Starred Review in Publishers Weekly! →

“Journalist Riesman unpacks the minutiae-gnarled debates swirling around comics writer and producer Stan Lee in his eventful, myth-dispelling debut, while also telling a story that will resonate even for those who don’t know Spider-Man from the Red Skull … This detailed, clear-eyed examination pulls back the curtain on one of America’s great storytellers and is sure to reignite debates over Lee’s legacy.”

I’m happy to report that Publishers Weekly has given True Believer a starred review! Read it here!

The Forgotten Third ‘Watchmen’ Creator Speaks →

When I ask Damon Lindelof, showrunner for the upcoming HBO series Watchmen, about John Higgins, his mind goes straight to the Beatles. “John Higgins remains one of the unsung heroes of Watchmen,” he says. “Certainly Moore and Gibbons were John and Paul, but Higgins was George and Ringo combined, and his striking colors reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.”

Higgins was indeed a hero of the graphic novel that Lindelof’s show riffs on, having been the man who did the coloring for the book. That makes him one of only three collaborators who created the Watchmen comic, along with writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and he is indeed underappreciated, even by the book’s supporters. But even that bold analogy isn’t enough: It’s more as if Beatles fans assumed the band consisted only of John and Paul and didn’t even know George and Ringo existed, much less that they created music of their own.

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Interview: Damon Lindelof →

The rights to Watchmen, the book, were supposed to revert to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But DC Comics didn’t do that and Moore has historically been furious about it, as have readers who advocate for creator rights. What does it feel like to make a show that a lot of people are going to oppose on principle, independent of the quality of the material? Is that something you think about?
That’s something that I think about a lot. What are the ethical ramifications of this even existing at all when I completely and totally side with the creator? Acknowledge that the creator has been exploited by a corporation? Now that very same corporation is basically compensating me to continue this thing. I ask, “Is it even hypocrisy?” Then I say, as a fan, “Where would I come down on this thing if someone else was doing it? If I heard someone else was doing an HBO series called Watchmen that was not a strict adaptation of the book?” I felt that I’d be really angry about it and then I’d watch it. [Laughs.] I wonder how many of the angry people who don’t think it should exist will actually have the discipline to not even watch it. Those are the people that I really admire. The ones who are like, “This shouldn’t exist and I’m literally not watching it.” That’s an admirable position.

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On the Joker as Arch-Nemesis →

Nowadays, one tends to think of the Clown Prince of Crime as — to borrow a term from video games — the Final Boss of the Batman mythos. He is, as Neil Gaiman put it in a comics story a decade ago, the White Whale to Batsy’s Ahab, the Moriarty to his Holmes. Where Batman pursues a near-fascistic vision of order, the Joker is what Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight refers to as an “agent of chaos.” The two are matter and antimatter, oil and water, an unstoppable force and an immovable object, a mythic hero and a trickster god, or any number of other overwrought metaphors.

While you can certainly tell great stories with other entrants in Batman’s rogues gallery — Two-Face, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, what have you — none of them fascinate the hero and his readers the way the Joker does. There’s a reason he’s the first of DC Comics’ Caped Crusader’s antagonists to get his own movie, which comes out this week: His wanton murderousness is the platonic ideal of everything Batman struggles against. And yet, it was not always thus. In fact, it wasn’t until a now-obscure story was published in 1973 that the Joker turned a corner and started to become what he is now. The tale is called “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” and it appeared in the 251st issue of Batman, which hit stands in July of that year. Written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, it is one of the most important Batman stories ever told.

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