Plastered all over the advertisements for the new Watchmen movie is what looks like a bloody Wal-mart logo. While that’s not too far off in spirit from the character that the symbol represents, it isn’t entirely accurate. The smiley face was the symbol of The Comedian, who is one of the most despicable characters to ever be referred to in comics as a hero.
The Comedian starts off the action of the Watchmen movie by getting murdered. It’s the investigation into his death that leads Rorschach on the trail of a monumental conspiracy. But who was the Comedian, and why was his death so significant?
Alan Moore's Comedian: Murder, Rape, and Viet Nam
The Comedian was one of the original group of New York superheroes known as The Minutemen. Only sixteen when that organization formed, he is the only one of that group to continue fighting crime into the decade in which the story takes place. One of the contributing factors of the disbanding of the Minutemen was The Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre I.
He was present at Captain Metropolis’ attempt to unite the second generation of masked vigilantes as “The Crimebusters,” and it was largely his cruel dressing-down of the aging Captain Metropolis which stopped the group from Coalescing. After the Crime Busters fell apart and vigilante-ism was outlawed, Eddie Blake began working for the government. He went to Viet Nam and fought there, largely because it gave him a governmentally sanctioned way to act without consequence.
The Comedian’s Joke
The attitude that the Comedian has towards the public is similar to that of the Joker in The Dark Knight. He claims to be teaching the public a lesson about the cruelty and randomness of the world by embodying it.
Eddie Blake’s joke is the irony that the people to whom he is cruel are the ones from whom he derives his license for cruelty. Despite fighting crime, he thrives on Chaos and destruction. He ignores all social conventions in an all-encompassing expression of total philosophical nihilism.
Complications: Fear of Apocalypse
One element which complicates The Comedian significantly is a story about him which is recounted several times in the comic. A couple weeks before his death, Eddie Blake approaches an old villain who he fought in the fifties. Once there, he gets drunk and rambles about an island, and an ultimate evil on it that will destroy the world.
Later in the comic you realize that he really did see an island which was populated with people that had a very convincing plan to destroy the world. The strange thing about the encounter isn’t necessarily that Blake learned about the island, but that his reaction to it was so emotional. Every other time we see the Comedian he seems totally secure with the worst atrocities.
What this reveals about his character is significant and to some extent redeeming. Eddie Blake went through years of interacting with the worst of humanity. The best he could do to deal with that was to enact it. In order to fight the monster, he internalized it.
Consequently, after several years he was completely hardened against anything he saw. He had not only seen the worst of things, he had done the worst of things. On the island, however, he saw something far worse than he had ever seen or done. The revelation shook the shell he had been constructing for himself for the last fifty years, and he finally broke down.
Eddie Blake is Human After All
Without the breakdown The Comedian would have been a force of nature. He would have been what he imagined himself to be: a vision of the irrepressible triumph of evil human nature. However, with his breakdown and rambling to Moloch, Eddie Blake became again human. He reverted to the real, sensible person he must have been before his years and years of exposure to the worst in humanity.
Nicholas Michael Grant - Nick Grant www.rookproductions.net
