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Tales of the Black Freighter
| Timeline | Minuetmen | Nixon | Keene | Under the Hood | Crimebusters | Black Freighter | Charlton | Frontiersman | Moore | Snyder |
| Tales of the Black Freighter is a comic book that exists within the Watchmen universe. It acts as a framing device, an allegory, a mirror of the main story, and a statement on the way of life of the average person in this world. Two characters with whom the reader will spend a lot of time are the News Vendor and the Comic Book Reader, two men, one young, one old, always at the newsstand, one reading the latest issue of Tales of the Black Freighter, the other desperately seeking some human interaction, whether from the boy he allows to read without paying or from his regular customers as they wander by to pick up The New Frontiersman, or Nova Express, or Hustler. |  |
| The story told in Tales of the Black Freighter is that of a man who is the sole survivor of a brutal attack on his ship by the eponymous vessel. He has washed up on an island with the wreckage of his ship and the bodies of his crew all around him, devastated by what he has seen and suffered, and destroyed by the knowledge that the next port of call for the Black Freighter and its crew of villains is his own town, where his family will surely be slaughtered. Determined to prevent this from coming to pass, he lashes the scraps of his wrecked ship together and uses the bodies of his crew as crude and horrifying flotation devices, then sets sail to try to precede the dark ship and save his family. |  |
| As the narrator prepares his grim conveyance and takes his frightful journey, he ruminates on the events that brought him to this point and the horrors promised by the Black Freighter. As he goes, he is driven to the edge of his sanity by the very thought of it, until it is clear he is no longer the man who originally set out from his home; the Black Freighter has changed him. He snatches a gull from the sky and eats it raw, then sees his own bloody, haunted face reflected in the water's surface and doesn't recognize himself, believing that he is looking into the dead eyes of one of his dead shipmates. As his journey continues, the narrator grows increasingly certain that he cannot hope to arrive in Davidstown ahead of the dark ship, and rather than planning his family's rescue, he begins to plot his revenge for their murders. By the time his raft touches the shore of home, he has lost the ability to see anything but horrors wherever he looks. Sure that the villains he fears have taken control of the town, he cannot look rationally at any evidence to the contrary. Seeing a couple on a date, he becomes enraged, believing they must have collaborated with the pirate occupiers in order to be free, and he kills them on the spot. He continues into town to kill the brutes now living in his home, as those are surely the very people who slew his family. | |
| The narrator continues his blind quest for vengeance to its inevitable conclusion, finally realizing he has killed only innocents, including, to his ultimate horror, his own beloved wife. He flees the scene and finds that the Black Freighter never attacked Davidstown but merely waited in the nearby waters for him to commit his vile acts and condemn himself to joining their crew of villains. He swims out to the ship and takes his place among them. | |
| In Under the Hood, Hollis Mason writes briefly of the superhero comic book fad, and it is interesting to consider why that was merely a fad in this world, rather than the staple of culture it is in our own. He wrote that the Superman stories were part of the inspiration for his own exploits as a costumed hero as well as many of his fellow heroes. It can be assumed, then, that real heroes killed imaginary heroes, much the same way as in our world, video killed the radio star. Why, then, did pirates take over the imagination of the masses? Perhaps with the reality of the present having been invaded, essentially, by what were thought to be fancies of a distant future, the realm of the imaginary had nowhere to turn but back, to a harsh, easily both romanticized and made horrifying past. | |
| It is also a disturbing sign of the hopelessness and pervasive nihilism of this society that the genre of pirate comics is accepted as children's entertainment or escapist literature, ugly and violent as they are. | |
| SPOILERS below | SPOILERS below |
| Perhaps the most important use of Tales of the Black Freighter is to illustrate the journey of Adrian Veidt, a man who, like the narrator of the comic, has a mission and has committed himself to it fully but ultimately is a monster for having carried it out and must live with himself. | |
Cedric(006) |
Latest page update: made by Cedric(006)
, Feb 28 2009, 9:50 AM EST
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Tales of the Black Freighter
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