Laughable: The Comedian #1 Review
What I am about to write is not going to be objective, because The Comedian from Watchmen is just about my favorite comic character.
How much my favorite? Well, I not only have the movie action figure, but I also have the Comedian badge pin – you know, one of the ones that DC sold for a buck a whack in 1987 or so and which made Alan Moore lose his shit and then tell then-publisher Jeanette Kahn that he thought “DC” stood for “dook corporation.”
But that’s not all…
…I also rock the man’s badge on the front bumper of my car. And I can already hear you: “But Rob,” you’re saying, “The bloodstain is on the wrong side!” To which I can only say: not if you see me in your rearview mirror when I’m rumbling up behind you, motherfucker.
My point is that The Comedian and me? We’re close. We’ve been close since I was sixteen years old. I know The Comedian, Mr. Azzarello. And this?
This is not The Comedian.
Brian Azzarello’s take on The Comedian is the first utterly wrongheaded depiction of any of the original Watchmen characters so far in Before Watchmen. It not only doesn’t jibe with the character’s portrayal in Watchmen, it doesn’t even work with The Comedian’s portrayal in Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen, which was already coasting past Moore’s depiction of Blake’s moral ambiguity into the area of pure psychopathy. And I could handle Cooke’s nutjob in a boiler suit depiction, because it at least seemed like a logical, if previously-unseen, point on a throughline that included the attempted rape of Silk Spectre, the cold-blooded murder of a Vietnamese prostitute, and the riot gas assault of frightened protesters.
Azzarello’s take on Edward Blake doesn’t fit on that throughline. It doesn’t fit anywhere in any depiction of the character, ever.
Specifically, I no more believe that The Comedian would personally love and revere Jack and Bobby Kennedy than I believe he would drink cosmopolitans and wear Jimmy Choo pumps, or that gimp mask he’s rocking on the book’s cover, for that fucking matter.
This entire issue is devoted to demonstrating Blake’s love for the Kennedys, and the point is crudely hammered home in a discussion between Blake and Jackie Kennedy where she insists, on our behalf, that it’s love. Azzarello has The Comedian playing touch football with the Kennedys at Hyannisport, doing the Kennedys’ dirty work (and Jesus Christ, is there a famous person with a questionable cause of death who The Comedian hasn’t killed in the newly-expanded Watchmen universe?), and going almost to pieces when he learns that Kennedy was assassinated.
Now, let’s ignore the first and most obvious problem with this depiction, which is that it is strongly implied in Watchmen that The Comedian was in Dallas at the time of the assassination, bodyguarding Nixon at best and shooting from the grassy knoll at worst, and not frittering away his time chasing Moloch in Cleveland or some other non-landlocked place with a waterfront for Moloch to hole up in. Yes, let’s ignore the blowing of that characterization and story point from the arguably greatest comic story of all time out of the water and focus on what matters, which is that The Comedian from Watchmen would never feel the way he is shown by Azzarello to feel about the Kennedys, or, in fact, about any politician.
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