Watchmen

I don't think I've thought about any other book over years and years as much as I've thought about [b:Watchmen|472331|Watchmen|Alan Moore|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442239711l/472331._SY75_.jpg|4358649]. The themes explored by this book haunt me, inspire me, worry me. It's a masterpiece. Which is not to say it's without flaws! Some of the interstitial material is pretty weak and doesn't add much of anything to the story. One storyline in particular also really drags emotionally for me, important though it is to the rest of the book. And the female characters are bland, which is a disappointment for a book in which all the other protagonists are rich, complex, deeply interesting people. Still, show more such is the power of this work that it remains a masterpiece regardless of the flaws. show less

My thoughts on this are so hard to pin down. The first time I read it, so many years ago, it already had such a following around it, and I felt somewhat disappointed. It didn't seem to measure up. Yet, after putting it down, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Still, probably 20 years since I first read it, I have such mixed feelings about it. The plotting of the book is superb, and the characterizations are good, although some of the tropes that Moore goes back to again and again are in this work as well. There are parts of the book that drag, and I can certainly be happy and fulfilled if I never read the damn pirate story again. But I can't deny that this story got under my skin and has never left; it demands a critical analysis more show more than any other comic I can think of, and it gives you plenty of things to analyze. show less

Dark, romantic, ironic & self-aware adventure that rewrites recent history (the US wins the Viet Nam war & Tricky Dick is re-re-elected to a 3rd term), and plays grimly with the yearning we have for super-powers. Regular people don costumes and assume mysterious titles so they can fight crime and be celebrities. Idealism is tripped up by those darn feet of clay -- good guys and bad guys presented in shades of gray. And the big question: do the ends justify the means?

All the while that I was reading the Watchmen, I wondered: what took me so long? All those years gone by, when this could have been something I could think about, something I could talk about, something I could revisit. Whether it was the moral ambiguity or the layering of the stories or the lostness of the heroes, I couldn't say, but I was mesmerized from the moment I picked the book up. Maybe the thing that was most interesting though was this: This had to be a comic. While many comics are simply movies on the page, using the forms and conventions of the cinema for the visual elements of their storytelling, Watchmen did things it would be hard to imagine either a book or a movie doing. When Watchmen won respect for the comic book, it show more was all the more true because its story couldn't have been told any other way. show less

Entirely hopeless, totally grim, and filled to bursting with characters one simply can't like or even find common ground with, this graphic novel still packs a huge, reverberating punch.

The scope and clarity of the vision is immense, maybe even epic. The quality of the illustration is very high indeed. The text bits interspersed were a welcome relief from the intense graphics. The comic book story about the bleak ship of the damned, which was both part of and not part of the narrative, was intense and haunting. I'll probably never forget the imagery of that raft. *shudder*

It's a tour-de-force with no one to like, no one to love, and certainly no one with which to identify. This combination gave a certain necessary distance which allowed show more me to finish the book without running screaming into the sunset. I kept thinking of the exchange between Boromir and Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Boromir is afraid to venture into Lothlorien because he's heard that no one comes out unscathed, and Aragorn responds: "Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth."

I have not come away from this book unchanged. show less

Watchmen is a classic of the graphic novel medium and in twenty years will, I am sure, be accepted alongside purely textual works such as Brave New World and Dubliners as exemplary "literature".

The book tells the story of several masked crime fighters, of the Batman mould, but does so with such attention to practical detail that Moore's work reads like an alternative history rather than mere comic book fantasy. Key events and individuals of the 20th century are skilfully dropped into the story and provide a way for Moore to comment on politics, decision making, human nature and the changing technological face of the human race.

If that all sounds too heavy, I must stress that it's not - Watchmen is a thrilling and exciting adventure show more story in its own right but is constructed with so many layers and plot strands that even after three readings I am still seeing new perspectives and messages in the work. For example, the character of Dr Manhattan (a blue superhuman capable of extremely powerful matter manipulation) is both a musing on the irrational traits of humans (by removing such traits from Dr Manhattan) and a set up for a "what if" scenario in the reader's head where one country in the world were to obtain a weapon so powerful it made them militarily indomitable.

It takes a talented writer to appear to conform to genre expectations whilst simultaneously dissecting them and stimulating in the reader a re-examination of the world around them, and for this Moore's reputation as one of the very best British writers is deserved.

Watchmen is an exciting, thought provoking and detailed work that manages to be intelligent without talking down to the reader. Well worth reading. show less

This review appeared on my now archived blog in January 2009.

I was never into comic books as a kid. They were just...lame. It wasn't just the fact that the characters were these two-dimensional cheezy dorks in fluorescent costumes. Stories dragged on pointlessly. Oh wait, there was a point: to keep people buying them to find out if Ultra-Fantastic Man was going to be victorious in his fight against Mr. Really Mean Dude. But since the Ultra-Fantastic Man comic book wasn't canceled, he obviously won while Mr. Really Mean Dude got away or was temporarily incarcerated. Either way, he'd be back. Lame. Even the comic books themselves were tissue thin paper colored with half-assed ink.

In college, I had a roommate who was an avid collector. show more This guy defied the stereotype. There was no mistaking him for a dweeb. He was a 6' 2" jock. He played high school basketball and, although he didn't make the college team, still played it for fun. He was an all around fan of sports in general, easily segueing from basketball to football without missing a beat.

He took it upon himself to inform me that the comic books had evolved. "Graphic novels" had emerged and elevated the pathetic industry into something resembling traditional fiction. They even used real paper!

For instance, Batman was revitalized by Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns. Miller would later go on to create 300 and Sin City, which were both later made into successful films.

But the one that stood out from the rest of the graphic novels was Watchmen, written by Alan Moore (Moore would later go on to write The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V For Vendetta and were subsequently turned into films). In it, Moore imagines an alternate reality where superheroes really existed and explores what impact they would have on society.

The story is set in the mid 80s. Nixon is still president thanks to the help of these superheroes (the outcome of the Vietnam War was decidedly different) and the repealing of the 22nd amendment. Watergate? Buried, along with those nosy journalists. Cold War tensions are high and threatening to turn hot as the Soviets are tired of getting boxed in by Pax Americana.

The relationship between the public and the superheroes isn't so great. After initial gratitude for fighting crime, things turn sour. The cry of "Who Watches The Watchmen" goes out and is scrawled in graffiti everywhere. The police grow to resent the superheroes, seeing them as nothing more than costumed vigilantes reveling in the glory. They go on strike and hold protest rallies. Ultimately, Congress passes a law banning superheroes, unless they work directly for the government. Those that don't retire or go into hiding.

Meanwhile, someone is eliminating superheroes. The first one to go turns out to be one of the government sanctioned guys. And since he's working for Nixon, you know his hat can't be white. His death drags the others out of retirement (and hiding) to figure out what's going on.

Unlike your typical comic book superhero, the superheroes in Watchmen don't have super powers, except for one guy. They're all just normal people with good fighting skills and gadgets, a bit like Batman. The one that does have super powers, Dr. Manhattan, can re-shape matter with just a thought. He gets lost in a conundrum over time, experiencing it all at once. One moment he's reliving the accident that made him what he is, the next he's on Mars building sand castles contemplating his post-human state.

Other characters wrestle with the way their lives turned out or what the whole point was. Truth, justice, and the American way? Some wonder if that's a multiple choice question. They certainly don't agree with one another. Was it really about doing good? Was it just a costume fetish?

And underneath it all is the comic book within the comic book. A teen reads about "Tales of the Black Freighter," a pirate ship comic. Moore and Gibbons, the illustrator, deftly weave the events of "Watchmen" with "The Black Freighter" together with the narration from one paralleling the other. And there are the clever little segments at the end of each chapter: excerpts from an autobiography written by a retired superhero, a treatise on the study of owls, interview excerpts with retired superheroes, and articles on missing persons that figure in the story.

You wouldn't get this sort of literary skill with old style comic books. They were all "bam", "kapow", and "you haven't seen the last of me" crap. Watchmen helped change all that. While it didn't turn me into a collector, it did teach me to appreciate the medium and look at it with an open mind. I've picked up a couple stories, and even got into the Sandman series. None of that would've been possible without Watchmen and the other graphic novels of the mid-80s.

I haven't spoken to that old roommate of mine since graduation. However, I'm sure that he'd be pleased to see that graphic novels have received their due and then some. show less