Tales of the Black Freighter

If superheroes exist, nobody wants to read about them. That is the world-building. The news-stand sells Tales of the Black Freighter, and a boy named Bernie reads it while the city ends.

The story he is reading — “Marooned” — is a sailor whose ship has been taken by a hellish vessel, the Black Freighter of Brecht’s song. He rafts home on the bloated corpses of his shipmates to warn his town, and on the way he becomes the thing he meant to save them from. He murders innocents in the dark. He arrives to find he was not needed. He swims out to the Freighter, which has been waiting for a man like him.

Moore has said it is Veidt’s plot, drawn in a different register. A man convinced that only he can prevent a disaster, doing unforgivable things in the name of home, and discovering that the disaster was him. The boy does not know he is reading the other book. We do. That is the cruelty of a comic-within-a-comic that is not a joke.

It is also a non-book of the kind this catalogue said it would one day hold: not a grimoire, not a scripture, a periodical a child can buy, doing the work the grown-up story is too proud to do in caption boxes.

On the readability rating. Substantial runs of “Marooned” are drawn inside Watchmen. The rest of the anthology is a fake publication history in the appendix. You can read the sailor’s story. You cannot buy issue one.