Unbeatable Comics: Comedian #1

writer: Brian Azzarello
artist: J.G. Jones

Before Watchmen continues, creating a new ripple in the canon by emphatically stating Edward Blake, the Comedian, was not involved in the assassination of JFK.

I guess it's implied in the comic, and strongly suggested in the movie, but the beauty of revisiting this world is that another writer can given another interpretation of both the character and events as we've come to know them.  Blake famously took up the role of the Comedian because he came to believe that the world was a big joke, and he would provide the punchline, but I was never convinced that his motivations were properly explained, nor his particular worldview explored.  He was the fall guy for Ozymandias's master plan, the one who figured it out long before anyone else.  But he's mostly known as the maverick with violent tendencies and the tenuous link between generations.

I've never really gotten into Brian Azzarello as a writer, and so can't begin to form a basis for comparison with his other work, only that it seems I've more or less avoided him until now, or so it seems.  He's a name writer who seems to have avoided being identified with the mainstream.  He wrote Superman with Jim Lee on art, and no one really remembers that.  (Maybe I'll have to investigate it now.)  Anyway, he starts his tale off pretty deliberately, with Blake being good friends with the Kennedy boys, who J.G. Jones draws very much as boys, actually, and I think that's fairly deliberate, and a telling element of the issue.  With everything that's been said and seen about John and Bobby over the years, a lot of things have been obscured.  I've read that some people found Azzarello's depiction of Jackie as offensive and unlikely, but I take it up with everything else he does in the issue as a way of removing that barrier that's existed for fifty years, and revealing the whole clan as living human beings again.  Blake joins this ride as another pragmatist believing the Kennedy vision, assassinating an American legend (Marilyn Monroe) and crying with Moloch over the fall of his good friend.  Where do we go from here?  That's what the question is in the story, and that's what Azzarello successfully challenges his reader with, too.

Like the Comedian, JFK's legacy has been obscured by the reports of his womanizing.  It becomes hard to reconcile the visionary with the man, especially after one of his disciples tried to follow that pattern without any of the vision.  (What Clinton never seemed to realize was that Jack wanted anything but to become a politician.  It just so happened that he and Bobby were better at it than anyone else in their family.)  Yet there's the man and the vision, wrapped up in a tidy, tragic package.  The tragedy of the Comedian is that he never really got to play the hero.  In fact, Azzarello goes out of his way to suggest that not only was Blake not responsible for the death of JFK, but that he was probably the only man who could have prevented it.

It seems like incredibly heady stuff, and maybe stuff that doesn't even belong in a comic book, much less one that some say by definition impugns a rich legacy.  Yet this issue proves beyond a doubt what this project is capable of accomplishing, what someone like Azzarello can give both to fiction and history, because in this case the two are intertwined, inextricably, much like the man and the vision were in JFK, and how we'll learn the same is true of the Comedian.

The real joke is that the story of Edward Blake is just beginning, twenty years after everyone assumed the book had already been completed.