Watchmen

Watchmen hit the stands when I was 14 years old and still reading Iron Man and Daredevil, sticking to classic superhero stories rather than special issues like Watchmen.  I remember my brother being very into the series when it first came out, though by the time the last issue hit the market, he was away at school, so I don’t know his final feelings about the series.  I didn’t pick up Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibson’s creation for the first time until shortly before starting this reading list, when my sister lent me her copy, sometime in 2008 or 2009.  I read it quickly and had mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I found it by turns brilliant and pretentious, insightful and tired.  I remember being especially dissatisfied with the climax of the mystery, the look of the whole puzzle once it had been put together.

The novel, as you would expect with such a dense piece of literature, benefits from a second read.  While there were a few chapters that I still thought were lacking (Chapter VI, for example, in which Rorschach’s past is revealed), I found the narrative on the whole consistently compelling, and I got entirely over the feeling that the storytellers were being pretentious.

The things that struck me are the things that would strike any attentive reader.  Gibbons rewards the reader with so many little details within the frame--from newspaper headlines, to graffiti, to background action--that it becomes a pleasure to linger on each frame and see what treasures are hidden within.  In this same vein, the geography of the main street corner featured in the story, where the Gunga Diner, the newsstand, The Utopia theater, and the Promethean cab company are located, is beautifully consistent in ways that slipped by me on the first read.  Every garbage can and architectural line are attended to, and it becomes clear to the reader only over time that scenes are taking place in the same vicinity.  The third gift Gibbons and Moore give to their readers is the clever transition, in which the positioning of characters in one frame matches the positioning of entirely different characters in another frame.  These visual connections of two different situations and groups of actors seem to me thematically linked to the story told in addition to being simply neat. 

Watchmen cares about the interconnectedness of all things, just as we are all bound up together on this Earth, sharing one fate.  The recurring visual act of zooming out from an extreme closeup to a wide shot asks the reader to see where each part exists in the larger composition.  And the main recurring structural tool employed by Moore and Gibbons is the interweaving of narrative elements, either by physically intercutting two scenes or overlapping one scene’s visual elements with the audio elements of another scene.  The best example of this of course is the way the Black Freighter comic in integrated into the scenes of the lives unfolding around us.  These acts might come across as tricks or merely cute when first encountered, but it becomes clear that the technique is thematically tied to the point of the novel.

Moore and Gibbons create such a complete and compelling alternate universe that whether you find the conclusion satisfactory or not, you cannot help but admire all the thought and artistry that went into this unique novel.