After the storm: Under the hood
In this episode, Hollis talks about the way things changed in the fifties. People began to take superheroes less seriously, and they even became the butt of humour. The marriage between Sally Jupiter and her manager gave rise to many ribald and off-colour jokes, and some of the Minutemen began to turn to other comforts, like Mothman, who took to the bottle. In the midst of all this, even here in
Watchmen world, there was the McCarthy era, and each superhero was forced, for reasons of national security, to disclose, privately, his or her secret identity. Most were cleared as being “proper Americans” due to having served in the forces. Others, who had kept less than patriotic company in their youth, were not so lucky. Hollis also mentions the birth of little Laurie, an event which he says looks to have been the catalyst for the breakup of Sally's marriage.
The only hero to refuse to reveal his identity was the original one, Hooded Justice, and after he retired, presumably, events conspired to turn up a body in the river which Hollis reckons was HJ's true identity, an East German strong man who had gone missing about the same time as Hooded Justice disappeared from the scene. It appeared to be murder, or execution, and Hollis floats the idea that the strongman, if he were Hooded Justice, had been eliminated by his own people as a spy before he could be discovered. Whether there is any truth in this he does not know, and admits he's only putting two and two together and may be well short of the mark. He also notes that with the demise of the superhero, or masked adventurer, went the reduction in supervillains. As he points out, it's not so bad being a guy in a crazy costume as long as others join in, but if you're the only one dressed up you're gonna look pretty stupid. He says that the criminals just traded in their supervillain costume for a suit and a briefcase, and got into prostitution and drugs; worse and more merciless adversaries then than they ever had been before.
Another thing that sped the demise of his people was the approach of the sixties, the open criticism of American values, rock and roll, free love, mini skirts, the whole sixties thing. Men out of place, out of time, the Minutemen did not know how to deal with this new era. It's interesting, and obviously quite deliberate, that he twice uses the phrase “bearing down upon us”, as it is liberally used in the
Tales of the Black Freighter. He then goes on to describe another thing that was bearing down upon them, the most wonderful and yet most frightening of all, and it was called Manhattan. There is no explanation --- at least, not here --- of how Doctor Manhattan came to be (the author probably assumes everyone reading knows; you may as well explain who Jesus was) but his narrative seems to point to the possibility of his having been created in a laboratory. He also mentions a young man called Ozymandias, who is said to be if not a protege of Manhattan, then a contemporary, and he uses the phrase that best sums up the general feeling at the time at the appearance of these truly superheroes: we've been replaced.
And indeed, having met both Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan at a charity benefit, this was what impressed itself on the mind of the ageing hero: time to retire. No point patrolling the streets in a silly cape, maintaining the peak of physical fitness and a sharp mind, if your replacement could level mountains with a thought! And so he retired to mend cars, which had been his first love. Believing the day of the masked hero was over, he was surprised to be approached by Danny, who asked him if he could use the name Nite Owl, and a whole new breed of masked adventurers seemed to be about to be born.
The Story so Far
After it is revealed, or postulated anyway, that close association with Doctor Manhattan can be directly linked to cancer, and having been pushed too far, the blue giant abandons Earth (and Laurie), taking himself to Mars, where he sits and thinks. In the absence of their major enemy, Russia decide to take a step they would not have dared to had Manhattan been on the planet, and they invade Afghanistan. The US begins to make plans to retaliate, and the world moves a step closer to armageddon.
And the clock now stands at nine minutes before midnight.