Who Watches the Squadron Supreme?

This article first appeared in Journey Planet #77, December 2023.

Squadron Supreme was a 12-issue Marvel limited series that came out in 1985-1986, predating Watchmen by about a year. Written by Mark Gruenwald and (toward the end of its run) drawn by Paul Ryan, it had none of Alan Moore's multi-layered storytelling nor Dave Gibbons' beautifully clean draughtsmanship. But coincidentally, it did ask a few of the same questions, like: Is it safe to hang around superhumans who are in effect walking nuclear reactors? When superhumans fight in most comics, how come nobody gets seriously injured or even dies? What if superheroes really affected the world and how society works? And what if some of them decided that leaving ordinary human governments to run the planet just wasn't working out?

The Squadron's origins begin back in Avengers #85 in 1971, as both an alternate-Earth version of the villainous Squadron Sinister and as a pastiche of DC's flagship Justice League of America, with alien powerhouse Hyperion modelled on Superman, caped crimefighter Nighthawk on Batman, Doctor Spectrum on Green Lantern and so on. As they sporadically guested in various Marvel titles, more Squadron members would be added to parallel the JLA's evolving line-up. Thus we had Arcanna for Zatanna, Nuke for Firestorm and so forth. Prior to the limited series, the Squadron's Earth (or at least the USA: like many American comics at the time they rarely made a distinction) had been devastated by an alien super-intelligence (Defenders #112-114), leaving society in a very sorry state.

In an ongoing 'Marvel Earth' comic (stories set on the world shared by Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men etc), that sort of devastation would have been handwaved by the start of the next storyline; perhaps an opening page or two showing the heroes clearing up rubble and reporting that the President is back in charge, and then onto the next plot. But given that Squadron Supreme is set on an alternate Earth, writer Gruenwald had the opportunity to pretty much do what he wanted with the planet and its greatest heroes over the next twelve issues. And that's just what he does, examining the questions I posed earlier as the Squadron looks at the world with its war, crime, disease and death, and decides to use their great powers and resources to make actual, world-changing differences by instituting their so-called 'Utopia Program'.

Assuming control of the United States, they outlaw guns, get to work on a cure for cancer, establish behavioural modification on criminals and introduce cryogenic 'hibernaculum' chambers for people with incurable conditions. At first, the Utopia Program is a success, even if some of the Squadron's members don’t seem to be fully on board with the 'benevolent dictatorship' approach that they have imposed on society. Things go bad when one of the team uses the behaviour modification device to 'fix' the attitude of his romantic partner after a disagreement, turning her into a clingy, lovelorn puppy. Another discovers that his nuclear powers have had life-changing effects on his close family (mirroring the later Dr Manhattan plot in Watchmen), while others quit the team in disillusionment and disgust.

Things come to a head in the final issue when former teammate Nighthawk and his Redeemers (a scratch band of renegade heroes, untried newbies and desperate villains) confront the Squadron, demanding that they step down and dismantle the quasi-fascistic 'utopia'. A calm and civilised discussion does not ensue. Instead the most lethal super-team battle in the history of comics to date takes place in what is effectively a model for the famous 'airport fight' in the movie Captain America: Civil War. Hearts are stopped, heads are caved in, backs are broken and chests are impaled. By the end of the issue, seven major characters are dead and the dream of a utopian society has died with them. It's a brutal and brilliantly tragic finale to the series.

Squadron Supreme gets a follow-up shortly after in the shiny graphic novel Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe, in which the survivors of both teams must work together to hastily combat a spatial anomaly which threatens to engulf the sun itself. The body count rises again, with some heroes failing to even survive the launch of their space rocket, while another fatally underestimates the simple physics of retarding the growth of a sun-sized entity (the subsequent purple smear effect is quite disturbing). Oh, and somebody's head explodes. The Squadron survives, after a fashion, and goes on to guest star in mainstream 'Marvel Earth' comics, but they never reach the high and lows of the Gruenwald/Ryan era.

A curious epilogue to this tale is that when Mark Gruenwald died unexpectedly young from a heart attack (like one of the main characters in Squadron Supreme) in 1996, his will mandated that he be cremated and his ashes mixed in with the ink of the book he was most proud of. It was the trade paperback collection of Squadron Supreme #1-12. You could say that he loved comics so much that he wanted to be part of them forever.

Suggested Reading

Squadron Supreme Volume 1 #1-12 or trade paperback Squadron Supreme. The follow-up graphic novel Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe.

Neighborhood Watch(men): the street where it happened

This article first appeared in Journey Planet #77, December 2023.

One of the things that grabbed me about Watchmen was all those scenes at the intersection of two streets somewhere in New York: the man at the newsstand and the kid next to him leaning against an electric hydrant thing, reading Tales of the Black Freighter; the fabulously named Gunga Diner where Dan and Laurie meet and where Rorschach stakes out his mail drop; the Utopia cinema prophetically showing The Day The Earth Stood Still; the Promethean Cab Company where supporting characters like Joey work, the guy selling watches out of a briefcase just up the street; the nuclear fallout shelter sign on the wall; the freaky 'Hiroshima shadows' image of embracing lovers spray-painted onto a wall; and of course the bland-looking Institute for Extraspatial Studies building, which is fated to be the manifestation locus of Ozymandias' creature.

The last few pages of issue #11 show many of the series' supporting characters converging by chance at that intersection. Aline has come to see her girlfriend Joey and an argument swiftly turns into a violent assault. Gloria Long is quizzing Bernard the news seller about her estranged husband Dr Malcolm Long before spotting him down the street. Detectives Steven Fine and Joe Bourquin are driving by, possibly on their way home. Milo from the cab company and his locksmith brother Ralph are going for a drink after work. The Utopia is packed with moviegoers and just down the street hundreds of knot-topped music lovers are attending a Pale Horse/Krystalnacht concert.

Then there is a bright, white light from inside the Institute for Extraspatial Studies and everybody dies.

Those wide-screen panels at the bottom of the last few pages of issue #11 show the fantastic draughtsmanship of Dave Gibbons, doubtless directed by Alan Moore's characteristically detailed script. We see the lives of these secondary and tertiary characters colliding – literally in some cases – as their personal storylines lead to a climactic resolution. In another book, these people might emerge from this incident more or less in one piece. They would grow and learn from the encounter on that fateful street corner and perhaps end up as better, wiser human beings. But this is Watchmen, and Moore and Gibbons have just killed them all with a giant telepathic squid monster.

The first few pages of issue #12 describe the aftermath of the catastrophic event in graphic splash pages, dialogue-free until Jon and Laurie turn up in the middle of the carnage. We see the bodies, limp and bloody, strewn across the street, hurled against walls. We see vehicles embedded in restaurant windows and heaps of corpses spilling down the steps of the Utopia. We see the monster itself, a bulbous obscenity complete with titanic tentacles and what I can only describe as a bloodshot 'eye-gina' bursting out of the shell of the institute. It's a powerfully cinematic sequence of scenes.

Not only are those splash pages powerful, but taken as a whole they're incredibly precise and consistent; you see a leg in one page and it matches up perfectly with an outstretched body seen from another viewpoint on another page. Just like the entire Watchmen series, it all matches up beautifully like an intricately disassembled clock, waiting for the reader to piece it all together in their mind's eye. Carnage yes, but beautiful in its way.

Somewhere around my second or third rereading of Watchmen back in 1987, I started to get ever so slightly obsessed about those streets, those corners and buildings where it all happened. I wanted, needed, to be able to visualise it as a whole as Moore and Gibbons must have done, to see exactly which building faced which, to work out who worked at which corner, to figure out how close they all were to the monster when it appeared. So I studied the source material for a bit, deduced what went where and drew a little map on some lined paper (see below). I showed the map to my comic-reading wingman Ian and then folded it up inside the Watchmen trade paperback and subsequently forgot about it for 30 years.

My hand-drawn map from 1987

Then Pádraig (Ó Méalóid) invited me to join the editing team for this issue of Journey Planet, and I thought about digging out my old map and maybe redrawing it. Maybe a bit neater on the computer, and labelling things up. And once I'd done a nice map of the streets before the disaster, it shouldn't be too much trouble to use it as a template for a map of the scene after the event.

I may have got a bit carried away.

Have a look at the pictures below, then keep reading to see how I worked out what went where.

W 40th and 7th: Before

Here’s how the intersection looks throughout Watchmen, up to the point that the creature appears.

W 40th and 7th: After

Here’s the intersection as it looks in Watchmen #12. The creature’s tentacles, crashed vehicles and bodies match up to the artwork as best I can manage. Jon and Laurie are indicated by the blue and yellow dots, where they first appear in that issue. 

How do we know where this is?

Fortunately, Rorschach's journal tells us that he shadows Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk to the Gunga Diner on 40th and 7th, which gives us the exact midtown location of the intersection, not far from Broadway and Times Square.

The problem with Madison Square Garden

In Watchmen, Madison Square Garden is clearly visible from the intersection (seemingly a block south down 7th Avenue from the Utopia). But in our real world (or Earth N as my co-editor Pádraig calls it in his article) the current fourth Madison Square Garden is further downtown, south and west on 8th Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets, and therefore could not possibly be visible as seen in (for example) issue #11, page #24.

So in the world of Watchmen (Earth W), the current (as of 1985) Madison Square Garden must have been built in a different location to its real-world counterpart. Perhaps the existence and actions of Dr Manhattan et al caused this curious divergence in municipal planning? Maybe a Moloch or Underboss-run construction racket in the 1960s resulted in a change in the city’s zoning, or maybe the Comedian just shot the architect. We may never know, but there's probably a very niche fanfic in this. 

The Comedian's apartment

In Watchmen #1 page 4, Detectives Fine and Bourquin are seen leaving Edward (the Comedian) Blake's apartment building and shortly thereafter walking past a Gunga Diner. Does this mean that the Comedian lived just down W 40 Street from the intersection with 7th Avenue? I don't think so. The diner on page 5 sits in a building with a substantial stone corner which is quite distinct from the Gunga Diner seen in (for example) issue #2 page 4. Gunga Diner is presumably a chain, and the detectives were simply passing a different diner.

Midtown Comics

In the real world, the south-west corner of the intersection is actually the location of the original Midtown Comics, a well-known comics store visited by several of the issue's contributors (other comic stores are available). Coincidence? Probably not.

Attending a signing by Dave Gibbons earlier this year (2023) at London’s Gosh! comic shop, I had a chance to inflict my Watchmen streetmaps on him, which he graciously approved of and confirmed that he used his old building surveyor skills to meticulously plan out the layout of the intersection. As if there was any doubt.

References

As well as Gibbons’ faultless artwork, I drew upon actual streetmaps of Manhattan and the following resources:

http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/New_York_City

The work of AYBGerrardo, who I later discovered had undertaken a similar project to mine. Sadly, the links below no longer work, but I did manage to save a copy of their annotated streetmap.

http://www.watchmencomicmovie.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=406

http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/AllyourbasicGerrardo/media/cGF0aDovd2F0Y2htZW5tYXAuanBn/?ref=

The Thing From Another World - a tropogram

Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it? There was that whole Covid thing for a couple of years, and other stuff. I've been busy on other writing projects - mainly tabletop roleplaying game adventures and the 80s incarnation of the 7TV miniatures game - so I've had little to no bandwidth left for sharing whimsical musings, savage comic reviews or the like here. My apologies. 

I've pinned a lot of my self-esteem to 'getting shit written and published', but my work has largely disappeared into Development Hell - for reasons beyond my control - these last 3 or 4 years, so I'm at a bit of a low ebb. It's hard to keep writing and designing and creating stuff when it's all gathering digital dust at various publishing houses.

Aaaaaanyway, I've decided to break my duck with a pretty diagram that I created yesterday (instead of doing my Real Job), for all the film/book/comic/sci-fi/horror/infographic nerds. It can't just be me, can it?

I was inspired by a recent post on the excellent Nightmare Man group on Facebook, wherein top contributor Tristan Sargent wrote another of his articles linking the various versions of the movie The Thing to its book origin (John W Campbell's Who Goes There?) to H P Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness (written two years before Campbell's story) and several Doctor Who stories involving Ice Warriors and Krynoids.

In the post's comments thread I joked about drawing a diagram to link all the inspirations and connections together, like one of those Rock Family Trees they used to do on BBC. Coz you know how much I like doing those sorts of things. Like I did with Alan Moore's Providence comic, and the plot of Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

So I scribbled some notes down, fired up Visio and knocked up an infographic that tracks some of the influences, forerunners, coincidences, homages, rip-offs and sequels of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi classic.

I've used a colour-coded key of my own devising to track some of the common tropes like Polar Setting, Human Assimilation and Suspended Animation. Hence the term tropogram, which I have just invented.

By no means accurate or compete, I hope it's of some interest. I enjoyed putting it together.