Watchmen

Watchmen takes place in an alternate United States in the mid-1980’s where the existence of superheroes has had a great impact on a number of different real-world events through history, such as the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon.  In this alternate world, costumed heroes have lost their favor among the police and the public, eventually leading to the passage of legislation that outlawed costumed crime-fighting in 1977, leading to the eventual retirement of many heroes.  Despite this law however, multiple heroes stay active, whether it be through government sponsorship or sheer, unlawful vigilantism.  The story is set off with the mysterious murder of Edward Blake, who is revealed to be the costumed hero known as the Comedian, who is one of two government-sponsored agents. The Comedian’s murder leads to the involvement of a vigilante known as Rorschach, who used to work alongside the Comedian.  Rorschach’s investigation uncovers an apparent plot to eliminate current and former costumed heroes, and this leads him to warn the rest of his former allies.  Among these allies is Dan Dreiberg, a retired hero who took up the moniker of Nite Owl after being inspired by the original Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, who was a member of an older group of heroes known as the Minutemen.  Another person whom Rorschach tries to warn is Doctor Manhattan, who is the other government-sponsored hero and is the only person in the world with actual superpowers. Doctor Manhattan, who was formerly Dr. Jon Osterman, obtained the power to control matter after accidently being caught in an "intrinsic field subtractor" in 1959.  Another hero in the story is Laurie Juspeczyk, also known as the Silk Spectre, who is the daughter of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre from the Minutemen.  Laurie was Doctor Manhattan’s lover for a number of years, but several factors cause strains in their relationship and she also goes on to have a relationship with Dan Dreiberg.  The final major character in the story is Adrian Veidt, who was formerly the hero Ozymandias but went on to retire to run his own enterprises after publically announcing his true identity.  Veidt is considered to be the smartest man in the world and his different exploits lead him, in essence, to be the villain of the story.  Other notable characters include retired villain Moloch, the criminal known as Big Picture, and the remaining members of the Minutemen, including Captain Metropolis, Hooded Justice, Silhouette, Dollar Bill, and Mothman.

Characters from left to right: Ozymandias, Silk Spectre,

 Doctor Manhattan (back), Nite Owl, 

Rorschach, Comedian (front)

Watchmen was created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who are the originators of the work.  Moore was the writer for the series, and before Watchmen he created the graphic novel V for Vendetta and created the character of Swamp Thing.  After Watchmen, Moore created the monumental works of From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as working with notable characters such as Batman and Superman in Batman: The Killing Joke and Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?  Dave Gibbons was the artist for Watchmen, and some of his other notable works include contributing art to 2000 AD, Judge Dredd, The Green Lantern, and the Superman series For the Man Who Has Everything.  Currently, Alan Moore is working on books called The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic and Jerusalem.  Dave Gibbons does not have any notable publicized active works, but he recently worked on a limited series called The Rann/Thanagar War as well as the series Green Lantern Corps: Recharge. 

Alan Moore (left) & Dave Gibbons (right)

Moore and Gibbons utilize a masterful mix of words and pictures in Watchmen, as neither dominates over the other and they are each equally vital to the telling of the story.  The work contains a consistent mix of both word-specific and picture-specific combinations of words and pictures throughout the story, as occasionally pictures are not at all needed to further explain what is being said in the text and vice versa, as there are multiple occurrences where words were not needed or not used at all to explain what was going on in particular pictures.  An interdependent mix is also used frequently, as there are numerous frames where neither words nor pictures would be able to give the reader a fully detailed explanation on their own.  Moore and Gibbons also utilize a great deal of a somewhat parallel combination of pictures and words in a very unique fashion.  The story includes portions of a fictional comic called Tales of the Black Freighter, and there is a frequent mix of words from this work overlaid into the actual story of Watchmen, and vice versa.  Watchmen is definitely stylized in a very realistic fashion, as the story takes place in real places and includes a number of references to real people, including illustrations of Richard Nixon.  The realistic approach utilized by Moore and Gibbons includes extremely detailed images of both people and backgrounds, and this impacts the reader in that it somewhat minimizes the “masking effect.”  This serves to keep the reader from identifying too much with any one character, as there are a number of important people to follow over the course of the story.  Personally, I believe that the only character that can be related to by the reader is Rorschach, as his true identity is withheld until later in the story and his face is hidden behind his mask, which he himself refers to as his true face.  

     Overall, I believe that aspect of Watchmen that allows it to work best is the fact that the story is told in a non-linear fashion, with numerous flashbacks that jump around within the story.  Another aspect that works quite well for the work is the nine-panel grid layout utilized by Gibbons, as he liked the “authority” it provided.  This layout was also particularly useful for Moore because, according to Gibbons, it “gave him a level of control over the storytelling he hadn't had previously.”  In Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons successfully introduce a bevy of different, original characters and are able to provide all of their details and backstories effectively.  The biggest key to their success in this, to me, was their use of fictional documents, such as newspaper articles or hand-written letters, written by the story’s characters at the end of each chapter.  This innovative technique allows readers to gain insight into the characters of the story that might not be obtained otherwise. 

Sample of fictional end-of-chapter material

Watchmen is widely considered as one of, if not the greatest graphic novel of all time by critics, reviewers, and other readers.   The series has become one of the greatest selling graphic novels of all time, and in 2005 it became the only graphic novel to appear on Time Magazine’s "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels" list, where it was described by critic Lev Grossman as "a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium."  Entertainment Weekly also had very high praise for the work, as it described it as "the greatest superhero story ever told and proof that comics are capable of smart, emotionally resonant narratives worthy of the label 'literature'."  The legacy of Watchmen, as written by Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times is  "one that Moore almost certainly never intended, whose DNA is encoded in the increasingly black inks and bleak storylines that have become the essential elements of the contemporary superhero comic book," is "a domain he has largely ceded to writers and artists who share his fascination with brutality but not his interest in its consequences, his eagerness to tear down old boundaries but not his drive to find new ones."  Watchmen was one of two comics that inspired the creation of the Comic Sans font by Vincent Connare, and the work also spurred the creation of Watchmensch, a parody of the work of Moore and Gibbons.