Well past suicidal by now, I am rereading two comics quasi–simultaneously, an old Steve Engelhart Captain Marvel (#39) and the Earth X trade paperback. In both, I note with dry interest, Uatu the Watcher is portrayed as an extreme sports asshole.
The Watchers generally are portrayed badly or well, ranging from Christly to diabolical, entirely depending on the scattershot whims of the writer. Some of the Sixties "Tales of the Watcher" stories (Larry Leiber I believe) even had him engaging in romantic skirmishing clearly beneath his cosmic status:
Johnny, nota bene, is reading a Marvel comic about the Watcher. Not much has been written about the comics that exist within the Marvel universe formerly numbered 616. That recent invention, Gwenpool, lives on a sort of Marvel equivalent of DC's Earth Prime and reads the same comics we do. The evil "Superboy Prime" in DC used to read DC comics from our world. Earth Prime is (or was) ostensibly "our" world. There is a Fantastic Four also where the team are discussing John Byrne's creepy obsession with the She-Hulk in the comics in their universe.
Incidentally, I like how gormless the Thing looks in this panel. Totally deserving of Johnny's hard superior scorn! Cookie Monster face. Although the thought bubble isn't visible, he's obviously going "Duh –– whu–– wha..." Me want cookie.
There was some gooey bad sentimentalism written around Uatu more recently, don't have the citation to hand, sorry, about how he took a wife and fathered a child. Then he got shot dead and his body was crudely mutilated on the surface of the moon by an old Ghost Rider villain, The Orb. That penny-ante short-con small-time pissant! He gouged out the Watcher's eyeballs. Bad move by Jason Aaron, but not as bad as that ultra-shitty Nightcrawler In Heaven book he recently penned which was among the worst cack THIS CORRESPONDENT has ever witnessed –– at least since that Fantastic Four where they went to Heaven to get the Thing back, and God was Jack Kirby.
This bilgewater from the hand that gave us Scalped and that good run on Ghost Rider? He seems, like Rick Remender before him, to have reached the back wall of creativity in his spastic pursuit of Marvel money.
I don't know what Aaron's nebulous fixation with eyes is in Original Sin (which, like Bendis's terrible Age of Ultron and Remender's often-excellent Red Skull/Apocalypse/Kang-fest in Uncanny Avengers was overshadowed by the mighty HICKMAN's Secret Wars, each of which seems to have almost drifted out of continuity) –– but it is redolent of Emerson –– E.T.A. Hoffmann –– Longstreet –– and leads into Freud of course.
"Eyeballs are testicles. Also: the moon's a balloon." –– SIGMUND FREUD
The seemingly arbitrary variedness of Uatu's responses to human stimuli are noted rather dryly by Steve Engelhart in Captain Marvel #39 when he helpfully summarizes all of Uatu's previous blunders into the workings of men. Anyway, the heterogeneous responses to Uatu and his kin (see also late numbers in Tom DeFalco's excellent run on Fantastic Four, when "Aron, the Rogue Watcher" –– initiated by Engelhart in the aforementioned Captain Marvel #39 and again in his also-superb run on FF –– rears his head) reflect
a larger division in the American –– if not the global –– mass– (un–) consciousness. Is government surveilling good or bad? Is it right that Uatu is watching our every move? The Watcher is a Cold War-era phantasy on surreptitious monitoring, particularly relevant now in the wake of Edward Snowden, Wikileaks etc. etc. ETC. My comment is apt, but dull. Not for nothing is this weblog entitled "Boring Comics. It is perhaps fitting that Jason Aaron (wrong or right his wayward instincts at this point) had the ultimate Marvel Cold War spy, Nick Fury, destroy & then supplant the Watcher.
(Whatever happened to that particular storyline? Where is it in the "post-Secret Wars universe"?)
In those Strange Tales comics by artsy alternative Fantagraphics / RISD / Mome types, meanwhile, the reinterpretation has a sexual emphasis. The Watcher as voyeur. He is portrayed as a peeping tom and a serial masturbator (fixated, again, on She-Hulk –– and dispatched, again, with some premonition, by Nick Fury).
Haven't the data.
Check your Marvunapp.
Leave it to Uatu on this occasion to provide the educational conclusion:
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