 So yeah, as Rob said, my name's Kevin McNeely. I think I'm teaching an honor seminar in media studies next year as well. So I guess that would be out of reach with most of you. Yeah, I didn't get my, I was away. I didn't get my description in. Yeah, it's just that this would, I think this is for third and fourth year, but it's a general kind of survey of how you engage with and think about media, including books. I did ask you to bring your book today, so I hope almost all of you have the book itself. This'll, it'll, I hope become clear why I did this in a second or two. But media studies involves a kind of broader set of approaches to textuality, to image and representation, which we'll be talking about today. And in fact, one of the things you can study under the rubric of media studies is our, we'll see that that plural is a peculiar thing, in fact, graphica, different kinds of graphic texts, including comics, comic books, graphic novels, and other things like that. So often, in media studies, we're thinking about the ways in which mediums define themselves and the way in which we sort of traverse or even transgress between different kinds of, different sorts of media, different ways of communicating, different ways of representing things. And you'll notice that Watchman is itself a kind of compilation, I think, of different, well, if we were thinking in literary terms, we would call them genres, genre. So that's like a bad English pronunciation of a French term. Oh, this pen isn't very good. But genre is just a kind of writing in a broad sense. So you might think of a novel, lyric poetry, that kind of thing. Those are genres. If you open up Watchman and just kind of flip through, you'll notice, of course, there are, most of the pages are laid out like a comic book. And in fact, Watchman did appear as a set of 12 comics. So you got them at the comic book store or at the newsstand or something like that. In 1986, 1987, you'll see that there's a kind of a seasonal arc if you look at the timeline in here and the time corresponds, it's not quite, it's a little earlier, 85, 86 is when it's set, but it kind of corresponds to 12 calendar months. So each issue would come out once a month. And it's set in the time roughly of its publication. So it appeared, as I said, in 1986, 87, you'll notice dates in here work their way through 1985, basically, okay? But so it's approximately contemporary in its publication. So there are these things that look generically, we're thinking of a genre, like comics. And then, I don't know, I hope you've read it. Sometimes I've put this, I've taught this course, this book a number of times on different courses, and when students, I use it as a kind of a hook sometimes. Students will go down and say, oh, I don't wanna read that, I don't wanna read that. Ooh, Watchman, I'll go on this course, right? So it's kind of a way of selling things because people think they look and they see a comic or a piece of graphic art or something like that and they think, well, what do you think? I'm guessing what you think. You think, cool? Now, this is just dated myself. Easy, right? This is simple to read. And in fact, when I was teaching in Arts One, one of the things that became apparent, aside from some of the students saying, oh, I took this section of Arts One because we were doing Watchman, that was cool. But, well, they didn't say cool. But in any case, became apparent is that this is in fact a fairly dense text. It's actually harder to read this text than to read what often presents itself. It's always difficult reading, but what might present itself as a novel or some other kind of what looks like a sort of straight text. Not just because this combines image and text, but because, as I was alluding to just a moment ago, of the way in which it compiles different genres. And I would say, in fact, different media. So I started off describing media studies as looking at these kind of transgressive moves sometimes or transitions among different kinds of media, different kinds of text, different kinds of image systems, things like that. This text is doing that in various ways. And so what I was gonna ask, in fact, is did you read the parts in between? Did you just read the comic parts, or did you sort of slug through the way through all the kind of encyclopedia entries, the papers, the keen act, I think you get, which is fictional government act, all kinds of stuff. These are different genres. And in fact, I would want to suggest to you just a little bit, these are different media sometimes as well. They all look like text, but they might operate in slightly different ways. So part of what Watchman is doing, just to start off, is compiling different kinds of texts, different textualities, different ways of writing might be, and drawing might be a way to think about that. Now we want to sort of think why it does that too. I was just gonna say in order to, and then leave that blank. There are some blanks in here. In fact, I've just randomly opened to a black square here. You'll notice that at times the images do go blank. This is at the end of the sixth issue. You will see that there are, yeah, the sixth issue, the abyss gazes also. But you'll notice at times the text itself kind of leaves things hanging. In fact, the title, the abyss gazes also, that's how they've put it. It's a translation from German, kind of leaves things fragmented or hanging as well. So that kind of opening, that sort of openness has something to do with the way in which this text is operating and how it is that those textualities are unfolding. There's a kind of fragmentation that starts to occur as it compiles all of these different genres and these different forms. And it tends to at times sort of leave us hanging in the space between here and there. There's also something to notice sort of right from the beginning in the graphic arrangement, which stays fairly consistent, and I'll comment on that in a little while. But you'll notice that a feature of comics, something that marks them off. When you open a page, you think, oh, that's comic. You might not think you had to think about this, but in a very basic way. Are these kind of empty spaces between? There are a lot of empty spaces in here, a lot of places where things aren't written or aren't colored. And you'll notice when you're reading comics at least, as well as reading through this text as a whole, as it's been compiled, as these 12 issues have been put together, is that you have to jump, you might not even think about it, right? It happened so quickly, but you have to jump from image to image. You have to actively, and this is really important, I think, move your way across. So one of the things I just left us hanging, what is this text for, where is it leading? One of the things in a very basic way that it does is try to give you strategies, or maybe just a little bit of a nudge sometimes, try to help you across those gaps, help you across these blank spaces, push itself forward somehow. There is a linear structure here, there's a narrative that seems to move forward in time. You'll notice, so moving across these gaps towards something, trying to make a point, might be one way to think about this. But as we move forward here, you'll notice that other kinds of time, fragmentations of these kind of linear movements, circles and circuits start to develop that seem to undermine how it is, and to ask you to rethink, I think, how it is that you get pushed, or you get invited, or you get helped maybe, there are different ways to think about this, across these gaps, and maybe even how you enter into different kinds of relationships with this text. So now I've jumped out of my PowerPoint frame already, but I'll just let it go along. One of the things that I asked you today, so this is just being cute, but it's that I want you to bring your books, and I'm glad you all did that. Part of the problem is that this is copyrighted by DC Comics, so with a PowerPoint presentation like this, I can't legally, there's some illegal stuff goes on in here, but I can't legally reproduce those images, and in a way I kind of wanted to make a virtue of necessity, so if I can't put them up there for you, I'm gonna want you to maybe flip around in your books. It creates a bit of delay sometimes. You'll see that I might even lose my place at times in here. There's a lot of stuff here. It's gonna be hard to kind of get all this out within about an hour and a half, right? I don't think I'm not going to do it, in fact. I'm gonna miss a lot of stuff. But the physical act, the material act, if you wanna think about the materiality of this, the material act of kind of holding that book, of touching it, it's tactility, or we say in fact if it pushes back, remember I was just suggesting that you're invited into the gutters, these are called gutters between the images, you're kind of invited to make your way across that. Some of you have keyboards here. You know if you touch a key, it kind of feels like you're pushing back and you see something happen on the screen, and very basic. That's called a haptic relation. A haptic, it's not on the show. H-A-P-T-I-C, it's haptic. It has to do with your kind of physiological interaction and the reciprocity, with a text or with a thing, a machine, and the reciprocity that you feel. It's like it talks back to you. So that kind of physiological or material interchange, that's haptic, a haptic relation. It's often associated with the tactile. So one of the things I'm trying to start to suggest here is that we have a haptic relation to the book itself. It kind of pushes back at us in certain ways. Or Worshack jumps out of the window at you, for example, where the comedian gets thrown through the page. There are lots of ways in which this text seems to push at us in various, it can maybe offend you at times too. Some of the imagery is very graphic and disturbing at times. So these are all different kinds of reciprocities, different ways in which it seems to push back at you a little bit. So we want to keep that in mind. And that's why I wanted you, aside from the copyright infringement problem, that's really, I say it's a virtue of necessity, that's why I wanted you to bring your text so you could feel it. And so we could flip around a little bit. In fact, one of the things I'll get to it later, I keep saying that, but it's because of the PowerPoints in a certain order. But one of the things that this text does, oh, let's jump ahead and just forget about the PowerPoint. At the end of each issue, and you can see a page like this, everyone see that? They're different, you'll notice. And the blood, I guess that what it is, or this red stuff, red color, slowly drips down as the clock hand each issue moves from 12 minutes to midnight, 11, 10, nine, it counts down, until you hit midnight and we get, or one minute to midnight and we get our major event here. Everybody read it, so I'm not gonna spoil it. So your phony alien is teleported and materializes in New York City, right? And disrupts everything as this kind of clock ticks up towards midnight. This is also an echo of the doomsday clock at the University of Chicago as we get closer to nuclear devastation, nuclear war. The hands are moved by the scientists who are involved in this project closer to midnight. So midnight is nuclear apocalypse, that's what it indicates. This is, as I said, there's blood here, I think. What is this blood? Does anybody wanna speak? This is representing something, it's at the end of each issue. But what is this? Where is this clock kinda actualing? It's all blacked out here, so you can't really tell. But in terms of the narrative of the book, I mean, if you flip ahead, in fact, to the beginning of issue 12, you'll see this. The beginning of issue 12, the last issue. When that alien's materialized, you get these large page, in fact, they're broader than the page. The page can't contain the image. You get all these images and where's our, you see any blood or a clock? Yeah, so this is a marker of death and it's the blood dripping down and it's over the clock there, in fact, in that first image of the issue, right? Often the issues work with a close up image that then draws back, so you can see it there in that version. Now, an impossible thing, because you can't do it, because it's not on every page, but this is suggesting the physical relation to this text, and in fact, that kinda haptic relation is that if you tore out each of those, don't do it, although you might. It depends on how you relate as a reader to this book. I mean, you could, I hate this, so if you tore out each of those pages, put them together and stapled them at the bottom, and if they were on a firm card, so it won't work very well with these pages. Do you know what a flip book is? Yeah, there's a kinda cinematic move here, so you have to, it can't work. You can't flip through the book and make this happen. There are too many pages, but if you pulled them out and made this, so a hands-on relation, had some kinda hands-on relation to the book itself, in fact, if you flip right to the end, we're flipping now. What are the last words that are said to our friend Seymour? His editor says, so there's Seymour, he's about to pick up, again, spoilers, do you know what he's about to reach for? Yeah, we're about to go back to the beginning of the book and start reading Rorschach's journal, turns out. That's Rorschach's journal, there's Seymour lifting. You can see the image, he spilled ketchup on his t-shirt across the happy face, which is the image we start with, right? So we're looping around here. What does his editor say? Yeah, so the book is left entirely. We can extrapolate, can't we? It's left in your hands, right? This is a hands-on book, do what you want with it. If you tore it apart, you made that flip book and you flipped it, you would see this kind of linear time, a progression forward. At the same time here, of course, I've already hinted at it, there's some of that circular time, because what he's about to do, if he does pick up the book and open it, is start reading, and where do you start reading the book? And what does it say on the first page? First words. Rorschach's journal. So he started reading. We're in a kind of strange, I guess it's kind of a meta-loop, because we start off inside the story and then we go back outside and find our way in again. The whole thing is built in this kind of loop. So it moves forward, we have our flip book, we have different ways in which the narrative progresses in a kind of linear way, like a line, and we have all these circles as well that loop back on themselves. Isn't this course called, what's it, revised? Repetition compulsion, yeah. So there's a repetition compulsion driving the whole thing that you can see in formal terms right from the beginning. But it's also coded with or tied to a kind of hands-on disruption of that repetition. Nothing ever ends, says Dr. Manhattan to Adrian Vite at the end of the book. Because Adrian thinks he's brought about a peaceful world through trickery, right? Through fiction, through a kind of, by using, among others, comic book artists. And it turns out, why doesn't it ever end? Which is bad for Adrian, because he thinks, if his plot stays quiet and no one knows that Ozymandias has engineered all this, then world peace apparently will occur. But if anybody reads Rorschach's journal published in The New Frontiersman, which is a marginal, questionable kind of publication of the far right, I guess, in this fictional United States. So not a lot of people read it, a little bit tabloid-y, a little bit untrustworthy, you might think. Nonetheless, if it does get published and people read it, what will they find out? This all a lie, right? It's all fiction. And we'll go back to nuclear winter perhaps again, or the threat of nuclear winter and nuclear annihilation because everybody will realize they've been tricked. Nothing ever ends. The book wants to close off lots of circles, lots of repetition, lots of sort of a kind of unified holism that it has, a holistic kind of notion. But that's always constantly disrupted as well, constantly undermined. So this is part of this kind of tactility. In holding the book, maybe in ripping it, writing on it, shouldn't do that. Don't do it to library books. But whatever your relation is to this, kind of materially, I stick lots of stickies on it in order to find my place and things like that. The actual effect of this is that I can't find my place because I've put too many on. But nonetheless, that sort of disruption, that kind of hands-on quality, is part of what undoes the sureness of the book's unity. It juxtaposes these two tendencies. And that's really something to pay attention to. This is an interview with the writer, Alan Moore. So there is a writer, an artist, and a colorist, at least involved in the production of Watchmen. People will credit it to Alan Moore. It's his idea. He composed the original scenarios, and he writes the text and so on, and structures the narrative. But there are others involved in this. So it's not a single person's effort. It's a team effort. This is what Moore said. I find film, he says, there is a lot of controversy around the making of Watchmen into film. The thought was, now it has been made into a movie. You can watch it if you want. In fact, in media studies, it's one of the kind of approaches where you're actually allowed to watch the movie instead of reading the book sometimes. But you should probably do both so you can see the relationship. But there is a movie of Watchmen, and it was a little bit scandalous at the time. Alan Moore does not approve of the movie. He doesn't think it's right. I think Givens is fine with it. You'll see, as well, if any of you are comic book nerds or go to any comic book stores, that there are not only figurines that you can buy, like an Ozymandias figurine in Watchmen, based on the movie characters and the actors who played Rorschach and Night Owl and so on. Not only that, but there have been sequels written and prequels using the characters. Particularly, Rorschach was so popular. I mean, he's gross, right? He was so popular as a character at the time. Partly because he's not what you'd expect as a kind of comic book hero. He's very startling for people to read, and they wanted more. And, of course, what happens against Spoiler, but what happens to Rorschach? Yeah, he's obliterated, in fact. All that's left of him is kind of that, right? There's a big splurge on the Antarctic snow, and that's Rorschach. So although his journal Structures, the whole circuit of the book, he's also destroyed by the book itself. And fans were so sad, I guess, by this, even though he's kind of a horrible guy. But they're so saddened by this that prequels were demanded, and, you know, where can we get more Rorschach, and things like this? Alan Moore says, you can't, all right? And now he says you can't, not just for a curmudgeonly reason, but if you look on the screen, as he says, I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. He says, film makes you, watching film, any film studies people in here? Watching film makes you stupid, is what Moore says. He means Hollywood film. He means the version of Watchmen that was created eventually, right? That came out as a big budget superhero blockbuster, right? Alan Moore repudiates that. He says, that's dumb. This is a book. This is a comic book, right? It's a set of 12 comics. It is not a movie. And it's really important that it stay that way for more. It doesn't translate. It doesn't move from medium to medium for him. It is bound to this material physical medium. And this is the reason he says, he doesn't want you to be bullied by images. He doesn't want you to be stupefied to feel the kind of glamour of the screen image. It's as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open, waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms, right, here. That's it, says Moore. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be stupid. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms, he says. You can hear a kind of, I guess we could say, anger in his tone. So if Moore is really focused on the comic book, this sort of pushes us toward a kind of a question. And it might be a version of the question you could ask yourself that would have to do, why is Watchmen, or why is there a comic on Arts One's syllabus, right? Why is that here? Aren't we supposed to be reading great books of the Western world? Smart stuff, how great is this? It was a little difficult, I'm assuming, to read it. It does have aspirations to greatness. You'll see the network of quotations. I've just tossed a few names up there. There are many. Often it quotes both from popular song and pop culture. The book itself is built out of a revision of comics, in fact, of some characters that emerged from a purchase that DC Comics made of, they're called Charlton Comics. Although he changed this, but this is how it emerged. So it's a very much a revisionist text. It also aspires, he's quoting Shelley and William Blake. Osamandius, the name comes from Shelley's sonnet. So all of this kind of material is compiled from literary and other sources as if to legitimate the genre, right? Comics are legit for Alan Moore, right? This is the form itself, he'll say, too. Comics are art, right? You don't have to prove themselves as art. They belong with the great works of the Western canon. They belong there for him, right? I think we, as interpreters and readers, may want to argue this point. I think there's still a lot of, I guess a kind of a sense of the puerility of the kind of childishness of comics as a form that hangs on to them. But if you ever go to a Comic-Con or a comic book convention, there's not a lot of kids there, right? It's maybe it's the nerds, maybe it's whoever. This is an adult form. This is certainly not, I mean, if you start reading it, you'll discover this very quickly. This is not for children, right? So Moore considers this high art, right? And you want to think about that. And it's high art as book, right? Or as paper format. That's what it depends on, right? Film for him, at least the kinds of films like Watchmen that are made out of this material, not art. Again, you have to think about this. Not for, this is for Moore, right? I'm being a bit facetious here because I don't quite agree with him. But nonetheless, this drives him and drives us perhaps to think about the physical character of the book itself, too. That's what's really important. Now, this idea of sort of rescuing the book in a way, and part of this I think I take as a kind of mandate in arts one, has to do with, now you notice you're all looking at the screen and copying it down, right? Not that that's bad, but that's what you're doing, isn't it? Or you've got your laptops open or something like that. The screens are very present to us. This is what we're getting on 20 years ago. You notice that this is 1985, 86, 87. This is pre-internet, kinda. I mean, the military still has the internet. It's just starting to emerge here. So television is the mass medium that the book deals with. But Berkut says, if I'm right about these tendencies, that is to say about the shift from page-centered to screen-centered communication. This is sort of inexorable and inevitable. We're all moving onto our screens, it feels like. We're all kind of created now in a cyborg-like relation to our technologies. It's sort of fused with us in various ways. Your generation is perhaps the first, or you're among the first within 10 years, let's say, to kind of grow up accommodated to computers, accommodated to the internet. It just exists. It did not exist for me when I was your age. We were talking about how old I am, so it did not exist. So it's something I'm not as comfortable with as you are. Berkut says, do you wanna be that comfortable? This is unnatural stuff, right? Morse particularly associates with film, a kind of bullying and a kind of passivity, right? It just pushes at you and you don't have a lot of control over particularly screen-oriented media, right? Notice how all the TV screens that appear in front and say in Ozymandias, it's a kind of fortress of solitude. He has an Antarctica or something like that. And there's a bank of television screens that he seems to watch simultaneously because he's the smartest man in the world. So he's able somehow to digest all this stuff. But the screen itself seems to be associated with delusion and with a kind of evil. It's wrong, it's trickery, it's fake. You are being tricked by screens, right? So we have to choose. Since Berkut's will you either be driven to acquiesce, just say, what are you, stupid? I love the internet. It's awesome. Bring it. That's acquiescence, right? I give in. Wash over me, you beautiful blue signal, right? Something like that. Or Sierra, I don't know about this. Or you're gonna be like Alan Moore in this book and say, that's worms, right? Those are worms made of light and are you going to resist this modification of how you think of your own mindset? Maybe too late, right? It's always too late in some ways. And here's what to think about then in a kind of meta-reflexive way, which is this book. How are you, no, I didn't say why, but how are you watching PowerPoint slides? Notice I like to trademark PowerPoint as well. You didn't know, but Microsoft loves you, right? It's always there. It's all coded into this and you're receiving it. PowerPoints, Word, whatever processing program you're using, all that kind of stuff, that's carried along with whatever it is you're talking about, right? That's part of the signal. That's part of what you're doing. Feels natural, everybody just PowerPoint or what are they, what's the Prezi or any of these kind of presentation formats, right? How does that affect how you think? Why does everybody copy down whatever I put up there? I just typed that in, right? That could be a lie. Now you know probably it's not quite a lie because I quoted my sources and I quoted from here, but it's very easy to manipulate that stuff, extremely easy. I could just throw anything up there I wanted to and you'd see it and you'd do you copy it down? Do you resist it? Do you acquiesce to the screen? It's the question that's being posed to you here. How do books work? So although this might not seem like it belongs on an Arts One course, in fact in the course, that is very tied to the materiality of the book. You're buying books in the bookstore, opening them with pages. I don't know if you're using electronic text much or not, but we're tending to use material texts. This is an act of resistance in many ways. So you wanna think about what that resistance is, whether you buy into it or not, and how it works. What are you resisting? Are you resisting surveillance? Are you resisting corporate control? Are you buying into that? Is it a good thing? I don't know. So Watchman as well, as I said, is copyright. So there we are. Gonna use it anyway. This is what Moore said about Watchman. He said it's a kind of, we're thinking about revision and rewriting and repetition in here, I believe. So this book, as I mentioned, is itself, grows out of, it's a revision of some pre-existent, kind of deactivated comic book characters. They decided not to go this route in a way, but the idea that it originally came from was Moore killing a superhero. That's what he wanted it to start with. Superhero is dead. It was originally supposed to be a hero called The Shield that they bought from, as they said, from Charlton Comics. And then they said, now we don't wanna do that. So make up your own, Alan, said the DC execs. So he did. All these characters, though, tend to echo other characters in the DC universe, in fact. Some of them less known than others. One I think sort of springs to mind, if you know your comics, is The Question. Worshack is a rewriting of a character called The Question, with a trench coat who has a face mask that he kinda wears. And there are others, as well, in here. You can find echoes. These are characters who look like superheroes, the vigilantes, they look like others. So Moore is rewriting it, and he's asking a question, too, what if? This book is built on a whole bunch of what ifs. What if there really was a guy who had superpowers? Cause there's only one guy in here who's a superhero, and that's Dr. Manhattan, and he's blue and he's naked, and he's going to erase you, probably, or go live on Mars, or do something, or create, I don't know what he does, right? But he has superhuman powers. He's immortal, he's beyond the human, he's something else. Everybody else is human. The vigilantes are just kinda pretty good at Kung Fu, or Dan Dryberg has a really cool spate kinda floating ship, the night owl, right? Other than that, they're just normal people who punch people a lot, and have guns and stuff. Which is what the keen acts all about, in fact, right? It's outlying vigilanteism. It's saying no more of these costumed idiots running around punching people, right? We've had enough. You'll notice, though, that the government that produces that act is also very keen to use Dr. Manhattan and the comedian to go and win the war in Vietnam. This is not just a revisionist comic book, right? Not just superheroes, but it's actually revisionist history as well. Richard Nixon is still the president after, is it, four terms? He's seeking a fifth in here, I think. So, and he's the one who's about to push the button to launch the missiles onto Russia and to start the end of the world, basically. So, that kinda plays out in the background of all this. That's what Adrian Veidt's trying to stop. This is what Moore says, I suppose I was just thinking, that'd be a good way to start a comic book. Have a famous superhero found dead. As the mystery unraveled, we'd be like deeper and deeper into the real heart of the superhero's world and show a reality, and this is the key part here, show a reality that was very different to the general public image of the superhero. So, he's kind of undoing, maybe deconstructing, right? Taking apart and critically examining. That's one way to think about that term. The idea of the superhero. So, we still have a superhero here, but he's taken apart. Think about Dr. Manhattan. He doesn't care about people. He does not care. And Lori has to convince him on Mars to even bother to come back and try to set things right. So, he's gonna leave people to their own destruction. He doesn't care about them at all. That's the opposite of Superman, isn't it? Superman's always going to help you because he's friendly and all-powerful and he can fly and stuff like that, so he's always gonna help you. He's a nice guy. Not so, says Moore. That's not how superheroes would probably work. So, we're taking it apart and rethinking it. Gibbons, the artist says it takes quite a bit of organizing before you can actually put pen to paper. That seems like a really banal quotation, but he's in fact saying something important here. So, Alan Moore, in the composition of Watchman, handed him this very complex, long narrative and scenario description, typed up. It was all single-spaced. I think it's 120 pages they said or something like that. Gave it to him and he wants to collaborate. He wants to work with Moore. He's gonna draw this comic as it starts to emerge and he kind of says, what? How much stuff is there here? What is this? So, you have to kind of, as Gibbons says, kind of take it apart and find your way into it. You have to be organized. He's gonna sort of figure out what to draw, how to draw it, where to put it and so on. It turns out, he'll tell you, Gibbons will tell you that he followed Moore's instructions quite extensively. Moore would often say, well, I wanna do it this way, but if you can't draw it that way, just do it whatever, you know, I don't care. So, he'd often kind of let Gibbons have free reign, but Gibbons would say, well, no, I kind of stuck to what Alan said. I'll draw it his way. So, that's important to notice. As well, it's really significant and why I've, again, put up this banal quotation. You can find this on Wikipedia. A lot of this background information is easy to find on Wikipedia. I don't know that, except in different kinds of media studies context, you'll find people encouraging you to look at Wikipedia, but it's a kind of collective intelligence, very useful. Anyway, that's where that quotation came from. But if you think about the idea of the wiki in relation to this kind of compiled form of the comic, as well as the double authorship. In fact, it's a triple authorship at least. All right, there are three listed on the inner title page. It's collaborative. Comics are collaborative. There's not ever one author. People will tend to say this is Alan Moore's, but that authorial intention, right? The idea that one person intentionally means to write something in a certain way. We say Shakespeare in the Tempest, blah, blah, blah. That's assuming that there's a kind of intention there. He meant to do that somehow. That guarantees meaning, if we assume intention. With comics, you get into a problem. It's also with film pretty quickly in that the form is inherently collaborative. It's very rarely single authored. It's corporatized, so it's a publishing company is involved in structuring it. But the author, the artist, and the colorist, and others tend to be different. The letterist, the person who writes the letters is somebody else, right? So everybody's hand is on the creation of this material. Again, it's a banal point in a way. Yeah, that's how it works with comics. But if you think about it, the comic itself, I started off asking us to maybe consider how we transition across those gutters, how we insert ourselves into this text a little bit. Comics themselves are inherently co-creative, which means they open themselves up to a multiplicity of authorial positions. The artist is an author, Gibbons is an author, right? The colorist is an author. They choose him deliberately, in fact, they say for his quirky sense of color. But you'll notice there's not only is there a palette here, a particular kind of watchman-like color set, but in various ways, the colors, I'm just trying to randomly open, I don't know if I can get it. But you'll see how color itself, here we got a lot of blue. You'll see sometimes gold and green will make X's on the page. The color palette itself shifts from frame to frame often. And color is used to create different kinds of senses throughout the text. That's TV blue and tacky on blue, right? So he glows like a television screen, for example, in this context. That generates certain kinds of meaning. That's out of Alan Moore's control in a way. This is John Higgins, the colorist doing this. And he has free reign to color as he wishes. They do it together, but these are his choices. So that means that there's not a single intelligence behind this book. That it is, we say, intersubjective. It's between or among people. Notice that the characters in here, we feel like maybe one guy, Dr. Manhattan perhaps, or maybe Rorschach, occupies a certain kind of authorial position, right? It's Rorschach's journal you're reading, so a lot of this is from his perspective or filtered through his brain. But notice that we're not always reading Rorschach's journal. And there are things in here that he can't know, for example, that unfold as you read it. Dr. Manhattan is sort of omniscient and omnipotent. He can make anything. He can do anything. He can annihilate you if he wants to. You can't kill him, because he just reassembles his body, right? So he's kind of all present. Notice that he's also kind of omnitemporal. That kind of linear narrative that you might observe in the book is especially near the end, but also on Mars and at various points, is actually disrupted where he'll be in another scene. Dr. Manhattan will be talking in a scene five pages back or 10 pages forward. And you'll get the dialogue from that part on the page as well. He doesn't quite know when he is, right? Because he's in multiple time frames at once. Think about that flip book and how films work. That's an early film, in fact, making a flip book frame by frame by frame, right? That creates a kind of linear time, one frame after another. Dr. Manhattan doesn't flip one, two, three, four, five, six. He goes one, seven, five, seven, two, and then everything at once, and then only two things, and then five, he's all over the place, and he won't let that narrative settle, right? So what happens is that the subject position that you might take as authoritative. And maybe one other thing to notice is that is the attitude toward authority, governmental authority, governance in particular, that this text tends to evince, right? It tends to suggest that we occupy a subversive relationship to authority, or at least we prefer that, that that's better. It's better to resist the authoritative, better to resist singular control. Do not agree with Richard Nixon, right? Do not agree with Ozymandias. Because you're gonna be in trouble and you're gonna be annihilated, basically. Those are your two, your options. You're gonna acquiesce into nothingness. So acquiescence is not preferred here. Resistance, remember that's Fen Burkett's quote, resistance is preferable. And that resistance is created by co-creativity in fact, by collaboration, by not settling on a single intelligence, on a single authority. So authorship and authority here are sort of combined conceptually, they're associated. And by not having a single author, by disrupting that authority of the omniscient narrator in a way, you end up with a kind of resistant form, a form that won't let itself entirely be co-opted. You never get to finish reading this book, is one way to think about that. It's too slippery. It will evade the controlling gaze of any reader. That's another way to think about this too. In media studies, intermedia is just a word, it means a number of things, but one way to think about it is combined media. Comics, as a genre is, or comics are, there's another grammatical slip here, right? Which is part of that resistance, if you think about it. But comics is co-creative, so it's collaborative, but intermediate as well, it exists in the combination of different media, different forms, right? It's not a single thing, it's always multiple, always plural, and always I wanna suggest a little bit unresolved. So if we could, now I haven't opened up the book too much and I'm already halfway through. We'll see how we do. But if you could have a look now, the page numbering is also a little tricky. I think in some of the editions they have numbered the pages consecutively, but in mine they preserved the comic book numbering, so that's what I've preserved here. So this is issue three, pages one to two. So if you could kinda flip to the beginning of issue three, it looks like this with the nuclear waste hazard warning sign and just have a look there. We get a figure, you learn late in the book that his name is Bernie and what's he doing? Down here in the bottom corner. Notice how he's positioned structurally and spatially as well, he's kinda off in the margins and at the bottom, he's sitting down. This is not your superhero, who is this guy? Again, you'll learn in issue 11 that his name is Bernie, but who is he? What's he look like, what's he doing? He's reading, simple question, right? And it says up there. So we could check our screen to see what I was fishing for. But one of the things that we should notice if we're thinking about this idea of the kind of omniscient narrator or this kinda all-seeing figure, here is one of our stand-ins. This guy is reading comics, right? And what comic is he reading by the way, do you know? Tales of the Black Frater, in particular. It's a series called Marooned, I believe. So, and this is important because the author of Marooned of this comic book is actually a figure in the margins of this text. You'll see him appear on TV screens. People are saying, where is he? He's disappeared, and you get to witness his death as well when the ship is blown up. I don't know if you remember this on the island where they create the creature. So here he's reading this. Now, in a way, what we can call this is an allegory of reading. So an allegory, an allegory is a kind of large analogy. If you think of an, when we think of allegory as a genre, it is a type of writing, it involves a kind of equal sign. So one thing always stands for another. I'm gonna suggest that this figure here offers us what we call an allegory of reading. He's talking to us about how we read, and in particular how you read comics, and in more particular, how you read this comic. He's telling you something, because of course, Tales of the Black Frater, which they removed from the film, but it's actually embedded in here, and you'll see a kind of interlacing happens. You read what he reads sometimes, sometimes not, and sometimes the captions from the Black Frater, and you can see that there, delirious, I saw that hellbound ship's black sails against the yellow in the sky. This is like a really sort of schlocky pulp fiction kind of pirate writing. Instead of superhero comics in this world, they have pirate comics, although you do have superhero vigilante action figures, remember Ozymandias is putting out a line of those and so on. So pirate comics are very popular here. Notice what he says, delirious says our narrator here, I saw. Comics reading has something to do with seeing in a certain way. If you kind of sort of, I suppose, look at what our news vendor says, on the next page, so we've got Fallout Shelter. I mean, this is, now his name's Bernie, do you know what this guy's name is? He does tell him later. Bernard, hey, he says, we've got the same name. This is another version of the kind of mirroring that often takes place in here. There are various sorts of identities and identifications. Bernie's gonna say, so what, who cares, I don't care. Great, you have the same name as me, fine. But nonetheless, there's a kind of identification, a kind of mirroring offer there. Mymesis is the word for that, mymesis. In any case, at the center of that page, I mean says our, he's talking and Bernie's not listening, he's reading, right? So we're getting a bad listening happening here. I mean, I see the signs, read the headlines. Look things in a funny, look things in a face, you know? Sorry, I can't do his accent. So notice what he says though, he sees things, he reads the signs. We're being told to interpret here. Is he a very good reader? This is Bernard who's talking here. Cause there's a sign being put up when he says I read the signs. What sign is being put up behind him? Yeah, it's a warning about a fallout shelter. Reading that sign should tell you, nuclear war's about to happen, right? Is he reading that? He sort of is cause he's anxious, but he's not actually looking at that. He's staring off in a space somewhere away from the headlines themselves. Notice he's a news vendor and he sells comic books to Bernie. So that's, and Bernie sits there reading them as he does it, right? In fact, I don't know, maybe he doesn't even always sell them. He just kind of picks them up and sits, right? So there you go. And these two chat back and forth. Their fate is going to be significant a little later on. But just pay attention though to what he says. In fact, this is what you're often being asked to do. He says I read the signs, pay attention, look around me, listen, read things. This is a really important warning to heed when you are, in fact, reading Watchmen. An awful lot happens in the edges and in the margins. That's why I said I can't even, I mean I've just sort of touched on it here already. I can't cover it all. That's not gonna happen. Can't possibly do it because there's too much happening all over the place. There's too much going on here. It's, we say, over determined. There's too much information. You can't process it all. You can't organize it. But the thing to really notice is that, and we're noticing here, paying attention, watching is that all of these different layers, these different trajectories, these different stories intersect in various ways. He's reading a comic written by a guy who participates in Ozymandias' plot to save the world. And it's been kidnapped and disappeared. Things start to loop around quite frequently and to interweave in this text. So if we're thinking about this idea of the reader and what it means to read, that means that, I said this is an allegory of reading. That means that this is a reflexive text. It reflects on itself. If we're thinking cognitively about this, it reflects on itself as if it had a consciousness as a text. So that question, what are comics for? It asks that question of itself. What are we doing? How do they work? How do we read the signs and so on? How do you read this text? Why might that be important? And it's also reflexive in the sense that this is a kind of comic inside of comics that reading, the act of reading, is embedded inside a reading. Does that make sense? It's embedded in itself in certain ways. Now, I'm gonna pass a little bit quickly over this. This is maybe too much jargon, but what I've started to set up here is a reading of this text as pulling together two incommensurable conceptual frameworks. Incommensurable, the text is built on an incommensurability. That means basically that they don't fit. They don't fit conceptually, they cannot be resolved. The two names for these, these are strategies of reading or of interpretation of media and of texts in particular. So there's the semiotic, again, I said this was jargon, the semiotic and the hermeneutic. The semiotic and the hermeneutic. Semiotics refers to the study of signs, semi-on, sign. So you'll often be thinking about decoding, about how representation works. And in particular, again, I'm passing over this fairly quickly, but you'll see how this plays itself out, maybe in here, the arbitrary. If you look, I think we're on Mars at what Laurie says on page 23 of book nine. Oops, yeah, right at the bottom of the page. So it looks like this. Oops, take off my sticky note. Looks like that. Okay. Right at the bottom corner, she says, I mean, look here, my life, my mom's life, there's nothing worth avoiding. It's all just meaningless. It's all meaningless. Stuff just kind of happens for no reason. And they're experiencing a kind of crisis here and she's trying to persuade him to persuade Dr. Manhattan to come back and help save the world. What's the point she's asking? She's about to hurl a bottle of perfume and destroy his kind of crystal martian palace that he's made here, his watch-like palace. But in any case, this kind of notion of meaninglessness, that is the idea of the arbitrary. When we're thinking in terms of semiotics and code systems, we're not thinking about meaning. We're thinking about how the system relates in and of itself, how it builds its own significances, how code functions. It doesn't have to have reference to its own outside. It doesn't have to have any ground. If we're thinking about meaning, that's sort of the flip side of things. So the semiotic avoids that and just looks at form and structure and how codes are created. The hermeneutic refers to interpretation and that is where we look for meaning within that kind of framework. So as I said, these are incommensurable ideas and this is the basis of that incommensurability. They don't fit together. Hermeneutic thinking looks for meaning, looks to ground truth or to say, to look for the horizon of, Hermeneutics kind of literally means the science of interpretation, how we interpret. So you're trying to find a kind of a ground or a place or a location or a conceptual surety that guarantees what's a better interpretation versus what's not, what works and what doesn't. Those are called horizons of truth. You meet that horizon. You find the place where we either share or accept a particular kind of stability, a ground. So hermeneutics looks for meaning, meaning, semiotics for representations and code systems. They are fundamentally at odds with each other. What I wanted to suggest to you is that if we look at bodies and images, bodies and texts and the way that they're presented in this set of images and text, you'll see that even from the cover on these two ways of thinking are consistently juxtaposed. I mean, think about that happy face. Right there on the front, right? You've got a happy face. You just have its eye here in this kind of geometrical ovoid. The happy face itself, this is the comedian's button. You start to see glimpses of it and it becomes clearer what it is you're looking at as we go here. But it's a symmetrical construction. It's a circle with a very even kind of geometrically simplified image on it, just two eyes and a mouth, and everything balances. There's that circuit that the book itself tends to generate, the circles that it tends to inhabit, you see there. But across that, you get a very embodied, corporeal, unruly smear of fluid. This is blood or ketchup. I mean, if this is Seymour's t-shirt at the end, this could be ketchup, which is fake blood, people say sometimes, if you've got a cheap theater company, but in any case, notice how it doesn't, it has no symmetry, it's splashed across the piece. Embodied, experiential, meaningful life, if you wanna think of it that way. The stuff of how we live tends to be messy. The kind of neat, decodable, understandable, comprehensible frameworks that we paint, that we draw. Look at the structure of any page, in fact. Did you notice this about Watchmen? It becomes pretty quickly apparent. Visually, it's structured in a nine-part grid, and that grid is always symmetrical. Even when gutters are elided and you get either a full page or a three-frame row here of image, it maintains this symmetrical structure. So it's formally incredibly exacting. It's built on an unwavering grid. The grid never disappears. Bodies are thrown like that blood across the grid. The grid cuts into those bodies, in fact, and doesn't accommodate them. This is another version, I'm suggesting, of this idea of an incommensurability. Fitting bodies to form doesn't quite work in here. The authoritarian nature of that grid, the fact that it's unwavering and appears to be sure, stable and consistent throughout, is set violently against the human inhabitants of the urban grid, of the visual grid, of whatever grid the page is here. Notice how each of those nine pieces actually echoes the geometry of the whole of the page. It's inset as well. So we have this kind of, as I said, incommensurable relationship between image and body. Here's my way of avoiding copyright. You can't copyright the smiley face. Okay. I think we'll break here, and we can break with this question now. So we're gonna start after the break. Take 10 minutes, I hope. We'll come back and we'll start to be a little more directly connected to reading the text itself. Okay? Okay, so I've got too much material here, and I seem to be throwing a lot of abstracts at you. This must be fun for your last lecture, too, to have all this stuff kind of thrown at you. But hopefully it'll wind itself off nicely. So I'll try not to move too quickly, but I think this is a curse of the kind of lecturers having too many slides and so on. So ignore the PowerPoint. But what it says there is one of the kind of structural principles. So we're thinking about this idea of a reflexive structure of a frame narrative, and that frame is encapsulated in the kind of catch. I suppose it's a catch phrase, it's a quotation from Juvenal that is translated, in fact it's mistranslated by more, it appears at the end of the text and in fragments part of the way through it. We'll think about that in a second. But who watches the watchman is how he translates this line from one of the satires. There's the actual line. You can see the word for watchman is castoriate, which does not quite mean watchman. It sort of means jailer or guardian. Now this might, if you know that this is a mistranslation, this might give you pause. You think what, can't he read Latin? Well you know, who does. But in any case, you'll notice how he chose what he and Gibbons choose watchman in particular because of its resonances, because it's a kind of polysemic word. It has many meanings. There's the watchmaker and watchmaker, John who becomes Dr. Manhattan he fixes watches, right, he's a watchmaker. So there's that idea of time and of the temporal that's a part of the kind of narrative here. Remember that Dr. Manhattan exists in multiple time frames, for example, and tends to disrupt this unitary coherence that we're often seeing marked by circles and geometries in the text itself. It suggests something of surveillance the term does as well. So to watch over. So there's watches, it sounds like, that's not in the Latin, it doesn't mean watches, but we call them watches, we check the time. So there's that idea in his translation, his mistranslation, but it also suggests surveillance, being watched, right, people are watching us. This lecture is being recorded by these little cameras up here, right. You're excluded so they can't see you apparently, whoever they are, right, it may be you if this ever appears on the internet or something. So we're watching ourselves here or watching me. Maybe I'll get it, I'll watch myself and be totally embarrassed. But in any case, that's idea of surveillance, of constantly being under scrutiny, of being imprisoned, in fact, in images and among screens, for example, of being stuck with only these kind of layers of visual illusion. That's a big part of what that term suggests. And also watching. I wanna suggest, I've been doing it already, that instead of reading, I mean, Bernie's a figure of the comic book reader, and we are readers when we're looking at this, but the name for reading in this text is watching, right. You have to watch out. Pay attention, you watch what goes on here. Now think about what that means. Do you read as a watcher? Is reading a kind of watching? That sounds peculiar, it sounds odd, but I think this text is encouraging it. Partly because it's a mix. This is an intermediate, right. It's a mix of text and visual and other forms, tactile forms, for example. But so we can't say we read an image exactly. You tend to read text. People say that, I'm reading, I'm interpreting an image. But really what you're doing is watching language, watching words, watching over it, and paying attention. So I wanna suggest that's the word and that's why he mistranslates here. So there we have those two ideas. Whoops, I went too far. No, I didn't. The other thing about that phrase is that it appears not just at the end, as I mentioned, but in fact throughout. This is a piece of graffiti that I like. So I just thrown this in here. It has very little to do with Watchmen in a way. But I didn't write this. This was on the wall of outside the kind of convenience store that's in the village by the University Gates. And someone had taken a Sharpie and drawn a TV with rabbit ears and written read inside. I think the intention is, stop watching TV and pick up a book. It's very Alan Moore-like, so that's why I thought, okay, this might work. But... Yeah, I know. Well, the book itself too is kind of out of date. You'll notice that it's kind of anachronistic. It seems like it's a bit quaint. It's a Cold War artifact in many ways. But reading it now as a sort of pre-internet book, that kind of pre-electronic book in a sense, gives it a certain archaic feeling. But that archaism is maybe tied to the kind of materiality of the book itself, right? Books are kind of old school. They don't quite fit with the contemporary exactly. They're always a little bit out of step. And that archaism seems to encourage critical perspective. It slows you down. It maybe makes you think. It makes you pay attention. You have to watch out if you're reading. So maybe that graffiti was significant. I just threw it in here because it's a graffiti and connected, but also because that's how the phrase who watches the Watchman appears throughout the book. I don't know if you noticed this, but it is spray-painted on walls often by knot tops. The sort of punk rockers who... they kill the first night owl and so on. So these kind of gangs of people who float around in the margins again. If you pay attention, I've only noted one. So in issue one, page nine, you'll see on the wall behind the image. It's always in the background. This is written, Uch is a schmin, question mark. One of the things... It's the phrase. If you know who watches the Watchman, you'll see sometimes, well, at one point, night owl and Rorschach beat up a bunch of knot tops and they stopped them from spray-painting. So it says who watches the who and then they got pounded. That was where it stopped. All the way through the book, the phrase, who watches the Watchman, it's sort of omnipresent. It's always there and it's always incomplete. It's always masked from view. So here you have the frame. The gutter of the image masks the whole phrase. So I don't want to always be absolute about this. I don't want to say always, but I'm going to say always. It is always incomplete throughout the book. It's never fully visible. It's always fragmented. It's always broken off. Always disrupted in a way. Maybe I can put that question to you. Notice that this lecture itself, the way that the room is structured, in fact, is angled towards a kind of single authority. You're supposed to listen to what I say and write it down and I'm standing in the middle and that means I'm smart. Right? And you are eating my worms. That's disgusting. But in Alan Moore talk, he's kind of gross anyway, right? He talks. That kind of idea of being worm-fed, of just having stuff thrown at you and you take it and that's encouraged by this room. Right? I'm talking, you listening. So I know you don't know me, but what if I put this question to you? How come they did this? This is a question for the artist and for the author. Why is it never complete? Why is the question, who watches the watchman? Which is the structural question behind the book. Who's in charge? Who polices the police? Who guards the guards? Right? Whose perspective controls the others? Why is it fragmented throughout the whole book? Sorry about the worms thing. I know that was gross. That's a really interesting point. In fact, that they too are watchers. We tend to think of creators as producing them, but in fact, they're not all creating at the same time. So they're actually readers of their own work. Right? They're watching it. Why would that relate to the fragments then? Yeah. Oh, that's good. That the perspective itself is fractured. So we don't have, again, an overarching perspective. It's always divided. Or more importantly, always incomplete. The incompletion is going to be really significant here. It's also a question, you'll notice. It's not a statement. Anyone else? Any suggestions? Why fragment it? Is your opportunity to disrupt the authority of my talk here? And what does? Yeah, that's the question you don't want to ask, in fact, because that's the question that troubles everything. That's a disruptive question that takes things apart, which is in fact what happens, of course, to Dr. Manhattan's body. It's taken apart. It's what happens to Rorschach at the end. And what does Adrian say? I quoted it already. But near the end of Book 12, nothing, or Dr. Manhattan says this, rather, nothing ever ends, right? So we're left fragmented and open-ended here. Just for a second. Just for a second. That's your name. Laurie Jupiter, the silk specter, too, on Mars says it's meaningless then, right? Where's the center? More and others seem implicitly to be advocating for a sense of the meaningful in the process, I suppose, the act of critique itself. They tend to value not stable, coherent notions of groundedness. Remember, I said there was a kind of sensibility here, a kind of irresolution behind the whole text, conceptually. It can't settle. This is a sense, or an image, of that sense of unsettlement, of unsettling happening right there in front of you. And it's always behind the images. It kind of floats there consistently. Could we look now? I said we were gonna, I'll just toss these out here so we can see them. I said we were gonna look a little more at the book. This might seem like a bit of a cheat because let's look at page one. So really get into the book really deeply. In fact, the first question is, is that actually the first page? Because I think the cover, right? If you've got all these flipping things, if you've got references to the text in the book's cover, on the inside covers, on these other pages, quotations, bits of text, the first page should really be this page. This is called paratext, though. It's on the outside of the text, but tied to it. So para, paratext. So this is, I guess, technically page one of the text. This is numbered page one right here, right? But you've had stuff going on already. And one of the things, I guess, we should begin by paying attention to is that this is, if you're thinking about this fragmenting of perspective, this in filmic terms, it's like a set of storyboards. And they did this for the Watchman movie, despite Moore's objections. They tended to use the graphic novel itself, the text, as a set of storyboards. They just took this image, put the camera at that angle and built on that. You'll see it follows, not exactly, but often, if you do watch the movie, you'll see it follows quite closely on the book. In fact, the visuals do. But you'll notice that if you do imagine this as a camera that we've got here and we're thinking about perspective, our detective, we've got his bald spot at the top. We're looking at the bald spot off his head. He says, that's quite a drop. You know, a cliche there. But notice how we've been looking through his eyes. And this is kind of an impossible perspective as well. But if you can imagine it's a camera, or a camera lens or something like that, we started with our camera lens poked right into a tiny little button flowing in some blood toward a drain right down at street level. And we go up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, in a vertiginous fashion. It's very dizzying all the way to the window where, through which the comedian was thrown. So we're sort of tracing his trajectory in reverse, the trajectory of his body. That's his blood being washed away on the street. Rorschach's Journal, it begins October 12th, 1985. So we have this perspectival reversal. Rorschach's going to end up in this, at this perspective as well, in a page or two. He's going to climb. I don't know why he doesn't bother using the elevator. But he's going to climb up the outside of the building and go in, like what? But he's going to go into the broken window. So okay. You can see the splat as we go back. Why does it, why would they do this? Why would they start in such microscopic proximity to what we're looking at and then pull back to a kind of macro view, to a kind of big view? What does that suggest? I mean, this is our linear, we're moving linearly page, frame to frame. This is as if we're drawing back, right? So it's quite linear, at the beginning at least. Why would they do this? Yeah, you miss the details, right? In fact, that's what Bernard, our newscaster, although he's missing the details often, frequently says, right? You've got to listen closely. You've got to look closely. You've got to notice stuff. So here, they're doing it for us right at the beginning. They've got their lens in so close that it's like this, right? It's right there, so they want you to look. And you're actually looking, what is this? Black dot. There's blood and it's an eye. The text is often obsessed with eyes and with looking. Notice as you flip through, all the way through, you'll see how many times it's interested in where your eyes are, how you see things. You might think of Lori's eyes, for instance, are reflected in the bottle of nostalgia perfume, or I think it's John's eyes reflected in the snow globe at one point. Rorschach doesn't seem to have any eyes or those black dots are moving all around in an interestingly symmetrical fashion. One more thing to note, somebody walks through the blood. Do you know who that is? Yeah, you wouldn't know that now, right? But yeah, after you've read the whole book, that's Rorschach. That's Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. Rorschach. He's got his mask off. And he's carrying, if we're thinking in semiotic terms, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, right? Signs, he's carrying a sign. What does this sign say? So he's kind of an apocalyptic sort of Christian guy, it seems like. I don't know how Christian Rorschach is, but he seems to be preaching biblical kinds of texts or quasi-biblical texts. The end is nigh. What part of the book is this? This is the beginning. Why would he be holding a sign saying the end? That's kind of like a Monty Python. Have you ever seen the Holy Grail? The end comes up at the beginning after the credits, so it seems like a joke almost, right? At the beginning of the book. This suggests something of this kind of looping structure, right? That the pattern is already set. That splat of blood, which is the comedians, also echoes the splat of blood on the snow that's going to be Rorschach. This guy, it turns out, but we don't really know it at this point. As I said, once you've read the book, this might suggest something about patterns of reading. We can read in a linear fashion in a naive way, unknowing and letting it unfold as we move from front to back. That's encouraging us to do here. In a way that takes for granted that you've already read the whole book, but you're sort of jumping around. We move from page to page in a nonlinear way to try and make associations. This is a form of decoding, in fact. This is a semiotic strategy to find equations, to find analogies, visual, textual, other kinds of sort of similarities, and to try and put together meaning out of those equations. So on that first page, we get all that stuff set up already. So perspectives being manipulated and also decoding and the interpretation of signs, which you can and cannot know. Notice as well, if we're thinking about bodies, Rorschach just walks through the blood and doesn't care. So the viscera, the kind of guts of... This is gross, again, but the guts of the comedian are on the bottom of his shoes and he leaves a trail. If you're thinking about this story, here you have a set of tracks. And as we pull back, you can see the tracks get longer. So it kind of plays out in that notion of linear time, but those tracks get longer and longer. So we're supposed to track here. We're watching as a form of track. We mentioned the grid already and this kind of rectilinear structure, but we get exposed to it right away. We've been over this already, but I just wanted to kind of point it out that the word in the text, so I say equations and so on, the word in the text for this idea of making these visual and textual connections is symmetry. You'll see that the symmetrical is... I've invoked this idea already, but we have juxtaposed, of course, symmetrical and asymmetrical kinds of images throughout. So some stuff matches and some stuff doesn't. And you get this idea of endings, of conclusions, and of closure tied in with that symmetry. And it's not just called symmetry, is it? It's called fearful symmetry. Do any of you know where that comes from? I've got a slide in a second, but it's in here, too. They tell you. Yeah, it says, William Blake's poem, The Tiger. Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night. The question is... It's a question. What immortal hand or eye could frame... It's one of the worst off-rhymes in English. Could frame thy fearful symmetry. What immortal hand or eye... That's what we've been talking about, isn't it? Hands, tactility, bodies, and eyes seeing, watching could frame thy fearful symmetry. Why is the tiger's symmetry so fearful, do you think, in Blake's poem? Does he mean fearsome? Like, we're big beasts, you know? Tiger. Or... Like, why is symmetry itself fearful? What should we be afraid of? Yeah, visually, that's what we're seeing, because he's got, like, the strikes on his side. Why does that create fear, though? Shouldn't we be happy? We've perceived geometrical coherence. We're like, ooh, very nice. Symmetry. I think that might be it. We call this a kind of Procrustian... Procrustes is this figure in Greek myth. Procrustian idea of the geometric. If you visited Procrustes' house, he had a bed where he would welcome all travelers. If your legs were too long, he cut them off. And if they're too short, he stretched you. So there's an idea in the Procrustian of perfect form, right? Of the symmetrical, perfect body being made to fit violently into some kind of conceptual framework. Be afraid of symmetry, Blake suggests, because whatever God has framed as symmetrical is not framed that way in your favor. I'm going to jump here a little in the presentation. It happens. But if you could think a bit about Oh, well, why don't I... Oh, I can't do it. It's too many slides. If you think about when Dr. Manhattan rematerializes, and it's... here on... This is... Sorry, I said I was going to be slow. It's called Chapter 4, Issue 4, pages 8, 9, 10, somewhere in there. So this page... So he's been dematerialized. He went back for his watch, ironically, and he got dematerialized in some kind of tacky-on beam or something that they were experimenting with. And then, days later, parts of him start to rematerialize. It looks like painfully and torturously. This image, in fact, echoes what happens at in Issue 12, or, yeah, in Issue 12 when Adrian tries to kill Dr. Manhattan again. He zaps him with a beam and sort of takes him apart. So there he is being taken apart and being turned into light. I think that's significant that the body is turned into light, which is kind of what happens in a screen, isn't it? Your body... Have you seen Chappie? Chappie? Well, your consciousness gets turned into a robot there. So somehow this connection between the living body and consciousness and the logically artificially created body, the representation, the image, gets blurred here. He's turned into light. He's turned into image. And then reemerges as a nervous system, as bones, as whatever, until we get in the cafeteria all the forks are floating because he's magnetic and there's a nude blue guy appears. That image there, so this is Page 10 of Issue 3, I think, as I said, wasn't it? Four. So there he is. Does that image echo anything for you? I said I jumped ahead, but... What is it? Yeah, no, yes, no. Do you know Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of the Homo Mensura? Homo Mensura? It's on my slideshow, but I don't know. I'm jumping around, so I scrambled it already. It's reproduced in the description of Dr. Manhattan in one of the sections at the end. But it's got him... Essentially it's a square with a circle inside it and then a naked dude inside who squares the circle. It's a very famous drawing. Homo Mensura, which means man in this case, it's gendered the measure of things. Man the measure, man the measure of things. The body was thought, Leonardo da Vinci suggests to be a rational construct, a symmetrical construct, a perfect construct. This is Dr. Manhattan's perfect body. That's balanced, symmetrical, ordered. And notice he eventually burns a hydrogen atom, the perfect simple structure an image of it into his forehead. That's a great point. Notice how symmetry is advocated for, right? And yet, we're off-center here. Again, if we're watching carefully, so thank you, you've been watching really carefully in fact in this case, but if you're watching carefully, you notice that what's offered to you as perfect is in fact skewed here. That's going to suggest something to you visually, conceptually, textually, all these different kinds of suggestions. Or what we think is a perfected form is going to turn out to be something that could, I suppose, do us in. There is the image too of Dr. Manhattan at the very end when he's looking at, he's about to zap. This is 12, sorry, 23, right here in the bottom corner. He's about to do something to Rorschach. I don't think you ever want Dr. Manhattan to look at you this way. In fact, you don't want him to see you. Because if he sees you and looks at you and does this with his hand, hand and eye, what's going to happen to you? Bad things, right? You're going to be obliterated, in fact. Where'd he go? I turned it to the wrong page. There he is. So there's Rorschach being zapped. It's colored differently than the way Dr. Manhattan is colored. Notice the pink, which is both suggest viscera, blood, guts, all this kind of stuff. And highly artificial kind of fluorescent neon sign, right? It's sort of between the artificial and the embodied here. But really, we're saying notice. I'm saying notice all the time. Pay attention. Notice how he's looking right out of the frame. He's looking right out of the frame. Suggests what? I mean, we have Rorschach's perspective here, so he's looking at Rorschach, we think. But who's he also looking at? He's looking at you, right? He can see you. Of course he can. He's omniscient. Now, books can't see you. It's a page, right? You think, oh, I'm safe. He is not going to kill me. It's a representation. But this book is threatening to kill you right there, right? That book is threatening to annihilate you. Because you're pretty sure it can't do it. I think you're probably 99%. But if you start to believe in the power of comics, maybe you're deluded, but you might start to worry a bit, right? Somehow this comic, though, is a suggestion. This book isn't just something that you see. Who watches the watchman? But it also watches you. What does Nietzsche say in the quotation? Those who gaze into the abyss, take care. You fight with monsters. Should take care that you do not become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. That's what's left out of the quotation in the title. If you gaze into the abyss, it says, and it leaves it open, like that graffiti that we saw, that abyss is going to look back. Dr. Manhattan is looking back at you. Or my favorite. I'm going to just abandon my PowerPoint because we're going to run out of time here. But it's good. I disrupt my own structure. It's good and bad. Because I've lost my page. When we capture Rorschach is where I'm after. It should be at the end of four. Nope. Sorry. See, this is another disruption. This is kind of, yeah, it's five. I'm looking at chapter five. Where Rorschach says behind you and so on. So if you flip to the end, this is called fearful symmetry, in fact. If you flip for a moment to the very end, so about page 28, 27, 28. I have to tell you, I'm confessing now that I disrupted and left my PowerPoint behind, so now your notes will be useless. This is my favorite image from the book. And it's really the juxtaposition of two images off center that I really find kind of provocative. So I'm on page 27 of five. Fearful symmetry. You notice what's said here by our two detectives or our police? It's a dead end. He can't get out. We've got him. And they do capture Rorschach, right? It's a dead end. He can't get out. What's the image we've got there when it is a dead end? Here, in fact, notice how the colors work too. Notice the purples and olives are counterposed with the oranges and sort of magentas. See how the colors work symmetrically? As well, you're being told certain things. That image in the bottom center on page 27 of the fifth issue there. Can you all see it? So it's probably the most boring image in the book. What is it? It's a window and it's closed. And inside is a kind of a blind. And you'll notice how the blind makes a kind of yellow or golden rectangle. And that's then bifurcated by the sash of the window there, and it creates two other rectangles, including one, the larger one, that actually mimics the shape of the whole of that golden piece. You can measure this if you want to. This is being a really detailed and maybe obsessive kind of reader. But nonetheless, notice how there are twisted symmetrical echoes of the rectangle here. Have you ever studied Renaissance painting by chance? Just happened to? Leonardo da Vinci, that kind of thing. This is called this inset here. Now, notice that the inset rectangle is not quite the same proportion as the page and the frame here, it's a little longer, although the bifurcated part at the bottom is in fact the longer one that echoes the page. It's called a golden section. A golden section. And this is the rectangular shape. It's based on a number called phi, which is an irrational number that keeps resolving itself. Similarly, a nautilus shell is built of golden sections. It's kind of an infinite regression of rectangles. They go here, here, here, here and they twist. If you ever look at a nautilus shell, you've got an image of phi. It's what's called a Fibonacci sequence if any of you study math. This is a Fibonacci sequence here. This is, in fact, I think I'm going to go for it and say I've got to really measure carefully because it's a comic book. So what they have done here, what Gibbons has done is reproduce a figure from Renaissance, early Renaissance art, a figure that signals it's just a rectangle. You'll see how, in fact, Renaissance paintings have certain proportions. Look for rectangles in Leonardo da Vinci paintings. You'll see that they're based on this particular ratio, this particular structure, this golden section. And it suggests balance, apparently, to your eye. And it's partly for book designers, too, but it's text inside a page. It doesn't work on this one, but often in sort of a standard paperback even. The text part, the part with the print, if you draw a rectangle around it, it will be approximately a golden section. It suggests balance and order and unity according to most Renaissance painters. So Leonardo would say this, for example. That's symmetry. That's a symmetrical form. Now the rectangles themselves are symmetrical, although if we follow on what you were saying, you'll notice that the golden section part is kind of centered here, so it's kind of centered and kind of not. Very typical of watchmen. It's a dead end, says our folks. He can't get out. It's concluded. How did the book start? Rorschach's carrying a rectangular sign that says the end is nigh. Dead end here. You know it's not a dead end because you can see the next frame. So there's a bit of irony here, but that symmetry is trying to... The visual symmetry of the golden section is trying to contain, trying to give you rectilinear order. It's a grid that's built there. It's boring, right? And it's absolute. Dead end. We've got him. We know who he is now. We're going to hold him. We're going to catch Rorschach, that horrendous vigilante. Next one. I said this is my favorite image. Right here. What does he do to the window? What's he do to your balance of golden section and everything like that? Your lovely Leonardo-esque window. Roar! Best line in the book. And he jumps through it. This is kind of in very immediate terms an echo of what happens to the comedian. Now, we know that Adrian Wight throws the comedian through the window, but it is bursting through a window. Right? You might think of these as windows, maybe also a little bit as screens. Right? Because there's television in here as well. So this is print. So this is not quite a screen, but it is a glass frame. It's screen-length. What does Rorschach do to screens and windows? Think back to how we look at things. Dr. Manhattan was going to look at you and come out of that page. What's Rorschach do? He's jumping at you. Were you scared when you saw this? No, because you know it's just a picture in a comic book, right? It's there flat on the page. But the thing to notice is that he is trying to get out of that page. Right? Notice he's talking nonsense too. This is like Batman stuff. Like, rural? Why would you transcribe that? You could just put in parenthesis Rorschach grunts, or Rorschach yells, or something like that, but they've actually transcribed it and the rational is defied by Rorschach here. All those borders are disrupted. He's still contained by the gutters here, but he is bursting out of all of those frameworks and he's going to destroy it. In fact, then on the next page, we pull off his mask. What does he call his mask? Yeah, so that there's this sense in which Rorschach can't distinguish between the representation, right? The kind of globules that he's putting around on that mask and the embodied reality of who he is. So if you're thinking about this incommensurability between the represented, right, and the lived, or the embodied, here it is right on this page. It's juxtaposed in those two images of containment and, you know, asymmetrical destruction and nonsense bursting through sense violently. And it's also thematized by the pulling off of his mask. Because to unmask Rorschach, does that tell you anything about who he is? They even say it here. And we're going to spend a whole book, a whole issue with Rorschach in analysis in some kind of therapy. Do you ever know who he is? He gives you the story eventually of how he becomes Rorschach. Does it help? I don't think so. That poor psychologist who's killed in the explosion at the end of the book, who's been through with his briefcase, he can't figure it out. And in fact, of course, at the end of that section, so we start off, here's another figure of the reader, and notice how he's looking at us. So we're being analyzed as Rorschach's being analyzed, or Walter Kovacs is being analyzed. He's looking at us. This is just the next issue where it opens up after he's been captured. We start off with a Rorschach blot. How do you make Rorschach blots? Rorschach makes one out of ketchup, and you can see in a menu at one point. You have to fold a piece of paper, put some ink or something on one side, fold it over, and it creates symmetry. It creates symmetry out of the asymmetrical, too. There's no geometry to this half, but when you reproduce it, it becomes geometrically regular. Makes sense? We're going to end up here with this image of Rorschach blots that we are invited. He's named after this psychologist who invented this technique that gets practiced on him, and they're inviting us to see into our past. There are images that evoke deep-seated memories and things like that, supposedly. They kind of bring out a side of you. What does Rorschach say he sees? Does he go along with the therapy? Is he a good reader? Well, yeah, but he says pretty flowers. A butterfly. You know he doesn't see that, though. He sees the head of a dog he's ripped off, right, or his mother prostitute with a client, and so we have this kind of access to Rorschach's private world. That suggests we're going to understand him, perhaps. Notice how it's all kind of created in these balanced symmetrical shadow images. There's one other... I've got a few minutes here, so I'm going to try and wind things off for you, although, as I said, I'm not going to be able to. Where else are those images that you see here in this one, for instance, or of his mother with a client? Where else are those images? Where do they occur in the book? Do the not-tops do something? Yeah, it's a particular kind of graffiti. Do you know what it's called? In fact, in issue five here in chapter five, they do tell about it. They're called the Hiroshima lovers. Hiroshima... It was good. Hiroshima lovers. That's because... Do you know about what a Hiroshima shadow is? Don't even know what a Hiroshima shadow is? Because this is kind of what happened to Dr. Manhattan's body, in a way, and it's kind of what's left of Rorschach. When the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, people who were outdoors had their bodies basically incinerated, evaporated, destroyed by the blast. It's a horrific radioactive blast. But what happened was the shadow of their bodies is burned into various stone and concrete surfaces, brick surfaces that are behind them, and you can still see those outlines today. So the Hiroshima lovers is the painting of a shadow of these particular figures. And it occurs throughout the books, in the background, again, with who watches the watchman and so on. I want to conclude, so just one or two more minutes, but with one particular image here that is also connected to this Hiroshima shadow. And that is at the beginning of what's called Chapter 11 or Issue 11, this white page with a kind of a blot. Now, quite literally, that's a misuse of the word, but quite literally, what this is, is we're looking through the glass surface of the dome in Ozymandias' hideout, and he's got exotic plants, butterflies, and other things, flowers underneath that dome, and sort of a blot has appeared in the snow that covers the dome, and you can see through it. And it's about seeing, right? Notice we see from death and white into life. So we're looking at life, we're looking at something that's being made to survive. What's the shape of this blot of snow? It's that shape. So we're starting to echo things. Now, remember that at the beginning of each issue and at the end of each issue, we also get these kind of echoes. It's almost at the end of my talk here today, but if you flip to the end of that issue, wherever it is, there we are. And this is coming back to our reader. This is the Tachyon transportation turning into television light signal of the alien, and it rematerializes over New York right where that newsstand is, where Bernie and Bernard have been reading comic books and talking about seeing. Now, they're going to be killed. This is the last moments of their life. Notice the shape here. In terms of those Hiroshima shadows, that's sort of what you're getting here. They're turned into shadow. They're turned into shade. What shape does that shade have? It's that shape. It's both asymmetrical and symmetrical at the same time. Now, this is where I want to leave us. What does that shade stand for? If you think in terms of these bodies that won't conform to the grid, they won't be represented, they won't be controlled, and at the same time the absolute deadly power of that kind of, in this case, nuclear blast of light, the structuring power of scientific rationalism, it's going to annihilate their bodies. Although not quite, because they persist after, but in terms of this kind of wash of light, what are they doing? What happens? What's their instinct? Bernie and Bernard, who share a name. It's to embrace. Now, you see Lori and Dan have sex, and this image is reproduced there. Remember, their costumes, if you think of Rorschach's face, their costumes come off, and then their nude bodies come off and reveal their costumes. You can't be sure what's inside and out there, and it's a very intimate moment that's sort of symmetrically played out on the page in front of us. It's a kind of tawdryness, right?