I do not think Geoff Johns is a hack. I think he has written some decent comics over the years, and when it comes to some straightforward action adventure stuff, he’s a good, if slightly workmanlike writer.

But he’s got a problem. And his problem is Watchmen.

Despite the fact he spun a good chunk of his Green Lantern run off a six page Alan Moore story, he clearly dislikes the overall effect Watchmen has had on the comic industry, and opines for a more innocent time when comics were fun and optimistic. In his mind, I think, Watchmen ruined everything.

So if you look at his career, at least from Infinite Crisis (the prelude to which was a fairly naked riff on Watchmen starring Blue Beetle), he keeps doing the same thing: putting characters in grim and gritty situations where he can push them to their limit and ultimately show that they’re better than that. The biggest part of his career has basically been a non stop rebuttal to Watchmen.

And this is the logical conclusion. He’s actually written in Doctor Manhattan as the specific individual who is ruining the DC universe. And... That’s not inherently a dreadful idea. If Grant Morrison was writing it (although when he used a Doctor Manhattan analogue in Final Crisis and Multiversity he handled it very differently) I might even be impressed at the sheer audaciousness of it. It’s... Kinda fucking meta, when you get down to it.

But here’s the big problems. Firstly, it’s been done. It’s been done SO hard. Alan Moore himself rebutted the influence of Watchmen, beginning with Supreme and continuing through his other reconstructionist superhero stuff like Tom Strong. Grant Morrison has done it in virtually everything he’s written at DC since his JLA run. Endless callbacks to the sunny, imaginative days when Jack Kirby was the King. Including Final Crisis, which is more or less ultimately about Superman facing down the living personification of grim dark dark grimness. Of course, that being a Grant Morrison comic, it was studiously ignored because Geoff Johns wanted to reboot the universe himself. And because apparently that’s just the fate of everything Grant Morrison writes these days.

Which leads us to our second major problem. Watchmen... Doesn’t really have that much direct influence on comic book storytelling anymore, outside the fact that Johns wants to rebut it constantly. Now... I can kinda get that Johns probably doesn’t see this the same way as we do. He’s high up at DC, and he’s probably had to spend years listening to accountants going “why does this 30 year old book outsell everything else we release? We need more Watchmen”. I can see how that would piss a guy off. But he’s the last major person in comics that will just not move on! This is a comic that exists purely because Geoff Johns hates how much he’s incapable of getting his own work out from under the shadow of Watchmen. And he’s had so many opportunities to actually close the deal and give us these more hopeful, optimistic comics that he keeps leading up to... Only for him to fall back on more misery and violence just so he can show us again how good and pure these characters are to overcome it all.

It’s... Kinda fucking sad, really. And he’s leaving comics now, to work on the movies, where someone is actually desperately needed to rebut Zack “if I’d made Batman Begins I’d have had him raped in prison” Snyder, who clearly is doing everything to the movies that Johns believes Watchmen is doing to comics. Except it actually is doing it to the movies because Snyder thinks Watchmen is about as good as comics get for ALL the wrong reasons. What Johns is leaving DC comics to... Jesus, I can at least hope a writer who can think in different directions to him takes on the actual event, whenever it arrives. I can cross my fingers and pray Morrison gets it but I’m not holding my breath.

This is... It’s not good. Someone might be capable of doing something good with it, but it just feels so completely wrong.

The way I see it, Watchmen is a foundational text for post-Bronze Age DC the way the Lee-Kirby era Fantastic Four and their other collaborations were for Marvel in the 1980s. For years, major creators like John Byrne and Walt Simonson obsessed over Kirby’s work, imitating it, playing off of it, always trying to come up with storylines or concepts or characters that were more audacious, more ambitious than the original source material — but never able to really escape its shadow. It would take an influx of new talent in the ‘90s and ‘00s — along with things like near-bankruptcy, the unexpected popularity of the X-Men and Spider-Man films, and the birth of Marvel Studios — to move the company beyond its nostalgia for the past. Today, there isn’t even a regular FF comic book. But for a generation of creators and fans born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Watchmen is when DC really became DC — just as Marvel was boring old Timely Comics until Reed Richards and his friends tried to beat the Commies into space.

DC’s relationship with Watchmen (also Dark Knight Returns, Killing Joke, et al.) is more complicated but similar in some aspects. For decades after WWII, DC’s characters defined the mainstream public’s idea of what “superheroes” were. Not Marvel’s neurotic, introspective anti-heroes and Space Jesuses, but fun, happy, optimistic champions of wholesome American values. But with the decline in comics sales beginning in the ‘70s and the rise of the direct market, Marvel began to rapidly outpace its Distinguished Competition in terms of sales and mindshare. DC’s first reaction was to be more like Marvel, with titles like New Teen Titans and Batman and the Outsiders that were clearly aimed at fans of Marvel’s X-Men juggernaut. (And of course, Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first of many “events” designed to simplify the company’s sprawling multiverse.) But with the cult success of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing in the mid-’80s, DC saw another way: go weird, go meta-, subvert everything that the company stood for. If kids 7-12 weren’t the core audience for comic books, why keep acting as if they were?

This approach led to some truly monumental work, like Watchmen and Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One, as well as the rich corpus of Vertigo series in the ‘90s like Sandman, Preacher, and The Invisibles. It also led to a lot of precious, self-indulgent bullshit and a tendency for “grimdark” tropes that persists to this day, culminating in the Snyderpocalyptic DC movie-verse. Marvel had its share of grimdark garbage in the ‘80s and ‘90s (plus a lot of flat-out terrible comics) but it managed to get past them, because it never had the self-image problem that DC did. Its self-loathing, transcendental heroes like Peter Parker, Ben Grimm, and the Silver Surfer were assimilated pretty rapidly into the counterculture. They were never The Man — not even Captain America, who fought Richard Nixon in the Oval Office and briefly turned his back on his country. DC, on the other hand, remained haunted by cheerful, campy depictions of its characters like Adam West’s Batman and the George Reeves/Christopher Reeve Supermen. For a long time it considered darkness the cure for its uncoolness. Now it seems to be changing its mind about the prescription.

Further irony is that the movies of Watchmen and V For Vendetta have cannibalized the sales of the graphic novels. Where before potential readers might pick up a trade paperback out of curiosity, now they’re like, “Oh, wait, there’s a movie of this? I’ll just watch that instead.”

Great analysis.

I think it’s important to remember that Watchmen is ultimately an OK story. It’s a fairly cliché pulp mystery plot with a twist ending that happens to be welded to some original-for-the-time worldbuilding and characters who were that bit more three dimensional than Marvel’s flawed heroes. It’s also an astonishingly good exercise in form, and it’s a superb example of how to tell a story in a way that’s unique to comics, with that amazing 9 panel grid layout and a narrative that skips back and forth through time from panel to panel. It also helps that it’s a self contained story, since it doesn’t have to worry about continuity or preserving characters for an ongoing.

But it’s something that was absolutely of a place and time. It’s a great comic, but if it hadn’t arrived after the slow build towards more mature comics that arguably began with Miller’s Daredevil, or at the point that the Direct Market was first really becoming a thing, or at that point between Donner’s Superman and Burton’s Batman where comics were angling for a major place in pop culture... It’s not important because it’s a good comic (although it is) . It’s important because it was the right comic at the right moment. It’s easy to overestimate how relevant it ever needed to remain after the horror of the 90s, by which point a lot of those major Vertigo writers of the 90s were going mainstream and starting to move comics overall in more interesting directions.

But as you say, DC just couldn’t move on. And now we have... This. And I doubt Moore will do just beyond roll his eyes and say he’s not really surprised by anything anymore. Even he stopped caring a long time ago. But poor, flailing DC are playing one of the last cards they had left that could generate any real surprise. In the long term, it’s not gonna do much good, and in five years we’re probably gonna be finding out that Rorschach has secret ninja training so he doesn’t completely embarrass himself when he inevitably meets Batman, and Nite Owl will get the ability to control birds with his mind so they’ve got any reason to justify having him around when they’ve just brought Ted Kord back from the dead.

It's all very silly.

Which leads us to our second major problem. Watchmen... Doesn’t really have that much direct influence on comic book storytelling anymore

One minor rebuttal here: I would agree that Watchmen’s thematic influence on comics is just about played out. Just about everyone is sick and tired of deconstructions of superheroes as fascist or authoritrian. Stylistically is another story. Today it’d be impossible to find a major mainstream superhero comic that wasn’t influenced, however indirectly by Watchmen, as well as Miller’s Batman comics. Simply put, there are fewer words — practically no omniscient narration. And if we’re privy to the characters’ thoughts, it’s usually through limited first-person, like in a novel.

This is a huge change, and it only seems to have taken effect in the last dozen years or so. In the ‘80s, the most influential comics writer was undeniably Uncanny X-Men’s Chris Claremont. At the height of his popularity, the average issue of X-Men probably had as many words as a New Yorker short story. Watchmen changed all that by placing the emphasis on the imagery as narrative — a classic example of show, don’t tell. This has come to be known as “decompressed” comics writing — the best exemplar being something like Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary, where there might be exchanges of dialogue here and there but most of the story is related through action scenes with no narration.

Of course, both Moore and Ellis are sophisticated writers who want you to read the images as intensely as the word balloons. (The average Watchmen script ran around 100+ pages for twenty-odd pages in print.) That’s not true of most comics scripts these days. I think the key difference is that where the comics writers of the ‘70s and ‘80s were frustrated novelists, the modern-day creators are mostly aspiring screenwriters and directors. Moore is a transitional figure in that regard, especially when you consider that his new prose novel, Jerusalem, runs around 1300 pages.

I wouldn’t disagree with any of that, but I think it’s the deconstructionist, grim ‘n gritty, “realistic” storytelling elements that Johns specifically takes issue with. Stylistically I don’t think the influence of Watchmen has been as big an issue, since I think that’s the element that’s stood the test of time.

Whether a given person thinks that's a good or bad thing is up to them. Personally I find the endless, melodramatic monologues of Claremont's X-Men nigh unreadable in this day and age, but I'm slightly too young to have experienced those first time around so I don't really have any nostalgia for them.

Right, and the whole “trick the superpowers into thinking aliens are invading to avert WWIII” is one of the hoariest tropes in Cold War era science fiction — it’s practically lampshaded by the scene where the “Architects of Fear” episode of Outer Limits is playing in the background. (And the “space squid” conspiracy also directly references the “Starro” storyline that kicked off both the JLA and the Silver Age of Comics back in the late ‘50s.)

The big irony is that Moore originally pitched Watchmen as an “in-universe” story with the Charlton heroes that DC had recently acquired, but Editor-In-Chief Dick Giordano made him change them into rough analogs of the Beetle, Captain Atom, The Question, et al. On some level this was to protect DC’s new IP. But I think Giordano and Moore also understood that Watchmen worked best as a one-off, that it wasn’t something that could be extended or franchised, and this hands-off policy persisted long after Moore’s acrimonious departure from DC. Partly because it was so self-contained, but also because it had become something like holy writ, a Gospel of Grimdark — though it’s not actually darker or more violent than a lot of the “alternative” comics of the ‘80s, or some of the mainstream comics of the ‘90s. Rather, there’s an understanding of the visceral nature of what violence does to the human body, at a time when the average superhero beatdown was about as bloody as a Looney Tunes fracas.

Maybe treating Watchmen as “just another superhero comic” is the best course of action for DC at this point. As you point out, there’s nothing really transcendental about it — much of the worldbuilding is stock alt-history tropes, and the nine-panel format is straight out of the Ditko playbook circa 1965. I don’t really see why the DCU needs Watchmen characters since they’ve already got the Charlton versions, but maybe they’ve come to value them as recognizable “brands,” much as they did when they mainstreamed all the Vertigo properties a few years back.