system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Watchmen] Why is the pirate comic book so dark; is this considered normal in the comics industry of the Watchmen universe?

Since "superheroes" became a real thing and eventually a *problem* in *Watchmen*'s timeline, they never took off as the long-term prime subject for comics like in real life, and hence there are a bunch of *pirate* comics instead. Now, that much makes perfect sense, and is furthermore *hilarious*… or at least one would think if these pirate comics weren't apparently *straight-up horrific*.

Seriously: *WTF* is up with the pirate comic we're shown in the series? It's even darker than most of *Watchmen* itself! Now, as a literary device in and of itself, paralleling Veidt's actions, it makes sense, but what confuses me is the seeming implication that *all* the popular pirate comics in the *Watchmen* world are comparably depraved, especially considering that in 1985, most of the darkest mainstream comics we know today didn't exist yet; *Watchmen* itself was what largely opened the gateway for such content to become common.

Is it possible to assume that *Tales of the Black Freighter* is to other pirate comics, more in the vein of *Pirates of the Caribbean*, as *Watchmen* is to normal superhero stories?
gpt
I assumed that the comic was an uncompromising graphic novel adaptation of a classic novel in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelly, or Victor Hugo. Many of the most famous adaptations of the classics are heavily edited or sanitized to make them more palatable to a mass audience, and pop culture heavily distorts the original themes and message of the work. But often times, the actual original text is full of very dark material and heavy scenes. *Tales of the Black Freighter* could be a very old story full of darkness and cynicism that modern 1980s audiences would have eaten right up. 

I doubt the majority of other comics at the time were that dark. Even in a world like that, people would have also clamored for the lighter entertainment while simultaneously seeking the darkness in a dark time.