factor in any superhero’s origin; Batman became Batman when his beloved parents were murdered in front of him, and Nite Owl became Nite Owl when one of the two people he happened to live with dropped dead and left Dan a fuckload of cash. Actually, that’s overly simplistic in favor of me getting a cheap joke (after some quick introspection, I’ve decided that I’m totally okay with that); JMS clearly shows that Dan’s family relationship is toxic, particularly the one with his father. So it makes sense that Dan would seek a father figure in Hollis Mason, who Dan finds using radio technology to hunt down. So JMS pretty effectively gives a motivation for Dan to seek out becoming a costumed adventurer, and demonstrates Dan’s facility with electronics, all in one sequence. It’s effective and economical, and it terrifies me that somewhere out there there’s a kid with a shitty father hunting down an apprenticeship with Ron Jeremy.

This issue covers a lot of ground in 24 pages. We go from Dan’s childhood to his training with the original Nite Owl to his debut in the costume and culminating in Dan’s partnership with Rorschach and the original doomed meeting of the Crimebusters. Which is a hell of a pace for JMS to move at – the smart money here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office was we’d get three issues of Nite Owl walking from Tribeca to Harlem – and the pace does affect the depth of characterization that JMS can give to Dan without having to rely on what we know from the original series. We see Dan’s obsession with Nite Owl, but we’re not told where exactly it comes from. We see that Dan’s willing to spend his inheritance on what is literally millions of dollars worth of crimefighting tools… but we’re not shown any motivation as to exactly why he’s willing to do it. Sure, he’s obviously seeking a father figure in Hollis Mason, but was his difficult home life enough for him to continue working to become a superhero after, say, his father died, Dan became rich and went to college to discover booze and broads? It’s not shown here; it’s as if JMS is expecting us to fill in the blanks with what we know from the original Watchmen…

And then we get to our Rorschach problem. JMS has Nite Owl meeting Rorschach literally during Nite Owl’s first adventure. And he has Rorschach proposing a partnership right off the bat, which is consistent with Moore’s original characterization showing Rorschach as less of a paranoid and utter loner prior to the Roche murder investigation. But what isn’t consistent is how JMS writes Rorschach’s dialogue: all “Hurm,” and stuttered, incomplete sentences. Which is fine, and consistent with the character… after the Roche murder investigation. Prior to that, and certainly at that Crimebusters meeting, Moore depicts Rorschach as generally articulate and speaking normally; Moore clearly shows that that one case broke Walter Kovacs, to the point it changed how he related to and communicated with the world. So when JMS breaks with that original characterization, it is jarring, and it pulled me right out of the story. If you’re not completely versed with Watchmen, it’s not something you might notice, and to be fair, Rorschach’s characterization is consistent with that of most of the original series (which took place after Rorschach’s break), but for me? It just felt wrong.

The art, pencilled by Andy Kubert and inked by Joe Kubert, is actually a pretty good match for a story about a superhero in the early 1960s. Everything has a heavy, almost sketched line that’s reminiscent, for obvious reasons, of old Sgt. Rock comics; everything is loose and thick enough to be almost dirty looking. Which is a particularly effective look for Hollis Mason, who is meant to be a 40s-style action hero. It’s a little more jarring for the Dreiberg Nite Owl, if only because of the baggage that we the reader being into the comic from the original. There, Dan is shown as somewhat soft and sometimes almost befuddled. The art style of the Kuberts kinda butches him up a bit, which frankly seems almost necessary in order to make the hero viable in his early days. The storytelling and pacing are solid, so this is a good art match to the story.

Look, Nite Owl #1 is a pretty good comic book; it’s got some action, and it at least sketches in some of the gaps in the character that you might have wondered about from the original. But, as with pretty much all the other Before Watchmen books, it almost can’t stand alone. It all but requires you to have read the original to understand that there’s maybe a motivation going on below the belt for Dan to continue with becoming a superhero. But relying on the original to do some of the storytelling for you is a double-edged sword – if you’re going to rely on the original, you need your storytelling details and characterization to be consistent with it. And here JMS cuts himself with that double-edged sword. He doesn’t do it as badly as Azzarello did in Comedian, but he does it all the same… and if you’re a hardcore Watchmen fan, it is going to disappoint you. Let’s call this one a “maybe.”