![]() ![]() We – myself and my small coterie of fellow comics readers, with whom I’m now hardly in touch and one of whom is dead – judged Watchmen to be realistic: grimy, gritty, containing sexual acts and acts of senseless violence.īut while Dave Gibbons’s art is detailed in content, drawing every label on every sweet wrapper, it’s somewhat cartoony in form and doesn’t have the fine hatching that was thought crucial for anyone aspiring to realism, something we ignored at the time. No artist who dashed of page after page of exaggerated, hypermuscled figures could make a claim for realism, but those were the artists we called realistic. Almost everything we read had just such men. No book which featured a man who could fly would be thought realistic. It was the building block of everything that followed.īut what was realism? Certainly it wasn’t the same quality you’d see in prose fiction or in art. ![]() It was the vital quality that we looked for realism meant a comic that was worth bothering with, that was of the present rather than the past, that recognised our maturity as readers. Trying to recall exactly what we meant, back in our teenage comic-reading days, when we talked about “realism” isn’t easy. ![]() We are sharing it here to mark the release of the new hardback edition of Zenith: Phase II from 2000 AD. This article was originally published by Tom Whiteley on his excellent Suggested for Mature Readers blog. ![]()
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