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In this episode: Dr. Peter Coogan joins the crew to discuss his theory that the sequel to Watchmen doesn\'t need to be written, because it already has...
\\n\\nClues to the sequel to Watchmen\\n
\\n By Peter Coogan
This reading of Watchmen was inspired by a comment by Sara J. Van Ness in Watchmen as Literature (McFarland, 2010). She pointed to the excerpt from Under the Hood in chapter 1 and the paperclipped note on its first page, \\u201c\\u2018We present here excerpts from Hollis Mason\\u2019s autobiography, UNDER THE HOOD, leading up t the time when he became the masked adventurer, Nite Owl. Reprinted with permission of the author\\u2019 (27). This \\u2018we\\u2019 is the novels only reference to the narrator\\u201d (p. 61). This comment inspired me to track down the identity of the narrator and it led to a series of discoveries about the novel.
\\n\\nRead through these clues and see if you can figure out why there is no need for a sequel to Watchmen.
\\n\\nHow did Moore and Gibbons build the sequel into the text?
\\nProblems with this theory:\\n
It seems unlikely that Moore and Gibbons intended this reading of Watchmen as they initially only planned 6 issues and originally intended to run letter pages after issue three and so included Under the Hood excerpts only as a placeholder until letter pages started. Moore originally planned to use MLJ\\u2019s Mighty Crusader characters and so started the story with the death of the Shield. All of these arguments are versions of the intentional fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy).\\n
Watchmen was published in September 1986, so the turnaround time from October of 1985 is problematic, but not impossible.\\n
Some of the depiction of the characters has to be declared fictional or speculative under this theory: All the Bernie/Bernard interaction at the newsstand, the Shea/Hira interaction on the island and the freighter, the police officers interaction in chapter 5 (and elsewhere), Godfrey and Seymour at the New Frontiersman, Veidt\\u2019s interactions with his servants and his role in their deaths. But some of these interactions could have been recorded by Veidt in his bugging and so might have been found. And other interactions might have come out of Congressional testimony, other investigations, or interviews published as part of the coverage of the revelations of Veidt\\u2019s role in the squid attack (such as the war room in chapter 10).\\n
Likely the inclusion of Tales of the Black Freighter is symbolic, either on the part of the source or \\u201cMoore\\u201d and \\u201cGibbons\\u201d (the diagetic versions of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons). It\\u2019s also likely that many of the other texts mentioned in the book (e.g. The Day the Earth Stood Still, \\u201cThe Architects of Fear\\u201d) are also symbolic.