Watchmen is a world that has had superheroes for decades. The story of the local comic superheroes is so different. But this week’s episode of HBO’s Peteypedia, HBO’s in-world info dump, has at least one way to match the Watchmen superhero movie experience: Batman still has a movie.
We already knew that superhero comics were created in Watchmen – Action Comics # 1 inspired costumed guards in both the comic and the show – but in the comics world, the characters never really took off. People were more interested in reading about costumed rather than fictive vigilantes, and superhero comics were especially stingy when real costumed civilians fell out of favor with the public.
Instead, other genres of history flourished in the American comic industry, especially – wait – pirate stories. Such a pirate story with a decided horror sound can be found throughout the Watchmen graphic novel, similar to the fictitious American Hero story in HBO’s entire Watchmen series.
Another way in which the watchmen of HBO continue the comics’ staging is to exhibit in in-world documents. In the comic, they were added at the end of each issue, and the show collects all these papers on Peteypedia, which is like Wikipedia, but even more cumbersome.
This week, while talking about the origins of Sister Night, the fictional Blacksploitation Vigilante movie that inspired Angela Abar’s costumed personality, Peteypedia provided a tiny window into the superhero cinema in Watchmen’s World. As with superhero comics, Watchmen also has superhero movies – but they are very different.
“Sister Night belonged to a subgenre called” Black Mask “movies,” writes Agent Dale Petey, “Responses or parodies of masked guards, some were very specific, the Black Superman, for example, was a parody of Dr. Manhattan. such as Sister Night, Tarantula, and Batman, were expressions of archetypes like Silhouette, Mothman, or Nite Owl, all of which provided fantasies to fulfill desires that also served as social commentary, and their implicit criticism was that masked vigilance was largely a white phenomenon were, and that was problematic. ”
At least Batman still seemed memorable enough to make his own movie sometime in the 1970s or 1980s – but it was probably not the up and coming hero story we were used to. When Polygon spoke to Cordon Jefferson, author of one of the most revealing episodes of the Watchmen series, he described Batman’s core concept as ridiculous.
“The notion that a heterosexual white billionaire can not live up to his standards and put on a costume is absurd, because rich, straight-laced white men live up to what they want. They can buy dishes, they can buy police forces, they can buy presidencies. The idea that a billionaire, a white man, is stuck in the street in search of justice because he can not get it elsewhere is absurd. ”
Sure, it is absurd in the more realistic world of the Guardians, and it would have been absurd for the audience of “Black Mask” films that Petey described as African-Americans who emigrated to Vietnam to escape the institutional racism of the Nixon era looking for new opportunities at the new border. ”
But imagine this mysterious Batman movie: Criticizing Bruce Wayne’s white status, with the tight budget of the Batman television series of 1966, but the stark and operational flair of the exploitation film. I would see it!
