Though it’s only made a brief appearance in Max’s bedroom so far, war propaganda will be an important element of The Specialists. In the real war, propaganda served many purposes, and some of them were not entirely admirable. Many posters featured dehumanizing and, frankly, racist depictions of the Japanese, Germans, and Italians. (To be fair, the Nazis had some truly horrible propaganda.) But there was another side to propaganda that was more constructive.
The Specialists
A WWII superhero webcomic
In addition to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, The Specialists owes a debt to Wild Cards, an anthology book series edited by George R. R. Martin. Both are epic stories, spanning multiple generations, that speculate how the real world might have been different if superheros really existed. But where Watchmen is a very tightly-plotted book that focuses on a handful of characters, the Wild Cards books are a collection of stories from nearly thirty authors.
I thought I’d talk this week about a couple of works that have influenced and inspired my efforts on The Specialists. Both provide alternate histories where superheros (and villains) have changed the social and political realities of the world in surprising ways. In other words, these are the stories that The Specialists wants to be when it grows up.
Watchmen, by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgens, (writer, artist, and colorist, respectively) is a deconstruction of the whole superhero genre. Moore is famously bored with traditional superhero stories, so when he ventures into that too-familiar territory, he tends to trash the place. Watchmen explored the psychological (and sexual) and political implications of costumed vigilantism in ways that had never been considered in the late eighties, when it was first published (though it has had many imitators since then).
First I want to thank everyone for making our launch day a success. A lot of people visited the site, and our Facebook community is growing steadily.
Next, I want to rectify a mistake from my previous post. Al Fukalek, my partner and longtime friend, only got a brief mention, buried down towards the bottom of that entry, and he deserves much better than that. Al does all of the artwork in the comic and the graphics for the site, but he also contributes to the story. I may be the one that writes the final scripts, but the formation of the original ideas is a joint endeavor.
Conversely, I contribute nothing at all to the visual aspect of the site, so I try to pick up the slack by handling technical and administrative stuff, and by blogging. Therefore, I might be more “visible” than Al, but that’s incidental. Al works at least as hard as I on this site, and it wouldn’t exist without him.
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