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.


Higly Overrated   December 15, 2003
 19 out of 139 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.


Smarter than the average comic   July 25, 2000
 18 out of 23 found this review helpful

This book was thoughtful and reflects the major issues of its time. Some of those issues have since gone away (who's afraid of the big bad nuke anymore? Not the majority of Americans, so the polls say), but the book still provides food for thought.

Watchmen came out a little after Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Both are pioneers in a new genre -- the graphic novel that targets adults. Dark Knight, however, simply tells a story. Watchmen went further. Watchmen includes a tremendous amount of social commentary packed in symbolism, while still telling a fantastic science fiction story.

Yes, you can enjoy the story even if you have no idea what the symbolism is for.

Yes, the drawing is extremely good. Very cinematic. (Seen the "making of" feature on The Matrix DVD? Remember the drawings of the scenes that the directors used to market the movie to producers? That's the cinematic style of comic drawing I'm talking about.)

And yes, many then-current issues have since gone away. The issue of vigilante prompted by Bernie Goetz is gone. Most people don't pay attention to arms control any more. The novelty of an actor becoming the President has worn off. The Tower Commission Report's quote from the Bible ("Who watches the watchmen?") is featured in the overleaf; who remembers the commission or its report?

None of this, however, takes away from the fact that Watchmen is a masterpiece.


An Intelligent and Fun Comic   September 8, 2003
 18 out of 39 found this review helpful

Many people have tried to convince me that the best the comics world has to offer is as good as the best that literature has to offer. I haven't seen it yet. I checked out some of this comic literature, fascinated with the form as I am, to see if this was true. Watchmen (along with the dark knight returns) is the best that the super-hero comic ever gets (so the critics say) and if this is it, then no, it's not equal to literature. The complexity seen in a Joyce novel, or Dostoyevsky, deals with more than Alan Moore has ever done in a single work (and yes I'm including From Hell and A Small Killing, even combined if you like!).

Most of what this comic has to say depends upon your experience with comics in general. If you know the formula behind super-hero comics, understand some comic history (the types of heroes found in older comics of the twentieth century), and what had become of comics by 1985 (when moore was working out this graphic epic), then you will probably enjoy this a great deal. It is a good read, for a super-hero comic.

The art, however, is weak, even considering the time period. It is functional though and does not take away from the story, the inks do that! Comics of this time period (Dark Knight Returns and before that Ronin), had access to painted panels and were not limited to the old "four colour" format, which is how this is coloured. So the comic looks only mediocre, I guess it's the story that everyone is so keen on.

The story, on it's own, is pretty good, if a little far reaching.
What we have here is the world is doomed and only our cynicism can save us. This may be true. We also have a pirate comic in this comic, that very cleverly, tells almost the same story as the central comic. The pirate story imitates arcs that have happened, and that will happen while the story is carrying on outside of this realm. Reasonably clever, for a comic writer. Best of all we have a tough to figure out "whodunnit", in classic pulp form. All these elements tie in together and the final volume of the story closes up all the stories quite nicely, yet I still have problems....why is that?

If someone had told me that this was the best comic ever, I might have given it five stars, however, what I have been told is that this is equal to literature of the highest order. On that level I give this only three stars. It is not great literature. I finished reading it in one afternoon and had completely digested it, and read it a second time by the evening. It wasn't hard to tie it all together. I still can't figure out what happened in The Grand Inquisitor (one chapter in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky), on anything other that a basic level. That basic level is more profound and potent than anything in Watchmen, which although good, doesn't even come close to living up to the hype as literature with super-heroes.

What this comic talks about more than anything is that man needs to be saved from himself, more than anything else. Heroes aren't there to save us from monsters, they're there to save us from our fellow man. The Comedian even mentions this quite explicitly. Watchmen is a good time if you know what you are getting into. It's a fun and intelligent comic that is worth reading if you like comics already.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that I do believe in an objective principle in art. I believe that there is some objective force that decides once and for all that Shakespeare is better than Septembers Cosmopolitan magazine. There has to be an objective force in art or it means nothing at all (except to you alone, which is the same thing as meaning nothing at all!). And from the comparisons I have Alan Moore is no Dostoyevsky and Dave Gibbons is no Rembrandt. That said, it is still a fun read.


Didn't expect to like it, but it deserves its reputation   March 9, 2004
 18 out of 20 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.