My first run-through put to bed any comparisons I would've made between Watchmen and Mr. Miller's Batman tale, `cuz there really is no comparison-the former funnybook is far more enjoyable than the latter! It was one of the few TPBs longer than eight issues that I've ever read from cover to cover in one sitting! As for that whole "requires a second reading" deal: I'll be dipped if the people making such statements aren't right on the money! I went through Watchmen a second time, and picked up on all sorts'a stuff I hadn't paid attention to the first time `round! Of course, having already read it once, it's easier to follow the second time through, which in turn makes it easier to sift through the subtle foreshadowing events, flashbacks, backstory, and subplots. So maybe those "intellectual-wannabes" are on to something after all! Or maybe I'M the one with A.D.D., who knows. All I know is, every time I give Watchmen a read, I'm unbelievably obsessed with finding out every little snippet of `hidden meanings' and `subtle nuances'... it's become a sickness with me. I find myself trying to come to grips with the book's alternate-reality setting (Nixon serving his fifth term as prez in 1985; the U.S. won the Vietnam War; electric-powered cars are the standard mode of transportation; etc.). I become fixated on seeing the foreshadowing elements contained in the end-of-chapter articles "written by" or related to the book's characters. I try to get into the minds of the core characters and make efforts to understand what motivates them, especially Rorschach's cold, mentally-unbalanced and uncompromising approach to solving crime, and the nigh-godlike Dr. Manhattan's gradual severance from his human side. To make a long story short, I read and processed Watchmen in a way that I'd never done with any other four-color tale (or any other form of literature for that matter), and found it to be an unusual and enlightening experience. Yeah, enlightenment from a comic book... who'da thunk it?

All right, time for me to top this all off with my assessment of the recurring face-with-blood-covering-the-right-eye dealie. I'm aware that there's been some discussion regarding the symbolism of this image-- what it means, why it keeps popping up the way it does, and so forth. After processing all the info and other peoples' thoughts about it, I finally arrived at my own conclusion: there is no actual significance to the `stained face'- Moore & Gibbons intentionally placed this `sign' in various parts of the book to make people believe there's some deeper meaning behind it when there really isn't any at all. Simply put, they're goofing on the readers, testing them to see if they, like the late Comedian, "get" the gag. It's sortuva Andy Kaufman kinda thing, you know? Hey, wait a minute... dear lord, I'm startin' to sound like one of those stereotypical pompous academic types who deconstruct every piece of literature they read to show everybody how scary-intellectual they are, aren't I? Never thought I'd see the day when something like that would happen! But I suppose there's a first time for everything...

`Late


Didn't expect to like it, but it deserves its reputation   March 9, 2004
 22 out of 24 found this review helpful

Having long heard Watchmen's praises, I resisted reading it because I dislike the late 80's and 90's ultraviolent comics, and I assumed Watchmen to be the quintessential comic of this type. I've finally read it, and I was wrong. It deserves its reputation. Violence serves theme and plot without being exploitative.

SPOILER: I'll discuss the story's ending. I'll also compare Watchmen to other works, such as Kingdom Come.

I think Watchmen is basically a condemnation of ubermensch theory (Nietzsche's idea that "supermen" are entitled to violate society's moral laws, imposing their will on those "inferior" to themselves. Hitler infamously used the theory to justify Nazism. I concede I am no expert on Nietzsche.), and an accusation that superhero stories endorse this philosophy by lionizing vigilantes. Watchmen also attacks the genre's simplistic good vs. evil morality.

Only one character has "superpowers" to justify claims of superiority, yet Dr. Manhattan takes too little interest in human affairs to want to control others. On the contrary, he lets himself be used as a tool, hoping to retain his humanity by pleasing people. Yet he's now too detached to morally judge his orders, becoming a living military weapon. Apparently, desire for power over others is for mortals living among mortals--like Ozymandias, the archetypal Aryan "superman": a blonde, blue-eyed, physically perfect, supremely brilliant, self-made billionaire.

Achieving peace through slaughter, Ozymandias, like his hero Alexander, embodies Nietzsche's belief that ends justify means. If paradise is attainable through atrocities, as Nazi and Soviet propaganda claimed, is it worth it? And, once the eggs are broken, should one reap the benefits of the sin? (I ask this sitting comfortably in California, stolen first from Native Americans, then from Mexico.)

Rorschach--Watchmen's brutal, uncompromising conscience--says no, and his journal seems to give him the last word. Yet Rorschach tortures for information, sometimes needlessly. Besides, his winning may mean Armageddon.

In keeping with a thought experiment in Nietzsche's worldview, Watchmen's universe is an apparently godless one, as stated by several characters. Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov justifies murder through Neitzschean arguments, but then feels remorse and, through this reluctant acceptance of higher morality, comes to believe in God. C.S. Lewis's arguments in favor of God's existence hinge on morality's independence of human preference. Watchmen's ending is too ambiguous for any divinely transcendent morality or providence to be clear to the characters or reader. As a Christian, I acknowledge the realism of this ambiguity, for even assuming that God exists and His will constitutes absolute morality, His moral intent is rarely as discernable in real life as in melodramas (the classic example of divine inscrutibility being Job's sufferings in the Bible). As Hollis Mason says in chapter 3, "Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything really gets resolved."

I like Watchmen--but fear I now better understand why the genre degenerated following its publication. It's a damning attack on superheroes, yet publishers couldn't stop printing their bread and butter, so self-indictment pervaded superhero books of the following years as they struggled with Moore's accusations. Also, as Neil Gaiman observes in his introduction to Busiek's "Astro City: Confessions," the easiest "riff" of both Watchmen and Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" for hacks to steal was darkness, not depth.

There are other reasons for the so-called "Iron Age's" violent nihilism besides Watchmen and DKR's influence. Such trends were already growing in early 80's comics. DC had ravaged almost its entire stock of characters in 1985's "Crisis on Infinite Earths." There was also the need to satisfy reader bloodlust once the maligned Comics Code, for better or for worse, became a rubber stamp. Universally recognized characters synonymous with virtue in the public imagination became brutal, wrathful, petty--and if heroes became jerks, villains became the most lurid sadists imaginable. This culminated in the near-plotless splatterpunk and exploitative sadism of the early Image Comics. "Good vs. evil" became "merely evil vs. nauseatingly evil." Moore expressed dismay that things took the direction they did in those years.

Watchmen's theme is: if Nietzsche were right, as superhero comics claim, that would be terrible. It took a decade for superhero writers to rebut this accusation. Their answer came in Waid and Ross's "Kingdom Come" and was: We never claimed Nietzsche was right--the essence of superheroes is that the stronger someone is, the LESS excuse he has to abuse the weak, and the greater his obligation to them. (As Stan Lee wrote years earlier: "With great power there must also come--great responsibility!" Or, as Moore himself has Superman say in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, "Nobody has the right to kill... not [even] Superman. Especially not Superman!") KC portrays a higher morality--indeed, a God-given one, delivered through the mortal Norman McCay. Perhaps it requires divine perspective to see that an ant who can shatter mountains is no better or worse than his fellow ants. Unlike Watchmen, but like most superhero comics, most of KC's characters have "powers"--flight, invulnerability, etc.--differentiating them from general humanity in a way that even bullet-catching Ozymandias is not. Yet they're not blessed/burdened with near godhood like Dr. Manhattan (staggeringly powerful even by superhero standards, Manhattan perceives all moments simultaneously, and creates and destroys life at will. He has no common reference with humans.). Powerful, yet mortal, they have no more free license to sin than anyone. Probably less. KC portrays a world which needs to relearn this, just as the comics industry needed to relearn it. (One shortcoming: unlike Watchmen, KC isn't self-contained. It assumes reader familiarity with Superman, Batman, etc. and with ultraviolent comics. )

KC and Watchmen bookend the Iron Age. Watchmen unintentionally (I say unintentionally because Moore apparently laments the fact) helped begin it, and KC helped end it.

Yet despite spawning these trends, Watchmen itself is breathtaking, complex literature which takes masterful advantage of comics' visual medium.

Warning: This is not an acceptable comic for children. An R-rated story with lots of sex and violence, Watchmen is a story for grown-ups.


Higly Overrated   December 15, 2003
 21 out of 159 found this review helpful

Okay, first of all, I'm not a huge fan of superhero comics. I do however like comics that have a certain depth to it, so when I read al the praizing i became interested. This one was supposed to be different. It supposed to be more than just a comic, more than just a bunch of superheroes.
It starts of okay, but pretty soon I had to admit i wasn't all that impressed. Actually, I found it all a bit tedious. The wrtinig became less and less impressive, the story less and less challanging and by the time I was at the middle of the book, I was totally bored.
There are people around who insist on comparing this stuff to great works of literature. I wonder if they ever read any.


The Comedian is Dead, but not Forgotten   May 6, 2002
 20 out of 22 found this review helpful

Long before "Kingdom Come" meditated on a world without heroes, around the same time as Frank Miller's "Dark Knight" returned, and executed more forcefully than the "X-Men"'s story of Sentinels and Mutant Registration Acts, Alan Moore & company asked "Who watches the Watchmen?"

Set in a world where heroes and vigilante justice have run their course, and the last era of superheroes are living out their days quietly with their own ghosts, "Watchmen" is an amazing piece of literature and comic book artistry. The series itself, twelve issues now commonly packaged in one booklet, is sprung from the golden age of graphic novels - the 1980's, where graphic novels told stories and presented images where normal comics, movies, and televison shows feared to tread. Perhaps most importantly, the themes of the story ring as true today as they did then, and the emotionally-invested reader will perhaps see themselves in the everyday characters talking sports and entertainment as the newspaper headlines blare klaxons of war and pending doom. Society entrusts its safety to a greater body politic, but who watches the watchmen and what is the price paid for handing over the responsibilities of self-defense and indulging in a comfortable apathy?

These are the driving themes behind "Watchmen", a graphic novel so stunningly well-written and well-drawn that I do not hesitate to recommend it to even the most ardant skeptics who look upon comics with disdain, never thinking to read anything remotely associated with them. "Watchmen" represents the perfect synergy between the use of pictures, the potency of the written word, and the sublime power of symolism that drives artists wielding either brush or pen to record their art permanently on canvas or paper. A worthy investment that stands tall amongst the great literary works of the latter part of the 20th century.


Perfection.   December 11, 2000
 19 out of 21 found this review helpful

I'm not a long-time fan of comics- I got into the medium when a friend loaned me some _Sandman_ books. So I can't say whether it's true that Watchmen redefined the industry when it came out. I can say that it changed my expectation of what can be done in a comic book.

Unlike every other superhero book I've read, this one starts from the highly logical premise that it's not *normal* to be a costumed crimefighter. These people must have issues. Then we throw in the stunned reactions of the costumed heros when the first SUPERheroes show up, an interpretation of how they could have changed history, and one of the most morally ambiguous endings ever, and you have one excellent plot.

There's more than plot to look at, though. The art is quite well done, and the writing is richly textured. Moore obviously had the entire story well planned before he started writing it, as bits at the beginning that seem inconsequential become resonant with the broader themes of the story when the punch line hits issues later. No other comic does so well upon repeated readings.

Not everyone will like the bleak tone of _Watchmen_, but if you're a fan of comics, you owe it to yourself to read it.