ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the twenty-first-century trend for remakes, reboots, citations, adaptations, and other revisitations of cultural artifacts from the Reagan era, taking HBO’s version of Watchmen as a case study. An adaptation as well as a continuation of the comic miniseries written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, first published in 1986 and 1987, HBO’s Watchmen comments on the historical distance separating source from reboot, offering, in the process, an extended critique of the role played by superheroes in US cultural history. This chapter argues that adaptation, in this context, has at least two meanings. It is both an activist repurposing of cultural artifacts for new political purposes and a new project of adapting activist politics to simulacral conditions that, since the 1980s, have suppressed political thought and action in historically specific ways.
