Watchmen (Absolute Edition)

Fanatically, obsessively plotted and structured. Completely morally terrifying. And sometimes searingly funny in the midst of the very bleak Reagan-era political world it occupies.Like a whole strain of great, great authors of the 20th century, Moore takes an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire history of his medium and genre and uses it to mow down his predecessors--not by bettering them, but by blowing them up into their ultimate, horrifying or ridiculous conclusions. So we get the fascist implications of depending on masked vigilantes, we get the insane hypocrisy of the prudery grafted onto comic books by censors, all the hilarious and creepy freudian and queer subtexts in comics (like Batman and Robin, say), and beyond all of that we get the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship that tainted 50 years of culture and politics, and the even greater insanity of what it looked like it might have taken to break its hold on us.I know this is over the top. But dear lord, the amount of talent and planning put into this very big comic book novella is really daunting. ( )

It took me well over a year to finish this book. No, I'm not joking.

I started reading it the week before the movie came out, back in March 2009. I read about halfway through... and felt horrible. Not about myself, but I started to get this sinking sensation about the world, the universe, about life, and I realized... the Watchmen story is SO DEPRESSING that it was affecting me and my outlook. I also think I was in a bit of a dark place going into the book, so it wasn't the right choice at the time.

So I set the book aside, and didn't come back to it until a few weeks ago. I hadn't meant to wait so long before picking it up again, but you know how life gets when there are a million books to read...

I finished the book without issue, and I have to say -- it's brilliant. The ending is so fantastic, so unexpected, so bleak, and so depressing that I can't help but continue to reflect on it time and time again. This is not a happy story. There's nothing uplifting about it. You will not come away from this thinking "well, that was jolly good, let's go for ice cream!".

But it will make you think, ache, and respond in whatever way you can -- and ultimately, that's what matters. ( )

If you are looking at this book already, you obviously have some idea of the plot of the Watchmen, and I don’t really need to review it. "Absolute Watchmen" is more of a showcase piece, and I am going to review the bonus materials that come with the graphic novel instead, because that is what differentiates this to the normal collected Watchmen novel, and this is what you would get this book for, over the cheaper Watchmen graphic novel.

Absolute Watchmen includes the twelve-part story that makes the graphic novel (obviously), plus a sampling of the draft work that Moore and Gibbons done to produce the graphic novel. What has been included is interesting to those whom enjoyed the graphic novel, and those who want to see the efforts that go into producing such a work.

There’s Moore’s after thoughts on the graphic novel “The Watchmen”, the original proposal for the graphic novel (using Charlton comics characters), character outlines, first using Charlton characters, then edited to characters that readers of Watchmen might be more familiar with, thumbnails of several pages, sketches in various stages of all the characters in the story, and Moore’s written script for two pages of the novel (the very first page and the very last), which Gibbons illustrated.

It’s hard not to be disappointed with the bonus content, really. Although the artwork and the like is quite interesting, I do not think that the added material does enough to justify the extra expense – there should have been more material. John Higgins, colourist, for example, does not even get to discuss any of his involvement in the graphic novel, and Moore only discusses some of the major themes that went into the novel in cursory detail, and so forth. The “Watchmen” story deserves a larger "making of" section than what this collection gives it, and I hope that it one day gets such treatment.

That said, the book gets five stars because of "The Watchmen" graphic novel, which is well worth reading. If I were rating the extras alone, it would get three or three-and-a-half stars. ( )

For a reader like me, Watchmen by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins is the perfect superhero comic. It’s a standalone comic/graphic novel series, with characters created for the series and a complete story arc. The back-story is incorporated into the comic itself, and I didn't have to worry about where to start or whether I had missed anything by not following the series for years.

In Watchmen, none of the characters are wholly good or wholly evil. I can’t say that I loved any of them (although Dr. Manhattan was probably my favorite), but I did love reading about them. Moore does a great job giving each character a consistent ideology and clear motivations while leaving room for them to grow as the story develops. I could have done with a stronger female character; the two versions of the Silk Spectre just aren’t the kickass heroines I want to read about.

The story jumps back and forth in time, and each twist raises as many questions as it answers. I never could quite tell where it was going, and I couldn’t stop reading because I had to know now!!! The one thing that I didn’t like was the weird seafaring story that appeared in some of the scenes, sometimes running on the same panels as the main Watchmen story. (A character is reading the story in a comic as other characters converse around him.) I couldn’t quite figure out how to read the two threads simultaneously, and it felt like noise to me.

Watchmen clearly demonstrates how graphic novels and superhero stories to be complex, thought-provoking, heart-breaking, and full-on entertaining.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

http://geekylibrarian.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/retro-review-watchmen/ ( )