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...I mean Parys. I can't find the thread where you asked about this (it might be because I haven't looked), but here it is: Quote:
So yes, there does come this point when characters start talking to you. They'll start telling you what
they want to do, you'll know what they would say and what they wouldn't say. I mean when I started writing Watchmen , I'd got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: “he's got a death wish”…he's so self-destructive, he's clearly…he wants out. There's no way that he's gonna live through this, he wouldn't be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he'll have to die. But it was the character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I'd got no idea when I started it.
More: http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/interviews/jan05/alanmoore.htm
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After inspecting my feces. I actully find it to be almost warm. And strangly arousing.
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Quote:
I'm Not Mister Mxypltk said:
...I mean Parys. I can't find the thread where you asked about this (it might be because I haven't looked), but here it is:
Quote:
So yes, there does come this point when characters start talking to you. They'll start telling you what
they want to do, you'll know what they would say and what they wouldn't say. I mean when I started writing Watchmen , I'd got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: “he's got a death wish”…he's so self-destructive, he's clearly…he wants out. There's no way that he's gonna live through this, he wouldn't be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he'll have to die. But it was the character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I'd got no idea when I started it.
More: http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/interviews/jan05/alanmoore.htm
Hurm......(pun intended)
Well, that definitely explains what I wanted to know.
I originally thought that he was trying to say that his death was justified cuz' principles don't mean shit. I mean, I thought Moore was saying that killing Rorsach was the right thing to do in the hypothetical situation.
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I've always thought he wanted Manhattan to kill him, but I never suspected Moore would have intended it that way. I guess the tears at the end were more of a way to beg Manhattan to kill him, to show that he really meant it when he said kill me.
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So he prolly knew that Manhattan would go after him.
But I think even if Manhattan didn't kill him that he would have told the world what happened.
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Yeah, as Moore said, he wasn't capable of any moral compromises.
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Interesting. I didn't expect him to be so verbose.
And he knows Watchmen was the pinnacle of his writing, too, which is curious, given its , what, 20 years old?
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who here wouldnt want a 20 year ol on their pennacle?
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Quote:
Pariah said:
But I think even if Manhattan didn't kill him that he would have told the world what happened.
We're led to believe that he might've succeeded in just that. The last panel leaves it completely up to the reader's perspective. Did Rorschach's journal get printed? Who knows?
All the same, I really like that Moore is that honest with his characters - or rather, allows his characters to be that honest with him. That, in my mind, is what makes him such a great writer.
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Quote:
Chewy Walrus said:
Quote:
Pariah said:
But I think even if Manhattan didn't kill him that he would have told the world what happened.
We're led to believe that he might've succeeded in just that. The last panel leaves it completely up to the reader's perspective. Did Rorschach's journal get printed? Who knows?
All the same, I really like that Moore is that honest with his characters - or rather, allows his characters to be that honest with him. That, in my mind, is what makes him such a great writer.
Yes, I alwayse saw the final panel as a victory for  . We would have known too if DC hadn't pissed Moore off and let him finish the sequel.
Putting the "fun" back in Fundamentalist Christian Dogma.
" I know God exists because WBAM told me so. " - theory9
JLA brand RACK points = 514k 
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What sequel? He's always said that going back to Watchmen would be, in his own words, "fucking boring". The project DC rejected was a crossover called Twilight of the Superheroes.
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Quote:
wannabuyamonkey said:
Quote:
Chewy Walrus said:
Quote:
Pariah said:
But I think even if Manhattan didn't kill him that he would have told the world what happened.
We're led to believe that he might've succeeded in just that. The last panel leaves it completely up to the reader's perspective. Did Rorschach's journal get printed? Who knows?
All the same, I really like that Moore is that honest with his characters - or rather, allows his characters to be that honest with him. That, in my mind, is what makes him such a great writer.
Yes, I alwayse saw the final panel as a victory for . We would have known too if DC hadn't pissed Moore off and let him finish the sequel.
That's a cool smiley (graemlin).
Let me do some testing:
:niteowl: :manhattan: :comedian: :thecomedian: :silkspectre: :ozymyndias:
Nah, didn't work. 
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!"
-Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah."
-Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents."
-Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise."
-Prometheus
Rack MisterJLA!
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Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
That's a cool smiley (graemlin).
Let me do some testing:
:niteowl: :manhattan: :comedian: :thecomedian: :silkspectre: :ozymyndias:
Nah, didn't work.
Click on the more graemlins button. Those are all the ones you use here. newbtard.
November 6th, 2012: Americas new Independence Day.
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We already are 15000+ posts
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you were new once too rex.....be nice.
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Are you turning into a liberal pussie on me?
November 6th, 2012: Americas new Independence Day.
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Quote:
rex said:
Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
That's a cool smiley (graemlin).
Let me do some testing:
:niteowl: :manhattan: :comedian: :thecomedian: :silkspectre: :ozymyndias:
Nah, didn't work.
Click on the more graemlins button. Those are all the ones you use here. newbtard.
Thanks! I love you too, you know that right? 
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!"
-Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah."
-Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents."
-Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise."
-Prometheus
Rack MisterJLA!
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Please say it's platonic...
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Me No Rikey Rob, he's a banana queer!
I shit on Hogan!
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Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
Quote:
rex said:
Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
That's a cool smiley (graemlin).
Let me do some testing:
:niteowl: :manhattan: :comedian: :thecomedian: :silkspectre: :ozymyndias:
Nah, didn't work.
Click on the more graemlins button. Those are all the ones you use here. newbtard.
Thanks! I love you too, you know that right?
November 6th, 2012: Americas new Independence Day.
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Quote:
britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
who here wouldnt want a 20 year ol on their pennacle?
Pete Townsend
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On Stan Lee's "writing": Quote:
Stan Lee comes up with an idea: “Right, next issue of The Fantastic Four , like, what if there's some really big powerful threat from space, sort of – or according to some people, what if in the next issue, the FF – the Fantastic Four – fight God”. And Jack Kirby goes away, and he thinks: “Galactus…Galactus eats planets…and he's got this herald…and it's this silver guy on a surfboard and he goes before him…and this guy's so frightening that solar systems will switch off their suns so that he doesn't notice them, they'll black out their entire galaxies so that he'll pass them by, and yeah, The Watcher, he intervenes and fills the Earth's sky with illusions to keep this creature away, but it doesn't work…”. And you've got Kirby, he'd pencil five pages a day…he just wasn't human. He'd just sit there pencilling five pages a day, six pages a day, nine pages a day, and in every panel – so he'd be breaking it down into stories, he'd be breaking it down into a continuity of images, he'd be inventing the characters, he'd be writing the dialogue suggestions – very crude, very quick, but sometimes quite detailed. Then this would go to Stan Lee, who would look at the story that Jack Kirby had written , would dialogue it in his own unique way – he would put in a lot of ‘thees', ‘thous', ‘face front true believers', footnotes, and then it would go out as ‘ Fantastic Four created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby', but it was only one of them who had a share of the action on the characters, and that was…the smiling one. And that's probably why he was smiling, come to think about it.
And the Marvel method – I've heard people – Archie Goodwin, who was a lovely man, a great comic writer and somebody I respected a great deal – I once said to him: “I can't see any advantage in the Marvel method”. And he said: “Well, sometimes it allows for serendipity”. That may be true. But I would say that it would be so infrequent – and I mean looking at the vast output of Marvel comics during the last thirty years of the twentieth century – those moments of serendipity were pretty few and far between. I'd say that the disadvantages of the method outweigh whatever slender advantages there might be. It's lazy. I've gotta say, it's lazy. And it leads to homogenous product because think about it - I mean, if the artist has no real idea what anyone's gonna be saying in a particular panel, then how can he put a particular emotion on their faces while they're saying it? So you have to go for this kind of – the emotional range of Marvel characters is generally ‘mouth open – mouth closed'.
On Morrie's Arkham Asylum:
Quote:
And so I had to sit down and think: “Why? Why does this book not satisfy me?” Brian's art's lovely, you know it's better than most of the post-modern Batman books…”
DW: Arkham Asylum…
AM: Well I wasn't gonna mention any names…but yeah, I didn't really like Arkham Asylum .
DW: That's interesting, because that didn't seem to work as much as anything I've read…and I'm not sure why.
AM: Not to slag anyone off, but at the time, I met Dave McKean after Arkham Asylum came out, always a difficult time, the book's come out, by someone you know and get on with, and you don't happen to like it, then, you have to choose between honesty and diplomacy, and I remember saying to Dave McKean that I hadn't liked Arkham Asylum , I thought his art had been beautiful, lovely, but it was the story that the art was in service to…
DW: Perhaps it wasn't really a story…
AM: Well it wasn't much of a story, the story didn't really resonate for me on any level, and the fact that it had got Dave's beautiful sumptuous artwork appended to it, I said to Dave that it was like putting an exquisite golden frame – and I said your art is an exquisite golden frame, it is, it's exquisite – it's like putting that exquisite golden frame around a dog turd. I said it's not gonna make the dog turd look any better. In fact the dog turd can make the exquisite golden frame look a bit – an attempt to polish a turd. It's like, the artwork, if it's not in service to something which has depth, it can be the most gorgeous stuff in the world, and the more gorgeous it is, the sillier it will look. Because you'll be thinking: “Someone expended all this effort and created all this beauty on this story”. It's like the gap between the story and the art is vast.
On The Big Lebowski:
Quote:
AM: Yeah, I don't like voiceovers in films anyway. Much as I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers, the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski was to my mind one of the major flaws of the film – it was a distancing device. Devices like that make it much more obvious to the reader that they are reading a story.
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on the rkmbs: Quote:
Gay. By gay I mean flaming gay.
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Quote:
Poverty Lad said:
Please say it's platonic...
Nothing scares a straight guy so much than the idea of having man-love with another dude...  
I'm one of those straight guys, BTW. 
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!"
-Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah."
-Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents."
-Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise."
-Prometheus
Rack MisterJLA!
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Quote:
rex said:
Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
Quote:
rex said:
Quote:
Captain Sweden said:
That's a cool smiley (graemlin).
Let me do some testing:
:niteowl: :manhattan: :comedian: :thecomedian: :silkspectre: :ozymyndias:
Nah, didn't work.
Click on the more graemlins button. Those are all the ones you use here. newbtard.
Thanks! I love you too, you know that right?
Sapiens. Homo Sapiens. You know, like human.
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!"
-Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah."
-Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents."
-Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise."
-Prometheus
Rack MisterJLA!
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Quote:
PJP said:
you were new once too rex.....be nice.
Thanks PJP. It was late and I had a "brainfart" or whatever it's called. Whould've thought about checking the other smilies first otherwise. 
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!"
-Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah."
-Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents."
-Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise."
-Prometheus
Rack MisterJLA!
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I'm Not Mister Mxypltk said:...I mean Parys. I can't find the thread where you asked about this (it might be because I haven't looked), but here it is: So yes, there does come this point when characters start talking to you. They'll start telling you what
they want to do, you'll know what they would say and what they wouldn't say. I mean when I started writing Watchmen , I'd got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: “he's got a death wish”…he's so self-destructive, he's clearly…he wants out. There's no way that he's gonna live through this, he wouldn't be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he'll have to die. But it was the character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I'd got no idea when I started it. More: http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/interviews/jan05/alanmoore.htm Hurm......(pun intended) Well, that definitely explains what I wanted to know. I originally thought that he was trying to say that his death was justified cuz' principles don't mean shit. I mean, I thought Moore was saying that killing Rorsach was the right thing to do in the hypothetical situation. You know what...I take back my capitulation of how Moore interpreted Rorschach's (alleged) death wish. It sounds more like he just couldn't process the idea that anyone could live the way Rorschach does--choosing suffrage over compromise--without being considered insane, and therefore used an inappropriately Moorian approach to make (what was supposed to be) a Rorschachian decision. I recall he did an interview in which he explained that he was totally befuddled by Rorschach's popularity. He was not expecting such a warm reception to a character concept the attraction of whom is his integrity and obsessiveness in pursuing his goals as a matter of an inherent moral drive rather than a greater good. He designed him to be a parody of Ditko's The Question and Mr. A, and so he treated him...like a parody. To his surprise, the sheer honesty of his portrayal resonated. That being said, Moore hit all the right notes with Rorschach throughout Watchmen, creating a self-styled hero worthy of the pride of hardcore conservatives: a person driven by an inflexible set of principles and, in Moore's own words, absolute "integrity". And there in lies the issue: Moore's inability, as an anarchist-cum-moral relativist, to understand integrity as an ethical bedrock for maintaining oneself--rather than a symptom of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder--caused him to lose touch with the character entirely. He played this Objectivist character's tune so well that his radically subjectivist mind couldn't comprehend Rorschach's behavior. And so he phoned in his last couple of lines and dubbed him suicidal.
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Surely one of the things which is so likeable about Rorschach is his inability to compromise. There is some deep Artic diamond hard integrity which you admire on one level.
But no doubt he had a death wish. He is self-destructive - you see it in how he eats and dresses. No hygiene, no sense of wanting to thrive. He paces the streets in the day telling everyone that death is coming. He just hopes under that Judgment Day sign that you'll also be part of it.
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Rorschach had a line in the book that summed up both him and every other anti-hero in existence. Incidentally (or not), it summed up the same point that was the driving force behind Dark Knight Returns (which is, essentially, Frank Miller's version of Watchmen anyway).
"Understood man's capacity for horrors and never quit. Saw the world's black underbelly and never surrendered. Once a man has seen, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend it doesn't exist. No matter who orders him to look the other way. We do not do this thing because it is permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we are compelled."
Compulsion to put yourself in the midst of danger isn't necessarily conducive to seeking out your own death. It just means your drawn to a hazardous line of work. Admittedly, Rorschach left little room for self-maintenance, but that probably had more to do with his crime-fighting objectives than it did with assuring his own eventual demise.
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And I just realized this is really close to this thread's ten year anniversary.
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We're about to reprint it to keep the rights from reverting back to you.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet." Our Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man said: "no, the doctor's right. besides, he has seniority."
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Officially "too old for this shit" 15000+ posts
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Rorschach had a line in the book that summed up both him and every other anti-hero in existence. Incidentally (or not), it summed up the same point that was the driving force behind Dark Knight Returns (which is, essentially, Frank Miller's version of Watchmen anyway).
I could be wrong, but didn't DKR come out first?
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yeah. TDKR was released in February 1986, Watchmen was in September. But Alan Moore started writing Watchmen earlier, and Pariah read the script.
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Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 30,833 Likes: 7 |
Whatever. Either way, they were largely the same book but with different resolutions. We're about to reprint it to keep the rights from reverting back to you. I'll never write for you again you bastards!
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 15,230 Likes: 1
Banned from the DCMBs since 2002. 15000+ posts
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Banned from the DCMBs since 2002. 15000+ posts
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 15,230 Likes: 1 |
Rorschach had a line in the book that summed up both him and every other anti-hero in existence. Incidentally (or not), it summed up the same point that was the driving force behind Dark Knight Returns (which is, essentially, Frank Miller's version of Watchmen anyway).
"Understood man's capacity for horrors and never quit. Saw the world's black underbelly and never surrendered. Once a man has seen, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend it doesn't exist. No matter who orders him to look the other way. We do not do this thing because it is permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we are compelled."
Compulsion to put yourself in the midst of danger isn't necessarily conducive to seeking out your own death. It just means your drawn to a hazardous line of work. Admittedly, Rorschach left little room for self-maintenance, but that probably had more to do with his crime-fighting objectives than it did with assuring his own eventual death.
But there is a big difference in mental health between Batman and Rorschach, probably best underscored by Miller's re-writing of Batman in All-Star Batman and Robin. Regular Batman is borderline depressed, but thrives. He works on his fitness and health. He lets the machine of his parent's wealth go ticking along. He has something of a life outside of avenging his parents, albeit one which at times is portrayed as a persona to cover the traumatised real personality. He has good friends and the occasional romance. In Grant Morrison's Batman and Son tpb, Bruce Wayne talks to a romantic interest about his parents' death, and says, "I got over it". But the artist (Andy Kubert) has drawn him with haunted, shadowed eyes. He clearly has not go over it, is traumatised and obsessed, but he is clearly functional. (I sometimes think that the character should marry and have his pregnant wife shot dead, so as to provide a new and fresh cassus belli, but that is another discussion.) All-Star Batman is on the other hand psychotic. He lurches between aggression and despair. His voice sounds menacing one minute, on the verge of tears the next. He does not indulge in hygiene. He put himself in a cave as a teen and ate bats as a form of mental flagellation. In order to teach Dick Grayson about pain and loss, he tries to do the same thing to Grayson (but he is rescued from this torturous imprisonment by a very troubled Alfred, who serves as Bruce Wayne's conscience more than anything else). Rorschach is more down this end of the psychological spectrum. He lives in a rundown apartment in a bad part of town. He doesn't seem to work much. He rarely eats, and is happy to indulge on the contents of Nite-Owl's fridge - raw eggs, cold beans from a can. He smells and Nite-Owl can barely shake his hand because his gloves are so manky - no hygiene at all. He regards his mask as his face and screams when his face is taken by the police. He can barely recognise Nite-Owl as a friend - his personality makes it very hard to recognise what a friend is. Rorschach is a piece of wire twisted too many ways, by his awful childhood, by being confronted by the horror of the murder-kidnapping of the small girl. Rorschach is a compelling character because of his Nietzchean will to power (Moore alludes to this with the reference to Nietzsche's famous abyss quotation). Rorschach is single-mindedly determined and intelligent (he can break into a heavily guarded base to talk to Dr Manhattan), and through hard detective work discovers the identity of the murderer of the Comedian - the smartest man in the world dabbling in some indulgent payback. Most importantly, he doesn't back down on anything: while his peers compromise, he simply cannot. He would rather die than compromise. Manhattan killed Rorschach because there was a fair chance he (the most resourceful of all the characters) would make it home and tell everyone what happened. Did Rorschach put himself in the position of being killed? Almost certainly, knowing who he was up against. Did he have a choice in that? Absolutely not. Ducking the confrontation would not have been in character. As Ahab said in Moby Dick, "I'd strike the sun if it offended me." As Ahab fears and compromises on nothing, so too does Rorschach. And if he sheds tears as he is disintegrated, it is only through frustration at knowing he has reached the endgame and has no options left. Rorschach is one of the best characters in comic books because he is brilliantly painted as a quite horrible, brutal, vengeful person who the reader is compelled to admire for his titanium principles. But lets not idealise him as some sort of survivalist icon, or think he should have had some other destiny in the plot.
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 33,919
devil-lovin' Bat-Man 15000+ posts
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OP
devil-lovin' Bat-Man 15000+ posts
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 33,919 |
Dang, I missed our anniversary. Sorry!
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 15,230 Likes: 1
Banned from the DCMBs since 2002. 15000+ posts
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Banned from the DCMBs since 2002. 15000+ posts
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 15,230 Likes: 1 |
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Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 30,833 Likes: 7
The conscience of the rkmbs! 15000+ posts
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The conscience of the rkmbs! 15000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 30,833 Likes: 7 |
I actually wrote out a long response to you like a week ago Dave. But I clicked someplace I shouldn't have and it disappeared, and I nearly destroyed my brand new machine in a fit of rage.
Soo.....Yeah, maybe I'll try again later when I have the energy.
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Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 30,833 Likes: 7
The conscience of the rkmbs! 15000+ posts
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The conscience of the rkmbs! 15000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 30,833 Likes: 7 |
Dang, I missed our anniversary. Sorry! Yeah, I was wondering about that.
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