Rorschach from Watchmen

All-in-all: The movie adaptation is as faithful frame-by-frame as we could ask for, I think. True fans of the original may be as embittered with the movie as is Alan Moore (for whatever reasons... there are too many to enumerate here), but I'm not complaining; we don't end up with disintegrated Professor X shortly before the credits roll (Although when we saw the preview for Wolverine, Jacqui and I both thought, God I wish this was Wolverine the Musical!). My favorite character still dies. The sex scenes were way too long, but the glory of the opening credits make up for it. And the ending of Watchmen delivers the morally unsatisfying conclusion we expected from the get-go, whether or not a psychic squid is involved. But is that what we really wanted?

What I like about Rorschach is that, on the most superficial level, he embodies the antithesis to utilitarian compromise, a "black and white" perspective in a morally indifferent universe. Part of the conflict in Watchmen stems from, as we all know, an inability for normal human beings with human limitations to grapple with a "complete" vision of justice in a fundamentally amoral world. The vigilante in the comic book world represents the incarnation of human agency at the very moment when the ethical boundaries (those systems of justice) human beings have constructed to constrain their own limitless desire become limitless themselves, taking into account all lives while forgetting to take into account each life. The flesh-and-blood hero, who must wear a mask to transcend his own limitations in the minds of his enemies, is designed to resolve one crime at a time, defeat one enemy after the other, his or her every action a completed action. The actions and the consequences of the masked hero are nearly 1:1, blow for blow.

But the "super"-hero, who needs no mask to disguise her transcendence, can contemplate the infinite, because her actions are always incomplete. And I think this is the moral dilemma super- "heroes" like Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias face. Their limitless power (or intelligence) has deprived them of their human agency, because infinite future knowledge makes them subject to the doom that is determinism, which nullifies ethical law. Neither can act because all paths open to them are already taken; they can only compromise because they foresee no other alternatives. In the same way, bizarro-world Nixon's hands are tied—the systems of justice the Cold War have created are limitless, overreaching, unable to think or act in terms of individual human lives or completed actions. The decision to instantly destroy one human being, or one million, for fear of intangible future consequences, becomes a mere calculation. We're forced to ask: Is human courage or psychic distance from the human condition required to reduce human lives to calculations?

I know Rorschach's answer. What about yours?

Masters of Horror

Despite Derleth’s fears, however, horror fiction became popular in the seventies with the success of novels like William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). Derleth’s estate fell into the hands of his children, April and Walden Derleth. Though the details of the dispute have never been made public, Derleth’s estate appointed a fan named James Turner (who had no editorial experience), as editor-in-chief of Arkham House following Derleth’s death. Donald Wandrei, who had been involved in Arkham House since his return from World War II as its managing editor, left the company after Turner’s appointment.

Under Turner, Arkham House’s focus shifted from weird fiction and fantasy to science fiction. In 1974 and 1975, Turner introduced science fiction authors Michael Bishop, Greg Bear, and James Tiptree, Jr. The Wind From a Burning Woman became Arkham’s fastest selling anthology, but success came at the cost of alienating Arkham’s traditional readers.

The eighties invited Lovecraft biographer S.I. Joshi to collaborate with Turner on adjusting Arkham’s continuing mission. While Turner felt that part of Arkham’s mission was to keep publishing important authors on the house’s backlist, Joshi urged the editor to look for new acquisitions. In the eighties and nineties, Arkham House published the compilation Arkham’s Masters of Horror and John D. Harvey’s bestselling horror novel, The Cleansing. Alexander Jablokov’s 1994 The Breath of Suspension, which merged the supernatural horror of weird fiction with more traditional science fiction, was also a success. The Derleth estate, however, felt that Turner had allowed Arkham to veer too far from its roots, and in 1995, April Derleth fired Turner. He immediately set to starting up Gryphon Press, whose first title was published in 1997, but he suffered an untimely death in 1999.

April Derleth became president of Arkham House in 2002, having appointed Robert Ruber as her consulting editor. The house’s new mission is to return to classic weird fiction. In 2005, Arkham House was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Small Press Achievements—the trophy was a bust of H.P. Lovecraft.

Cthulhu for President, Randy Andrews

For over more than sixty-five years, Arkham House has published two-hundred titles, surviving both the rise of the mega-publishers and the evolution of a genre that has mainly subsisted on the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft. From the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Arkham has kept alive Lovecraft’s otherworldly nightmares and influenced authors like Stephen King and Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy); artists like H.R. Giger (Alien movies), Clive Barker (Hellraiser), Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, The Watchmen and From Hell), Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman series); and directors such as John Carpenter (In the Mouth of Madness), Stuart Gordon, and Robert Wise. Adored by old-school Dungeons and Dragons role-playing gamers, the iconic Great Old One Cthulhu and its mythology were incorporated into the game by the late Gary Gygax; Chaosium Games and Wizards of the Coast followed suit with the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. And in 2008, no comic convention in the country is without bumper stickers advocating “Cthulhu for President.”