Watchmen

by Alan Moore

illustrated by Dave Gibbons

(New York: DC Comics, 1987)

Trade Paperback, 416 Pages, Graphic Novel

ISBN: 9780930289232, US$19.99

From the Cover: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the Watchmen? Someone does. Someone who’s trying to kill them all, one by one. Time’s running out for the Watchmen…

My Review: So, I’ve been avoiding doing any actual work the last two days. I have two papers to write and had papers to grade, but I just haven’t been “feelin’ it” lately, so I pulled Watchmen off of the library shelf in the front room Sunday afternoon (I had checked it out on a whim on our Saturday trip to the library) and have been reading to, as I said, avoid doing any real work.

In my misspent youth, I was into comic books. I was a Marvel reader. I enjoyed the exploits of Gambit, Wolverine, the Punisher and Ghost Rider, little knowing that a lot of what I liked about those characters—their moral ambiguity, their personal character flaws, their equivocation—owed so very much to what Alan Moore penned in the mid-1980s. The Comedian, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Ozymandias are all direct influences on the characters that have come after them (and even some that have come before). Really from what I understand of the comic book/superhero world (of which I only have a casual knowledge of), it was the immense popularity of Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (which, incidentally came out the same year as Watchmen) that changed the way the public viewed their superheroes.

All this aside though, as a burgeoning literary critic and academic-in-embryo, Watchmen fascinates me on a literary level. This is a plot and story that is easily the equal of the best Cold War-era writers, such as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. As some one who has been working to make the case that Stephen King is not only worthy of critical inquiry but can sustain it, far be it from me to dismiss Watchmen because it is “just a comic book.” That statement oversimplifies a very snobbish literary world view and causes one to overlook the fact that while, yes, this is “just a comic book” it is a comic book unlike any comic book before it … and after it for that matter. There have been many pretenders to Watchmen’s throne, but all have fallen short (if that doesn’t sound too pretentious). The cultural critique and insightful Cold War commentary that Moore has created in this format is nothing short of amazing. I don’t mean that to sound patronizing either, I’m not saying “Oh, look at what the comic book writer was able to do. You deserve a gold star.” No, what I am saying is that Moore took a format that was relatively simplistic and black-and-white in terms of its politics (as well as being deeply conservative) and turned it into something that was insightful, biting, relevant in its immediacy and even revolutionary (if that’s not too loaded a term for you).

Add to all of this the fact that Moore does this in the mid- to late-80s and it is nothing short of astounding. That Moore is able to do what he has done in Watchmen from within the Cold War rather than from without (i.e. at a distance of time) in terms of social commentary and critique makes Watchmen worthy of anyone’s attention, setting aside that it has a kick ass story; the story, in my mind is secondary to the critique.

Before I go (it is nearly 3:00 a.m. on the West Coast as I write this and I have to be up and teach English 101 at 8:30) I want to say that I think Watchmen has taken some unfair hits in the last decade (it’s weird to think that 2000 has been a decade ago) as tired and predictable from mainstream critics and especially in the run up to and in the wake of the 2009 film. What one has to remember, especially as the release of Watchmen fades into the fog of the last 24 years, is that Watchmen was existential and morally ambiguous and ambivalent before many of the other comics were. Yes, there was The Punisher, and Wolverine, but they still operated on a level of “good,” “justice” and “right.” In Watchmen, what’s “good” and “just” and “right” isn’t always obvious, and these are concepts that are often contradictory in Moore’s universe, and as such, it all makes for a much more interesting and complex story.