Since I’ve been reviewing these issues in the order they came out (and I took a long hiatus to pursue my master’s degree), it’s taken me quite a while to finally finish one of the many miniseries under the Before Watchmen umbrella. Amanda Conner and Paul Mounts provided us with the final Silk Spectre cover, and once again I’m not terribly impressed. It’s just a bit too vague and abstract for me. And those villains don’t mean much to me — they’ve really failed to make much of an impact over the past three issues.
The variant cover is by Bruce Timm, who was the creative force behind so many of the DC animated shows of my childhood. It’s kind of fun to see his style applied to the Watchmen universe, but it’s also a bit disconcerting. As a work of art by itself, I think it’s just … adequate.
Our story begins with Laurie sadly reading the farewell letter that the Comedian forced Greg to write. Of course, she has no way of suspecting Eddie Blake’s involvement in this affair, and instead reminisces to the multiple times her mom stood between her and boys. Meanwhile, Hollis Mason has gone into full cop mode by methodically tracking down Laurie in broad daylight. His efforts attract the attention of the Chairman, who actually gets so spooked, he decides to shut down his entire operation by having his two female assassins murder every single person involved in the scheme — even though his drugs were successfully brainwashing people to buy inordinate amounts of things they don’t need. I also think the amount of murders he’s committed would have only attracted more attention from the authorities, but the unnamed Chairman didn’t seem to care about that.
Hollis tracked down Laurie’s roommates just in time to be attacked by the Chairman’s women, but Hollis conveniently defeated them off page. When Laurie returns home, Hollis shows her that he tied up the two women, and she decides to take the fight directly to the Chairman. She gets into a brutal fight with him, finally gaining the upper hand by viciously driving the heel of her boot into his throat. As he staggers around out into the street, trying to remove the boot from his neck, Laurie picks up his gun and prepares to finish him off. It’s not entirely clear whether she actually pulls the trigger. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the Chairman is hit by a bus right at that moment and reduced to a pile of blood and bones.
Laurie lets Hollis drive her home, where she more or less patches things up with her mom. The issue ends with Sally dropping Laurie off at the infamous Crimebusters meeting, where Laurie meets Dr. Manhattan for the first time and begins dreaming of dating him just to make her mom mad.
DC only gave Darwyn Cooke four issues to tell this story, but he really needed six. We needed more time to establish the threat of the bad guys — I had a hard time figuring out who was actually in charge, and it turned out to be a guy who didn’t even have a name! It felt really out of the blue for him to suddenly go around killing everyone who worked for him. The absence of Greg and the Comedian were really felt in this issue, and everything with Laurie’s arc felt rushed. But then again, I’m not sure if I needed more time exploring Laurie’s backstory. The main Watchmen series already gave us plenty about her. And even a great like Darwyn Cooke couldn’t add anything interesting or meaningful to her story.
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