Interview

 Stuart Moulthrop:

 The Professor is Still Watching The Detectives
by R.J. Carter
Published: January 1, 2002

"Professor Moulthrop has a PhD from Yale University and has been a professor at Yale, the University of Texas, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Victory Garden, a widely recognized work of hypertext fiction, and numerous essays, articles and reviews. He is Emeritus Editor of the on-line journal Postmodern Culture and was recently named Communication Studies International Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia."

That’s how it reads on the biography page for Stuart Moulthrop at his current home, the University of Baltimore. What it doesn’t state is that, for the last several years, Professor Moulthrop has been hosting a hypertext website dedicated to the deconstruction, excavation, interpretation and reinterpretation of the subtext and symbolism found in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. His site, Watching The Detectives (see inset, left), is rife with essays, reader contributions, and other notations linking common threads throughout the story, and with the popular culture of the real world.

No mere fan page, Moulthrop and crew--steeped in the methodologies of literary academia--delve into Watchmen with the purest of intellectual intentions and uncover marvelous insights. His essay, Lateral Thinking and the Structure of Watchmen, co-authored with Jessica Furé, contains enough astute observations just on its own to merit a trip to the site.

I was able to garner some of the professor’s valuable time through an email interview, just in time for the controversial 15th anniversary of this book that continues to attract new readers.


Were you always a reader of comic books? And if not, how were you introduced to Watchmen?

Comic books were and maybe still are my primary form of literacy, like a native language. They were much more important to me in early reading than works of mainstream literature. I grew up with the Jack Kirby Marvel stories of the mid-60s (Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange). Every now and then I picked up Charlton books, which were even more fascinating because I couldn't follow them regularly. These comics made a deeper impression than I sometimes want to admit, but that was partly because they were more or less forbidden. During the 70s I had comics stomped out of my head and prose dominance stomped in. This was both good and bad. I missed a lot of interesting stuff from Europe that began filtering in during the mid-70s, but was also spared spectacle of Marvel and DC turning into primetime TV.

The second chapter of the story begins in 1987, when a bunch of my more interesting students started talking to me about Watchmen. This was a time in my life when the drug of repression was generally starting to wear off, and I began avidly borrowing from my students' stash, reading Dark Knight, Elektra Assassin, Stray Toasters, and a whole bunch of other stuff. In the 90s I was in a department that included at least one other comics fanatic (Anne Balsamo, now at Xerox PARC) and by then there were some pretty good comics shops around. All of that peaked around '94, at which point the World Wide Web became a serious distraction.


Comics are often considered--and often justifiably so--as "low-brow" entertainment. What was it about Watchmen that prompted you to believe it worthy of academic scrutiny?

In the early 1990s I was trying to figure out what complex, multi-perspectival storytelling meant for narrative. Some of this interest came out of reading avant-garde novelists like Burroughs, Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. A lot came from my involvement with hypertext, working alongside folks like John McDaid and Michael Joyce. But Alan Moore was in it also, in a big way. Watchmen deserves a major place in our understanding of late-20th-century narrative art. It's rather a dumb observation to say that Watchmen is hypertextual (which is like saying that "Purple Haze" is kind of loud), but Moore has captured the chaotic over-structuredness of events better than almost anybody I know, and in a medium that provides some significant problems for highly complex work.


What has been the response of your students who have assisted you in these efforts, and what has been the reaction of your fellow faculty members toward the study of a comic book?

I thank a bunch of my former students on the "Detectives" site: Ron Hale-Evans, Tim Fong, and Gavin Edwards from Yale, and Jim Macek, Bin Chen, and Dave Clark from Georgia Tech. Here at Baltimore, Sean Cohen, Jessica Furé and Jon Sachsman have all helped keep the fires burning (Jessica especially). These folks have consistently pointed to literary possibilities outside the mainstream. Watchmen has been very important, in one way or another, to each.

What has been the reaction of your fellow faculty members toward the study of a comic book?

You know, at no point have any of my colleagues shown open hostility to comics. I've had some students complain because they thought they'd paid to read *real* books, but virtually all the rough treatment I've ever had has come down on electronic writing, not comics. I think Spiegelman's Pulitzer disarmed a lot of the more obvious criticism. I do think of Scott McCloud's story about his Ray Suarez interview (in Reinventing Comics) and realize that comics is still culturally vulnerable. Too much BLOOD! But then, Hollywood has the same problem this election year.

Where I am now, at the University of Baltimore, comics is highly valued and respected as a form of publication. That's partly because our program uniquely emphasizes the fusion of word and image, partly because we don't sniff at popular creativity, and partly because we're a non-traditional bunch.


Could Watchmen have had the impact it did, with all its symbolism and layering, in any other medium? Say, as a novel or motion picture?

Nope. Absolutely not. Comics is its own form and it's really important to recognize that it doesn't need to be either novel or film. I could draw up lists of novels and films that I think share some DNA with Watchmen (Gravity's Rainbow and Repo Man, for instance), but none of these works are interchangeable with Watchmen. There's something uniquely important about the medium.

Nonetheless, I hope From Hell makes it to the screen and doesn't suck.


It seemed with Watchmen (and simultaneously, Dark Knight, Maus, and several others) that comics had finally come into its own as a socially accepted form of literature (as opposed to the bastard child of text and art it had always been considered before). That was fifteen years ago. In your opinion, what happened? Has the medium of comics achieved a level of literary acceptance, or was Watchmen a cultural singularity?

Scott McCloud has the best answer to this question. In the late 80s, comics enjoyed a remarkable peak of sophistication and imaginative development. At least some of that flowering depended on the emergence of a new market for comics among adult readers and collectors. In the early 90s much of that market drifted away, and McCloud is very concerned about the fate of comics in the next decade. But if he's right about emerging trends in the business of publishing, good times could be coming back. There's certainly no lack of distinctive vision or underlying talent, and the technical side of comics storytelling continues to develop. I think there was a "singularity" in the late 80s, but it won't be absolutely singular.


You teach several classes in Hypermedia (as well as Writing and Design). Scott McCloud, in Reinventing Comics, makes several assertions about the inevitable marriage of comics and the Internet. What are your own thoughts on how comics and the Internet have come together or could come together? Would Watchmen have been improved or injured had it been presented as a Web comic rather than in its original medium?

This is a tough question. Comics, as we know it, doesn't fit very well into the context of the Internet, unless you think of the Net as a distribution medium for what is essentially a paper product--not a bad idea at all. I had a chance last summer to ask McCloud about the digital animations called "webshows" that are starting to come on very strong all across the Web; he thought they belonged more to the family of animated cartoons than to comics, and I'm inclined to agree. I think comics need to be paper-based because their placement in that medium disrupts the automatic, mechanical linearity of film, and by the same token it acts against the attention deficits of the Web. McCloud makes a very interesting case for reinventing comics using digital techniques (reconceiving the constraints of the page, for instance), but it may turn out that such work takes us out of comics and into a new artform. Metacomics!

Source: The Trades