Serier, film och adaption. Detta är tre ord som den senaste tiden har blivit allt mer förknippade med varandra. Med titlar som Spider-man (Sam Raimi, 2002), The Dark Knight (Christpher Nolan,2008) och The Avengers (Josh Whedon, 2012) har serier satt sitt avtryck i filmhistorien. Men hur ser dessa båda medium ut och vad är det som gör adaptioner av serier så attraktiva? Detta kommer undersökas närmare i denna uppsats. Inledningsvis kommer vi se närmre på Watchmen (Grafisk roman: Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1986, Film: Zack Snyder, 2009) då denna kommer användas som exempel genom uppsatsen. Därefter kommer serier att diskuteras. Hur de är uppbyggda och vilka premisser dessa medium utgår ifrån. Sedan kommer film studeras med Watchmen (2009) som utgångspunkt. Hur är filmen uppbyggd, vilka stilistiska knep används för att nå ut till publiken och vilka likheter/skillnader finns det mellan film och serie? Sedan kommer tidigare adaptionsstudier granskas och diskuteras. Avslutningsvis kommer en närläsning av en scen ur Watchmen (2009) där de ovan nämnda premisserna kommer att appliceras för att se hur en adaption från serie till film kan gå till.

Abstract There is a common assumption that graphic novels belong to the category of children’s literature, however that statement is no longer true. Indeed, the genre of the graphic novel has progressed and taken on a more serious approach, this due to largely one author, Alan Moore. Despite ever-increasing research on Moore’s famous graphic novel Watchmen, not many have touched upon Gothic influences on the novel and what effect this genre has on the characters, especially the character of Rorschach. Instead, Watchmen is often associated with such genres as political thriller, science fiction and postmodern literature. This essay will show the presence of Gothicism through an analysis of one of the main protagonists, Walter Kovacs, better known as Rorschach. I employ the well-known theories of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud. I discuss conceptual implications of the method called the Rorschach test developed by Herman Rorschach in order to deepen the psychoanalytic relevance for the Gothic elements. Furthermore, Freudian analysis of the uncanny proved to be especially useful in the analysis. Uncanny is the fearful recognition of unsettling thoughts that tell you to give in to the animalistic urge to kill, destroy and exact vengeance. The uncanny is largely the common ground between the Gothic genre and psychoanalysis, and is crucial for a deeper understanding of the novel and of Rorschach.

Watchmen has been hailed as revolutionary not only for the literary quality of Alan Moore's script and the precise execution of Dave Gibbon's art, but also for the novel's successful exploration of sophisticated subject matter and realistic moral conflict. Perhaps the most interesting question Watchmen forces us to consider is why an individual would put on the costume and don the mask, and how such a constructed persona affects the individual psychologically and morally. For those heroes that came before, the compulsion to fight crime was often an in-born ideology of justice. But for Moore's Watchmen, we find that even superheroes are corruptible, flawed, imperfect, and even (more than) a little crazy. In the wake of what is arguably one of the most influential superhero novels published to date, the comics industry saw a rise in the popularity of anti-heroes like Moore's, but it wasn't until the 1991 creation of Marvel's Deadpool that fans saw exactly what it means to be a hero in the post-atomic, post-Vietnam age. Through self-reflexivity, genre deconstruction, and dark hysteria, Deadpool shows us that it isn't so easy to walk the straight line of the righteous, and that sometimes it's much easier to submit to the madness of a chaotic, morally ambiguous world. / Master of Arts

This thesis will explore Watchmen as an event in postmodern art and literature. When a postmodern event occurs, no language game exists at that moment to make the event comprehensible. Limitations therefore of incommensurable language games are exposed and scholars are left without language, scrabbling to decipher what happened. This is the case with Watchmen. Comics and literature collided and there is no language to discuss what has come out of that collision. Through chapter analysis, character study, and inquiry into the postmodern mood this project will demonstrate Watchmen as a turning point in the discussion of comics and literature.

The current era, or postmodern context, is characterized by an overwhelming amount of anxiety concerning humanity’s future, tied to a general perception of the postmodern context as one that is defined by ‘crisis.’ This anxiety-provoking sense of crisis is, I believe, the product of a much more significant destabilization of the paradigmatic base upon which the human worldview is established. The period that extends from the Newtonian era to the late Twentieth Century has been informed by what Edgar Morin calls a ‘paradigm of simplicity’ in terms of which the universe was understood as a perfectly knowable, deterministic system. Following a series of revolutionizing discoveries throughout the Twentieth Century, however, it has come to light that this deterministic paradigm is no longer suitable as a way of understanding the universe. Instead, a ‘paradigm of complexity,’ in which the universe is understood as a complex, self-organizing system that is never totally knowable, has been posited by thinkers such as Morin and Paul Cilliers. Further, both of these thinkers, among others, argue that the acknowledgment of complexity is an inherently ethical matter, since complex systems (such as human communities) present one with difficult choices to make in uncertain situations, rather than determinate sets of rules to follow. This study aims to show that a complexity view of the human lifeworld, does not cast the uncertainty of humanity’s future as a threatening cause of anxiety and dread, but offers us a valuable opportunity for growth, adaptation and the creation of new ethical values. Certainly, an inability to come to grips with this new paradigm has led to desperately reactionary measures on the part of some to secure a semblance of the stability and control that the ‘paradigm of simplicity’ made normative. As a result, the complex reality of the human lifeworld is negated in favour of the misleading belief in the certainty and security provided by a particular metanarrative. By contrast, Jacques Lacan’s fecund poststructuralist theory of subjectivity and Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist logic offer useful heuristics for the navigation of complexity thinking that neither mistakenly negate moments of uncertainty, anomaly and paradox for the sake of certainty, nor swing to the opposite, equally unacceptable, extreme of absolute relativism. Poststructuralist logic points to the notion of a ‘complexity ethics’ which issues a challenge to the idea, stemming from the ‘paradigm of simplicity’, that it is ever possible for agents to adopt an uncompromised ethical stance. The upshot of this is to argue that it is essential for contemporary humans to learn to live with ethical uncertainty, paradox, compromise, contamination and other figures of complexity, rather than search for an impossible certainty, since this strategy leads to more realistic, moderate, and therefore less dangerous, ethical reasoning. Good popular culture texts, such as the graphic novel Watchmen, which represent the reality of a complex human lifeworld, have the power to communicate these rather difficult philosophical ideas concerning the complexity of the human lifeworld to a wide audience in a very accessible format. An analysis of the varying ethical stances taken by certain characters demonstrates, in concrete terms, just how precisely the novel confirms the poststructuralist argument concerning inescapable ethical contamination. Thus, it is with recourse to such texts that one might begin to answer more concretely the questions, ‘what does complexity imply for ethical theory?’ and ‘what might an ethics for the complex lifeworld entail?'.

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo realizar uma aproximação entre dois campos distintos: a Literatura e as Histórias em Quadrinhos. Especificamente, pretende-se aqui analisar como Watchmen constroi e organiza sua narrativa partindo de um pressuposto realista. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação realiza uma aproximação entre dois gêneros: o romance literário e o romance gráfico (graphic novel). A ascensão de ambos os gêneros já aponta paralelos entre os campos. Após essa exposição, é feita a análise propriamente dita, que compreende duas partes. A primeira se constitui do levantamento das estruturas visuais de Watchmen (balões, formato dos quadrinhos, estilo do desenho) que se organizam em um jogo entre convenção mimética e deslocamento. A segunda parte da análise tem como recorte os capítulos II e XI do romance gráfico e se debruça sobre o tratamento dispensado ao super-heroi; o que significa, no contexto de Watchmen, construir um super-heroi realista. / This thesis aims to approximate two distinctive fields: Literature and Comics. It intends to analyse how Watchmen constructs and organizes its narrative from a realistic assumption. In order to do so, this thesis approximate two genres: the literary novel and the graphic novel. The rise of both genres indicates similarities between the two fields. After that, the two-part analysis is presented. The first part consists of listing and interpreting Watchmens visual structure (speech bubbles, panel format, drawing style) and how they reveal a play between mimetic convention and displacement from it. The second part focuses on Watchmens chapters II and XI and analyses how the super-heroi character is constructed; what does it mean to make a realistic super-hero in Watchmens context.

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo realizar uma aproximação entre dois campos distintos: a Literatura e as Histórias em Quadrinhos. Especificamente, pretende-se aqui analisar como Watchmen constroi e organiza sua narrativa partindo de um pressuposto realista. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação realiza uma aproximação entre dois gêneros: o romance literário e o romance gráfico (graphic novel). A ascensão de ambos os gêneros já aponta paralelos entre os campos. Após essa exposição, é feita a análise propriamente dita, que compreende duas partes. A primeira se constitui do levantamento das estruturas visuais de Watchmen (balões, formato dos quadrinhos, estilo do desenho) que se organizam em um jogo entre convenção mimética e deslocamento. A segunda parte da análise tem como recorte os capítulos II e XI do romance gráfico e se debruça sobre o tratamento dispensado ao super-heroi; o que significa, no contexto de Watchmen, construir um super-heroi realista. / This thesis aims to approximate two distinctive fields: Literature and Comics. It intends to analyse how Watchmen constructs and organizes its narrative from a realistic assumption. In order to do so, this thesis approximate two genres: the literary novel and the graphic novel. The rise of both genres indicates similarities between the two fields. After that, the two-part analysis is presented. The first part consists of listing and interpreting Watchmens visual structure (speech bubbles, panel format, drawing style) and how they reveal a play between mimetic convention and displacement from it. The second part focuses on Watchmens chapters II and XI and analyses how the super-heroi character is constructed; what does it mean to make a realistic super-hero in Watchmens context.

This essay aims to analyze if the graphic novel Watchmen criticizes the conventions of the superhero comic genre in regards to gender. The literary theory applied is gender studies. The essay examines the visual portrayal of male and female characters, as well as the male-dominated narrative. The novel does, to some extent, satirize the genre conventions. This can be seen in the hyperbolic visual portrayals of the characters, as well as the comments made on them. However, as there is a lack of self-aware criticism, the novel could not be considered as a satire of the visual representation of genders within the genre, but rather a reinforcement of them. Furthermore, the male-dominated narrative is present in Watchmen, and Laurie could be seen as satirizing this genre convention, as she is a hyperbolic interpretation of the girlfriend archetype. However, there is little change or self-aware critique against the genre norms here as well, thus it cannot be considered satire. Laurie does, however, show criticism of the violence against women within the genre by making a number of comments on the attempted rape of her mother. This may not be satire but she does provide commentary of this trope. In conclusion, while there are instances of criticism, the novel as a whole cannot be considered satire of the superhero genre.

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Denna kandidatuppsats avhandlar tre stycken analyser av tre stycken filmscener från filmerna A Clockwork Orange, Reservoir Dogs och Watchmen, tre stycken exempel på scener där så kallad anempathetic music används. Denna form av musik kan beskrivas som att den distanserar sig från vad som händer i den rörliga bilden genom att förmedla den motsatta känslan, till exempel om musiken är glad och lättsam medan en våldtäkt sker i bild. Denna uppsats analyserar i dessa tre analysexempel vad sådan filmmusik kan bidra med för berättarfunktioner och meningspotential i filmexemplens narrativ. Resultaten från analysen visade på att musiken i de tre valda analysexemplen bidrar till ökad reflektion hos publiken och hur detta möjliggör för att anempathetic music kan ses som empathetic mot publiken och deras tolkning av filmscenernas narrativ.