Watchmen, by Alan Moore. 1986-1987.
Set in the mid 1980s, but in an alternate universe in which Nixon is still the United States president, Alan Moore's much praised story is about a world on the brink of nuclear destruction and the place that recently legally banned superheroes have in it. It begins in rather quaint fashion, with the murder of an elder hero, The Comedian (pretty stupid name), who had been working for the government. An old ally of his, Rorschach, a masked vigilante with very dogmatic ideas about good and evil, makes it his duty to investigate this crime. One thing leads to another, and retired superheroes are forced by incredible circumstances to take a stand before the East/West arms race brings the apocalypse.
The story to this comic is very dense and rather layered. The brief paragraph I just wrote really only gives a tiny hint as to what exactly the curious reader will actually discover when diving into the thick of things. Over roughly 350 odd pages, writer Moore marries the notion of superhero comics with political/social commentary, philosophical ponderings on the nature of right and wrong, the deconstruction of a chronological narrative, the juggling of two seperate but related storylines (one being a comic book read by a character in this
Watchmen story) and offers some genuine dramatic weight to some very, very flaud superheroes. And arguably some more stuff I'm sure I left out.
What held my interest were the characters. Each was fascinating enough, either for the right reasons, such as Silk Spectre's compassion and Nite Owl's do-gooder nature, or the wrong ones, such as Rorschach's troubled doctrine on crime fighting and ideologies on right and wrong. Their stories were well linked together and I thought intriguing the notion of a world in which superheroes, unless employed by the federal government, were banned from active duty. Moore juggled the narrative nicely, especially givn that he wrestled with several character storylines, each one told with a great number of flashbacks (and Dr. Manhattan's crazy way of thinking about time. Yikes...). I admired the art of Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. everything frame is detailed and rich in colour. Every character thus not only becomes unique and memorable due to the writing, but also thanks to the efforts of the artists involved. The world feels very large and alive. I often paused from my reading to simply admire the pretty pictures. Very pretty they were indeed. Large scale moments or close quarter moments, action sequences or emotional dialogue moments, Gibbons and Higgins did a great job I felt.
As for the political and social commentary, I can understand why this was heralded as great in the 80s. It was a decade which witnessed some rather divisive political debates and waves. It also adds a certain texture to a superhero story. There's more going on than merely a Spider-man/ Green goblin stand off with Mary Jane hanging from a rooftop. The guiding politics championed by the Western governments (in this story basically the American government) and Eastern Bloc heavily influence the world these characters live in. I imagine that Moore's efforts encapsulated the ideas and fears of the counter-movement to the neo conservative zeitgeist of the 1980s. There is a great sense of paranoia that has stricken America and some of our protagonists, as there was back then. Fear of communism, fear of nuclear attack, fear of one's own government, fear of mankind's destructive capabilities. Some of those fears live on till this day in fact. I'm particularly terrified of my own destructive capabilities.
For that very reason I admire the end product. However, as I got deeper and deper into the story and as the references to Nixon, the arms race, the frustratingly barbaric and counterproductive nature we humans are faulted with piled up and so on, a strange thought occured to me. Back in 1985, a comic like this must have seemed, if I may use hyperbole for a moment, groundbreaking in a sense. And while I did genuinely enjoy myself mainly due to the rich characters and the fatalistic universe they inhabited, I kept thinking what the public reaction to the comic would have been had
Watchmen been published a couple years ago, during the height (or low) of Bush's presidency, with references to Bush, Cheney, Iraq, the Taliban and the Patriot Act. It seems to me that today's readers and media savvy populace are far more cynical and don't take kindly to heavy handed material. I wondered more than once if released today,
Watchmen would have been lambasted for its heavy handedness. The plot and characters I enjoyed very much, and while I appreciated Moore's willingness to give birth to a comic world that felt genuinely relevant, I couldn't help but roll my eyes at times and how unsubtle many bits of dialogue and moments were.
Is that just me who refused to cut the book some slack? Is such a complaint irrelevant due to the richness of the characters, a richness that requires this very politicized world? Is it irrelevant because the story's richness and quality could not survive without the obvious ham fisted moments? Am I possibly terribly off the mark because, somehow, there really isn't any ham fisted at all? Well, I wouldn't take the last option since my gut reaction was that a lot was heavy handed. It's one thing to convince a person that something is better/worse than they think, I think however it's an entirely different matter to change one's mind on what is subtle/heavy handed.
Regardless, I've typed far more than I needed to and I should stop. To sum it up, I really liked it and will go back to rad it again soon. I did not think it was perfect, but as a whole, as a final piece of story telling, I think it's very operatic, very large. Something so big and grand will usually have some small stains (except, apparently,
Casablanca), but the fact that I was intruiged from start to finish and that I want to revisit Moore's world again, and soon, is a very good sign.