this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
1236 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
6670 readers
2688 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Reminds me of this character in Watchmen. Calls himself the Comedian, but never makes "jokes" in a classical sense. He is cruel, overly patriotic, violent against protesters, seems to enjoy massacres in Vietnam. Only one other person understands that he is actually against these things and tries to show them this hyperbolic mirror of their own totalitarian views. But everybody else doesn't understand it, they take it face value and admire his "patriotism". He never breaks role until the last moment (or even then just in the movie?).
"But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream?"
"It came true. You're lookin' at it.”
as i recall the characters who get "the joke" are the comedian, rorschach, ozymandias, and dr manhatten, each of whom respond to the trauma of getting the joke entirely differently. the comedian embraces it, laughs at it, lets it consume him. basically decides "the world is fucked up, i might as well personally have fun." i don't recall him ever showing any sympathy towards the world. his terrible actions are ultimately justified by that he is the stand-in for captain america: his violence is government backed. the crucial difference between captain america and the comedian is that captain america represents what america could and should be, a future for us to work towards, whereas the comedian represents what america is, a present for us to move away from. i think that aspect is a very clever piece of writing by alan moore as the time when he was creating the watchmen was very politically different from when jack kirby was creating captain america. i've been thinking a lot lately about how incredible jack kirby's explorations of fascism, militarism, and jewish identity are all through his career. i think alan moore did jack kirby justice in taking a lot of captain america's tropes and superimposing them onto a fascist. i think jack kirby did an incredible job of showing us the lunacy of nazis in his super villains (something i didn't give him enough credit for until this year when i saw how these freaks operate when the mask of respectability is removed), but by alan moore's time, the value of an aspirational symbol for what america could be was diminished as america turned more and more fascist, making super imposing captain america's tropes onto a fascist felt uncomfortable and upsetting. but also, having now seen trump voters up close and personal, it's incredibly accurate to the mindset. both jack kirdy and alan moore did an incredible job depicting fascism in the hopes we the people would see their work and grow and change.
unfortunately not enough of us did
Holy shit. I'm wasting my time on YouTubers' analyses of media.. and apparently also on reading Watchmen 3x and watching every film and show and trying to understand it. You're brilliant.
i have the advantage over a lot of these media analysts that: i'm old. i was there for the comics industry bubble. i was there before comic book movies were respected. i was there before we got tired of every movie and tv show being part of the mcu.
i'm also a gigantic nerd. i've been posting online since the 90s. i joined twitter when it was an experiment to see what would happen if people could post to the internet without an internet connected device. i was using linux in 2002.
as such, a deep dive into these comic book artists, what they thought, and what their backgrounds were has given me some insights about how the development of comic books as an artistic medium has a lot of parallels to other countercultural movements, like hip hop. comic books are a community. the artists who make them are all in a conversation with eachother about what right and wrong is as they try to influence us, the readers. it's no coincidence that the origins of both DC and Marvel are deeply rooted in the production of military propaganda. these were all people who knew about propaganda, media, and message dissemination who wanted to use those skills to influence the public.