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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

The Watchmen is not a critique of golden era superheros. Everyone gets this wrong. It is a crititique of the comic book companies themselves and how they portray these "heroes." And it rules all.

i didn't know this, but from a third world perspective superheroes were always just a cultural arm of the american empire, and widely mocked for it, especially by the left. so the specifics below that level of ideological clash are pretty minor.

the companies portraying the heroes... reminds me of when bugs bunny fights the animator... i used to love that one.

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

and Borges would have liked it. Borges was blind though, so he would have missed like 75% of the story as it is told visually.

hahahahha! yeah, no pictures..

and yeah, borges liked imaginary worlds and mythologies and thought experiments and so forth. but i'm not sure this would have been his bag. i'll have to ask him when i see him in hell... pretty sure he's there lol.

clearly watchmen was a bit of an homage to him. but the subject matter doesn't cut it for me.

for an admirer of borges who i think surpassed him, check out roberto bolaño's "la literatura nazi en américa." holy fuck, what a book.

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

If you had read Watchmen when it came out, as I did, it would have blown your mind away.

but i would have had to care about superheroes in the first place and i didn't. i would have had to grow up under different circumstances altogether.

my eye openers happened elsewhere... like the time when i was 11 or 12 and a cop hit me with his nightstick when i told him about some petty crime in progress. pain aside, it became suddenly obvious that he was in on it haaahaaahaaa. that's all the experience i needed to unlock a large number of life's puzzles. although i had stopped believing in the jesus that same year too, or maybe the previous one, so i was on a roll becoming disillusioned with moral authority i guess lol.

for many years i resented that dirty cop but in retrospect i'd like to thank him for the lesson. almost zen.

but if i had grown up liking superheroes... yeah im sure i would have enjoyed the teardown of the mythology and the dissection of its ideological underpinnings.

i mean it's a good effort in that particular cultural context, and a ballsy move to slap the expectant audience with such formal experimentation, but the subject matter unfortunately just leaves me cold. at that time... i was more interested in cortázar, who fucked with the page more than anyone i had seen up to that point. those days i also was obsessed with herman hesse lol.