Despite my love of female super heroes, the main super heroine character of Alan Moore’s classic Watchmen, the Silk Spectre, was always the least interesting character to me in that whole series. She is mostly defined by her relationships to lead male characters Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl, as well as to her own mother, the original Silk Spectre. Aside from how she views herself in relation to these other people, we don’t know much more about Laurie Jupiter other than that in the context of the original story. Sadly, she also often comes across as a bit of a whiney harpy at times, and although she was realistic, she wasn’t usually endearing. So I will say this for Darwyn Cooke’s first issue of Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre; he actually made me actually like Laurie Jupiter for the first time, and he and artist Amanda Conner gave us an overall fun and breezy first issue.
But there also lies the problem with this comic so far; this is part of Watchmen…should it even be breezy and light and fun? More or less enjoyable as it was, Silk Spectre took me all of maybe six minutes to read. With Watchmen, it took six minutes just to digest just a few pages.
The story here is set in 1966, and teenage Laurie Jupiter is being trained by her mother, the original heroine called the Silk Spectre from the forties, to take her place as her successor. While this is something of a classic comic book trope (and highly reminiscent of Black Canary from the actual DC Universe, on whom Silk Spectre was more or less based on) it never really made sense in the word of Watchmen. To me, the central conceit of Watchmen was always “what if super heroes existed in the real world?” In the real world, people putting on costumes and fighting hoodlums in the streets would either be insane (Rorschach) total sociopaths (the Comedian, and I guess Ozymandias) or be struggling with some serious sexual issues (Nite Owl) Of all these various costumed vigilantes in the original story, the original Silk Spectre seemed among the most sane, more or less, although an attention seeker of the highest order.
So the idea that any sane mother would dress her non super powered teenage daughter up in fishnets and heels, then send her out in the streets to fight crime and probably get killed brutally was maybe the most “comic booky” and unbelievable thing in the original story. In the more whimsical worlds of Marvel and DC you give things like this a pass, but Watchmen was meant to reflect our brutal ugly world, one wear a pair of glasses could never hide anyone’s secret identity. But the whole concept of the mother making her daughter follow in her footsteps was so tangential to the main story of the original series, you just didn’t notice it or give it much thought at how crazy it was. But the first issue of Silk Spectre is ALL about this notion, so it ends up feeling more like a traditional super hero story found in any comic, and not one set in the grittier more realistic world of Watchmen.
In this first issue, Laurie spends her days and nights busting her ass to be a teenage hero and please her mother, to the point where she has no life of her own to speak of. While training one day after school, she meets a handsome, popular boy named Greg, who isn’t threatened by Laurie’s kick ass-ness at all, and in fact seems to be kinda turned on by it. This pisses off the local “Mean Girl” at school, a snotty, prissy bitch named Betty Kensington, who looks like Betty Draper from Mad Men and acts just like Cordelia Chase from Buffy. This new boy also annoys Laurie’s mom, who doesn’t want her daughter distracted by boys, and just wants her to train to be a super hero. And I guess this is my biggest problem with this story…we don’t really know why Sally Jupiter wants her daughter to be crime fighter so badly, as she retired from the costumed hero life early and saw it as a stepping stone to greater fame as an “actress/model.” The motivations for putting her daughter’s life at risk are never really explored. All we get out of her is that the she says the world is filled with killers and rapists, a rather clumsy way of referencing Sally Jupiter’s brutal rape attempt in the original Watchmen book.
After throwing a teenage “I don’t want your life!” tantrum, Laurie runs away from home with her new guy who professes his love for her. He’s dodging the draft (remember, this is the Vietnam era) and Laurie is looking to piss off her mom. So as the issue ends, they are off to San Francisco, in a hippy bus of all things. Of course, readers of the original series know that by at least the end of the sixties, Laurie is committed to the Silk Spectre persona and hooking up with Dr.Manhattan, so I guess the point of this series is just what happens between her and new boyfriend Greg in San Francisco that leads to Laurie making such a huge about face on living the costumed hero life. And while this first issue was by no means bad, I still don’t know if this is a story that was begging to be told.
I will say that the art by Amanda Conner is top notch here, but her overly bubbly and cartoony style feels out of place in the Watchmen universe. There are several cut aways to goofy, cutesy thought bubbles that Laurie has at various stages to describe her feelings, and the whole thing feels kind of off in the greater context of Watchmen. (although some are very funny) Also, the story is very PG-13 rated so far….heck, maybe just PG rated even. Aside from one lewd gesture made by Mean Girl Betty in one panel, this could be any DCU book about the exploits of a teen super hero and her overbearing mom. Hell, it could almost be a super hero book set in the Archie universe. Again, that doesn’t make it a bad comic, it just makes it feel like not a part of Watchmen. And while one might say this book shouldn’t be just like Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ original classic, it has to still feel like it is a part of that world….and so far, this doesn’t.
This whole Before Watchmen business is giving me bad memories of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. By the time Lucas and Spielberg got around to making the fourth Indy movie, twenty years had passed since The Last Crusade, and whole Indiana Jones trilogy had become this revered part of American cinema. Unless they had a really, really good to reason to go back to the well, they should have left well enough alone. Crystal Skull turned out to not be a good enough reason to taint our memories of Indy, and so far it turns out that Before Watchmen isn’t much different. (and even then you could argue it was the original creators who chose to return to their creation in Indy’s case, not an argument one can make about Before Watchmen) The original Watchmen has become THE seminal work of comic book super hero fiction. Any follow up with Watchmen in the title needed to be great, not just “good enough”, and so far Silk Spectre just seems good enough.
