There was a time when Woburn marked the outer edge of Boston’s northwestern sprawl. While it has was hardly rural in the proper sense of the word, it had its share of wide open spaces, undeveloped tracts, and land dedicated to agricultural purposes. Back when I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to see folks riding horses around my North Woburn stomping grounds and several of the neighbors kept chicken coops and small livestock pens in their backyards.
This started to change during my early teens, when the profits to be made from housing and retail developments began putting the squeeze on the city’s landscape. Small farms became condo complexes, McMansions were plunked down en masse upon former brownfields, and even sandpits, swamps, and reclaimed toxic waste sites became fair game for wily speculators hoping to make bank on Woburn’s ideal location at the northern junction of I-93 and I-95.
It was depressing to witness one former childhood playground after another fall before some developer’s bulldozer blade, but I also realized it was an unavoidable consequence of market forces. I didn’t like it and I wished the city’s leaders took a longer view of the consequences (traffic, generification of a unique community, unfortunate precedents established though a lack of coherent land use policies), but it was as inevitable as the fat, white mushrooms that would sprout in the vernal loam after the spring rains.
That pretty much sums up my reaction to the “Before Watchmen” prequel books that DC will shortly be unleashing upon the spinner racks. If the fiasco of Dark Knight Strikes Again didn’t represent the writing on the wall, then DC’s corporate restructuring into tighter vertical alignment with the rest of Time-Warner’s media empire certainly should have served as notice that the well would soon be revisited.
I suspect the only reason that DC held out as long as they did was out of a sense that the Watchmen brand conferred a level of artistic prestige which validated the less savory fruits of Sturgeon’s Law as applied to mass market funnybooks. After the brand took a hit from the so-so performance of the (pointless and superfical) Watchmen film, there was no financial reason not to milk that shit until the creative udders bled.
It’s superfluous and blatantly mercenary from an artistic standpoint, but entirely in keeping with the industry’s habitual mindset where seed corn is there to be eaten and golden geese to have their viscera stripmined for short-term gain. Watchmen‘s most remarkable attributes is the seamlessness of its narrative tapestry, an aesthetic reflection of the clockmaker symbolism Moore and Gibbons employed in the text itself. Rarely have I encountered a work of literature where the individual pieces — including the most minor details — fit together as precisely and flawlessly as they did in Watchmen.
As a consequence, the story didn’t leave much — if any — room for further exploration. Its moments of narrative ambiguity and lack of clarity are deliberate in nature, and left to the reader to surmise from the wealth of opposing viewpoints presented. Whatever “unfinished business” that remained was thematically integral to the tale itself. Gathering together a host of “acclaimed” creative talent to revisit Watchmen’s backstory (which, given the tale’s historical scope and frequent use of flashbacks, isn’t really “backstory” at all) strikes me as a fool’s errand, a cash grab manifested in the form of surface read spackling normally associated with low-grade fan fiction.
It’s also sad that fandom’s schizophrenic response to the prequel books has given rise to another wave of “bitch crazy” digs at Alan Moore and his notoriously contentious relationship with DC. Moore signed a deal that was hailed at the time to be a victory for creators’ rights and the unprecedented success of work in question came to bite him in the ass while DC repeatedly poured salt on the wound. That’s what the controversy boils down to, and yet it didn’t stop a legion of computer chair ignoramuses from spouting off all sorts of tangential and irrelevant attacks on Moore in order to justify the need for Watchmen prequels.
The argument that Moore based Watchmen on Charlton’s 1960s “action hero” characters — and thus has no grounds for (anticipated) complaint about other folks tackling Watchmen characters — specifically caught my attention, due to the factual stretching on both sides of the debate. Yes, the Charlton heroes provided the DNA for Watchmen’s principal cast members and an old “Meanwhile…” DC editorial column teased the work as a reintroduction of those characters. But the end results — due to concerns about promised creative ownership and the wise decision to have the characters tailored for the tale, and not vice versa — were more fully realized than the springboards used in their creative genesis, and to the immense benefit to the project.
Of course, Moore’s choice of source material in Watchmen or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Lost Girls has no bearing on the crux of the matter, which came down to good intentions poisoned by bad faith. It did, however, get me to thinking about some Watchmen prequels I would be (morbidly) interested in — ones that took the early Charlton analogue concept further by raiding the remaining properties left in the Tarpaper Shack of Ideas’ junk drawer and shoehorned them into Watchmen‘s fictional universe.
Just think what that grim and gritty roster of talent could do with such underappreciated gems like the Fightin’ Five, Son of Vulcan, Judo Master, and this pinnacle of superheroic perfection…
…the Prankster!
What do you mean you’ve never heard of the guy? Surely you’re aware of his acclaimed debut (and only) appearance as a backup feature in the final issue of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt (#60, November-December 1967)?
Still nothing? Well, let me refresh your memory.
This Prankster (not to be confused with the Superman villain) was the creation of Denny O’Neil and Jim Aparo, two titantic creators still in the process of perfecting their craft. Inspired by the dystopian fiction of Orwell, Vonnegut, and Ellison (particularly “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”), the Prankster acted as an anarchic fly in the tolitarian ointment of Ultratopolis — a “city that could be, but isn’t, but totally could be if your really think about it after a bong hit or four, man” where laughter, music, and other forms of whimsical joy were punishable by death.
The otherwise unnamed Prankster took it upon himself to freak out the dystopian norms and subvert the conformist paradigm with various gadgets and disguises provided to him by his Kindly Aged Scientist mentor.
Unlike the doomed Winston Smith and Harlequin, Prankster had a leg up on the buzzkilling enforcers of the status quo. Though Ultrapolis’s security elite had based their methods and tactics on the fearsome goosesteppers of the Nazi regime, the apparent destruction of all historical documents during an unspecified disaster forced the would-be fascists to rely on an incomplete set of Hogan’s Heroes DVDs to recreate the character and demeanor of their idols.
It’s a good thing, too, because I doubt such gimmicks as a “magic flute” or a rocket-powered hot air balloon would have done much good against even marginally competent authoritarian adversaries.
The Prankster’s sole appearance ended on a gun-to-the-noggin cliffhanger and the breathy promise of a wild and crazy continuation of his madcap adventures. Alas, the demise of Thunderbolt’s series and Charlton’s abandonment of the superhero genre in general ensured a this would never come to pass…though astute scholars of funnybook ephemera may notice similarites between the Prankster and Karl Kesel’s female version of the Joker from DC’s forgotten “Tangent Comics” stunt.
It’s a modest shame, really. Despite the derivative premise and roughness around the edges, Prankster was light-years ahead of Charlton’s other action heroes in terms of quality. Credit O’Neil and Aparo — or simply the presence of competent lettering, which was sorely absent in most Charlton books of the era — but the Prankster’s brief foray into superheroics didn’t feel like a typical muddy exercise in Ditkobjectivism as much as a forgotten one-off from a later issue of DC’s Showcase try-out series.
In any case, Prankster’s status as a forgotten obscurity from a second rate publisher has earned his colorful comedic shtick a permanent residency in the open-mic night of the damned known as Nobody’s Favorites.
