Steven Johnston has a dream, and it’s one shared by many comic fans the world over. Why not let him explain it to you?
One of the many subplots of [Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen] involves a sidewalk newsvendor in New York City, talking with various passersby (some of whom turn out to be major characters). A boy sitting nearby is reading a pirate-themed comic book that he’s apparently borrowed from the newsstand, and as the story progresses, we see various panels (or text bubbles) from this comic interposed with the “real” storyline.
As we learn from the postscript to Chapter 5, this is intended to be from an immensely popular pirate comic series called “Tales From The Black Freighter”, which is essentially a horror comic themed on the concept of a pirate ship captained by an evil figure, and manned by the damned. The specific story being read has the title of “Marooned”, and recounts the story of a sailor who survives an attack by the Black Freighter and is marooned on an isolated island; he frantically attempts to escape the island in order to warn his hometown of the impending assault of the evil ship, which he presumes is headed there to destroy his friends and family. It’s a chilling story that still gives me the creeps today, even given the dozens of times I have read it over the years.
…I’ve re-read Watchmen dozens of times, and I always wondered if Marooned would hold together as a story in its own right, if isolated completely from the Watchmen context. Eventually I decided to scan the issues in, do some rearranging, and see if it would work. I humbly refer to this as “Marooned (The Reconstruction)“.
It’s something that works surprisingly well, and is well worth checking out even for those of us who aren’t entirely in love with Watchmen. Go, read.
(Thanks, Larry.)
August 14th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Wasn’t there talk at one time of DC doing a “Tales of the Black Freighter” comic?
August 14th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
funny, one of the things I did after reading all of Watchmen was go back and read just the parts of the pirate story hehe
August 15th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
There was talk of Moore doing a Black Freighter mini-series with Joe Orlando. I guess the spat between Moore and DC put an end to that project.
Imagine if they’d one it… we’d have hundreds of comics showcasing pirates doing nasty things, instead of hundreds of comics showcasing super-heroes doing nasty things.
Ah, the loss.