There, we are presented with a series of images-rendered in wild hues by colorist John Higgins-that portray a ruined New York City full of racially unidentifiable yellow, orange, and pink corpses.
Indeed, this implicit message is rendered even more explicitly in the full-page panels immediately following this interracial embrace. The message conveyed by the visual is straightforward: racial harmony arriving at a moment of, and ultimately through, absolute catastrophe. As their figures atomize, the comic’s illustration reduces the two to a single human silhouette, rendered in a pointillist style of black dots perfectly integrated against a white background. In one of Watchmen’s culminating scenes, a Black teenager and a white newspaper vendor run toward each other as they witness this impending extraterrestrial explosion, falling into each other’s arms just as they are incinerated by the alien’s arrival. In an effort to forestall war-and the potential extinction of the human race-a retired superhero turned business magnate named Ozymandias concocts a brilliant, if megalomaniacal, ruse: He fakes an alien invasion, crash-landing a genetically engineered squid the size of a building into the heart of Manhattan, killing millions in the process. Although the recent HBO series bearing the same name-conceived as a sequel to Moore’s graphic novel- places questions of racial justice and white supremacy at its thematic center, the original comic was far less nuanced in its exploration of race.Īn alternate history of the Cold War set in New York City, Moore’s Watchmen centers on rising tensions that leave the United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of thermonuclear conflict. In his 1953 novel Childhood’s End, a group of (questionably benevolent) aliens arrives to put an end to political conflict, racism, and animal cruelty on Earth, notably installing civil rights in South Africa.Īt the height of the Cold War, a cosmic cure for racism would reappear as the central conceit of one of the greatest graphic novels (arguably, greatest novels, period) of the 20 th century: Alan Moore’s 1987 masterpiece Watchmen. Clarke would repurpose the trope yet again, setting his sights on (among other societal problems) apartheid. Decades later, the sci-fi writer Arthur C. In other words, his heart was in the right place, even if his vision of aliens vaporizing social hierarchies was a little naïve.
He saw his alien invasion novel as being partly inspired by the genocidal “Black War” that invading British colonists waged against indigenous Tasmanians earlier in the 19 th century. For example, when Wells wrote War of the Worlds, the granddaddy of all modern alien-invasion stories, he did so at a time of increasing criticism of British imperialism. Rather, it has tended to reflect the concerns and anxieties of its historical moment, evolving without ever dying. Yet, although our cultural fascination with bigotry-busting aliens is long-standing, the trope has not remained static. It’s as though the show’s creators assumed that simply writing in an immigrant or a person with a disability would magically create compelling television in and of itself-no need for intrigue or conflict or any of the flesh-and-blood details that make an audience care about whether or not a character gets sent off to the alien glue factory.Īliens have long been imagined as a panacea for prejudice. Yet, despite signaling aspirations to tackle big-picture issues from a global perspective, Invasion’s diversity is largely ornamental, a toothless, paint-by-number multiculturalism of the sort you see on college brochures. We meet a small-town sheriff on his last day of work, a Black soldier in Afghanistan, a Japanese aerospace engineer who pines after her astronaut girlfriend, an epileptic British schoolboy, and an upwardly mobile Syrian family living in Long Island. The series tells the story of five characters from radically different walks of life as their worlds are upended by a global alien attack. The scene is a near-perfect encapsulation of Invasion as a whole, a show that raises important issues in its first three episodes-racism, immigration, homophobia, ableism-only to speed off in a getaway car before it has to confront anything too serious.