![[VIDEO] The James Gunn Superman Cataclysm](https://bwspotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/superfix-wm.jpg?w=190&h=110&crop=1 "[VIDEO] The James Gunn Superman Cataclysm")
Spoilers for the comic I’m currently reading through for the first time and the movie I don’t plan to. It’s not anything that isn’t known by now, but just in case.
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I tried getting myself to re-read the previous issue. I wondered if reading it as intended rather than the way I read it to review it if I might get a better experience. I don’t think I would. Maybe the constant character switching would be less jarring but the story itself wouldn’t change. It’s still not the superhero experience I wanted. Still, it made me do this issue a bit different. I usually like to do the intro before the review, like I do with Chapter By Chapter, give my thoughts going into the comic. I probably could have still, but I opted to read the chapter first this time, since we’re focusing on one character: Rorschach.
Rorschach is an interesting figure in discussing Watchmen. For Alan Moore he’s the baddie in this story. Maybe not evil, but you can tell from the story how much he hates the character. Rorschach was originally going to be The Question, specifically the original Charlton version by Steve Ditko. If you only know Vic Sage from Justice League Unlimited, you don’t know Ditko’s creation. Having read the old Charlton adventures Vic was very outspoken in his own identity as a news commentator. Yes, they had those before the 24 hour news cycle needed something to fill in time. Ditko was inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand, and for a far-leaning liberal like Moore that had to be the worst kind of character…and back in the 1980s that wasn’t even as left-leaning as some of the more extreme views today. (This is the end of the political commentary outside of examining the character himself.) So Moore wants us to hate Rorschach.
This is not what has happened, at least not by the people I follow who discuss Watchmen. To them, Rorschach is the hero of the story. He’s the only one investigating the murder. He’s the only one fighting crime because he feels it’s the right thing to do. His hero-worship of the Comedian is off-putting as is his brutal nature, so that puts me off. However, he actually believe in good and evil, right and wrong, and wanting to clean up the criminal underworld. I disagree with his methods and the specifics of his worldview, but I kind of see why some comic commentators see him as the real hero. You may not agree with the assessment by the time we’re done, but you may understand it.
I see a man dreaming he’s a butterfly. A very violent butterfly.
Watchmen #6
DC Comics (February, 1987)
“The Abyss Gazes Also”
WRITER: Alan Moore
ARTIST/LETTERER: Dave Gibbons
COLORIST: John Higgins
EDITOR: Len Wein
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Well, guess what I want to die in a fire.
If you’re new to this site, you should know that the trend of kids shows turned into subversive horror is one I’m long past over. Popeye and Winnie The Pooh are public domain? Turn them into horror movies! We want to make a new Banana Splits, but now the costumes are robots who want to kill everyone because their show was canceled. They’re already planning to snag the early version of Mickey Mouse now that the early shorts have started going public. I know you hate children, but do you have to be so blatant?
When it comes to original “kids” shows, I’m usually a little more relaxed. Oh, I’m still not a fan but I’m not as angry at Five Nights And Freddy’s and its various inspirations because while it still hates your childhood it’s not ruining someone’s childhood favorites. They just find it funny that toys are killing kids and each other, video games are run by satanic cults (literally and figuratively) that steal souls, and whatever the hell else they’re going to come up with next. These are originals and I’ll take them case by case. The Freddy Fazbear games are actually kind of interesting, though I think the dead kid souls being stuffed into robots, toys, and games is getting overdone. Try something different.
I can’t decide where Buddy, a horror comedy from the guys who made that Too Many Cooks video for Adult Swim, exists on the childhate scale based on the above scene (if YouTube still has it up. If it keeps them from turning Barney the dinosaur himself into a horror movie or whatever an “A24” style movie is, I’ll reluctantly accept it. (No, really, that was a plan. For all I know it still is.) Buddy is so clearly a Barney stand-in that the final trailer just straight up ripped Barney dialog even though Keegan Michael-Key is supposed to be the character in the movie and I doubt his Billy West or Dean Wendt impression is going to be that good. (I do my research.)
Now, you might wonder how anyone could see that and think it’s a good thing for kids, rather than yet another adultified “let’s make a child thing evil” parody? And yet, according to The Mirror‘s US site that’s exactly what happened in at least a few movie theaters. From Avenue Q to The Puppetland Murders, the idea of an adultified kids show concept isn’t new. I’m surprised Doctor Who never got there given Russel T. Davies ” make mundane things scary” motif from his first run. It’s meant to be comedy, or in the case of the Freddy Fazbear franchise inspired by the supposed fear of restaurant animatronics from the 1980s that I never saw from any kids on the rare occasions I was at the local Chuck E. Cheese. Said musical robots are gone and now it’s just a birthday game space with someone in a costume…I think. I haven’t been in a long time but it’s what I see in ads when the mouse isn’t a cartoon character.
So somehow parents looked at that and said it would be great for their kids? Was that the plan? Is this another version of those YouTube ads using kids characters to up the numbers of their creepy fetish videos? (Speaking of blatant hatred of childhood innocence.) No, it just sounds like parents realized the price for being lazy parents.
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Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
Our previous chapter explained how a Klingon has an Orion wife, half-human kids, is on a science colony that, while not part of the Federation does maintain connections to planets in the Federation. We got to meet one of his sons, and Korsal may have some idea of what’s causing the plague…and it may threaten more than their lives! (I wish I could find a clip of just the cliffhanger stinger from Star Trek. Imagine how it would benefit some of the novel and comic reviews I’ve done over the years.)
Now we’re going to see what the doctors coming to Nisus are discovering because we’re going back to the Enterprise and with McCoy and Spock. They have an odd friendship, always trying to out insult each other in ways unique to them. McCoy is more emotional, Spock more logical. It’s the two natures that serve Kirk well, getting both perspectives and deciding which is best to follow in a given situation. It also makes for some of the more fun moments between them.
We probably won’t get a lot of that this chapter. This is the shortest chapter thus far, at 3 pages and not even a quarter of the fourth. Normally I would combine it with the previous or next chapter, but both of those are pretty long and I didn’t feel right shoving it in there. So this chapter is short and sweet. For those of you reading along, you might wait a week or jump ahead and wait for me to get to that review, or take the short chapter and…I don’t know, dust or something. Maybe get out of the house. Anyway…review.
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[VIDEO] The James Gunn Superman Cataclysm
You can be a James Gunn fan. You can like James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn. I’m not stopping you, but from everything I’ve heard, be it official promotion to painstakingly deep dive reviews like the one below, I will not be joining you. I knew going into Man Of Steel that it was going to be a lousy adaptation of Superman, but between this site and getting access to the special Walmart early screening I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. I still maintain it was a decent superhero movie but as terrible a Superman story as I was expecting. Any enjoyment I had came from the low expectations being worse than the movie, not the movie being good. It still maintained Zack Snyder’s misunderstanding of superheroes, but divorced from the source material it wasn’t terrible.
I’m not hearing that out of Gunn’s movie. Terrible motivations, unnecessary side taking in real world events the film clearly has no understanding about, and a twist on Superman’s parents Gunn swears is accurate and a good story moment that is so bad fans have actually done a head retcon because it so breaks their character even more than Snyder’s, if that’s possible. So just as Snyder’s continued defenses of his Superman makes me MORE negative to his movie rather than less, Gunn’s take stopped me from wanting to see it altogether.
The following video goes over every bad decision, comparing it to better attempts at the same ideas in other superhero movies. If you only watch from 3:26 on you’ll see comparisons to The Incredibles, the good period of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even the Richard Donner movie, so if nothing else I encourage watching that. Yes, the video is four hours long (not the longest video I’ve posted to this site, right Doctor Who fans?), so no commentary from me other than there’s one aspect of Lex’s lack of character I plan to make a whole other article about. The video comes from The Little Platoon on YouTube, and even if you watch it in pieces, it is very worth watching as he takes on the movies, the defenders, and the critiques of James Gunn’s treatment of Superman and the DC Universe.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on September 17, 2026 in DC Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, DC Gunnverse, DC Studios, James Gunn's Superman, movie review, The Little Platoon.
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