I just finished rereading the Watchmen Graphic Novel last night. The book deserves, in my opinion, every bit of the critical acclaim which has been lavished upon it. But to fully appreciate it, as with all works of literature and art, one must offer first an appraisal in historical-critical terms.
Watchmen was originally released from 1986 to 1987, during my junior and senior years in high school, as a series of independent comic books. I read these comics when they were first issued, and as such I consider myself a part of the book’s original audience.
Life was a bit different back then. Remember? There were no cellphones or internet. Personal computer technology was pretty new (as one of the editors of my school newspaper, I did photo-ready layout for the printers using glue and tape). Add to the cultural mix 1980’s music and fashion. Enough said.
Politically, it was a troubled time. Reagan was president, and American politics were driven by a wicked combination of unhealthy emotions: fear of nuclear annihilation, social-conservative rage at the remnants of 1960’s boomer drug and sex culture, anguish over environmental devastation, lingering guilt and regret from Vietnam, despair and cynicism caused by the memory of JFK’s assassination and Nixon’s Watergate, a persistent resentment of Johnson’s great society, embarrassment over Carter’s weakness… the list goes on. Many of these emotional maladies are still with us, though they are muted, and they go largely unfelt, it seems to me, by the tech-savvy, information overloaded, analysis impoverished youth of today.
Watchmen came into this milieu. Alan Moore wrote the book for me, but also for many others of similar and slightly older age, guys who were even more deeply and fully steeped in the world of superhero comics. The comic book audience… we were mainly boys and young men who were looking for escape, titillation, and illumination in the books we read. We were all addicted to the testosterone heavy air of the comix and game shops. I had a subscription cubby at a comic store on Burnside avenue in Portland, OR; the latest issues of whatever series I wanted were placed in that box as they came in the store, and once a month, sometimes once a week, I would stop in and purchase as many comics as I could afford.
Anyway, Watchmen blew me away. In my memory, Watchmen was absolutely groundbreaking in storyline and art. Today, the art seems less impressive… I suppose that is inevitable, since computer aided design and coloring has utterly transformed comic book production in the past 20 years. But truly, the art and design is still fantastic. The storyline bent genres and techniques with virtuosity, conducting readers through a complicated, multifaceted tale told in panels that had a storyboard like, cinematic urgency and immediacy. The volumes were punctuated with appendices of documents which had been “copied” into place from the fictional world of the text, adding depth, realism, and backstory. And showcasing Moore’s writing talents, which are considerable. Here was a postmodern comic par excellence, that broke apart the already changing conventions of comic book narrative and superhero identity and fractured them. For me it may have fractured them permanently. In retrospect I have to suggest that Watchmen was a part of the forces that drove me away from comics.
The new literary energy of Watchmen was not without precursor. Beginning in the 1980’s, the classic title X-Men had grown much darker in outlook. In this new direction it drew on an old underground tradition of gothic comic book tales (linked of course to pirate, war, horror and crime comics going dating from the pre-code era). Thus, before Watchmen, Marvel comics had already began to introduce moral complexity to the superhero archetype.
Then, from 1984 to 1986, one of the most astounding comic book titles of all time was published, Matt Wagner’s Mage. For me and others I think this title redefined what was possible in superhero storyline and art.
In 1986, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight unpacked and revealed the violence and the moral ambiguity and deviance which had always lurked just under the surface of the Batman character. And lo, moral complexity entered the DC comic universe.
I’m not trying to tell a full history here. I’m just saying that the emergence of a pivotal moment in a given body of literature is never without precedent. The ground had been laid well before Alan Moore wrote Watchmen.
But Watchmen was different. Whereas these previous titles only explored the dark side of heroism, Watchmen gave us an apocalyptic self-destruction of heroism. Not just dark, Watchmen was a hallucinatory eschatological revelation. It imagined the possibility of an alternate world, one which, from the perspective of superhero comic books, had been turned upside down. Moore’s America still had Nixon for president, and was apparently operating about one step away from a conservative martial law. In this world, superheroes are illegal. But with good reason. Moore’s superheroes (they are better called costumed adventurers, in the old style) have been reimagined and reunderstood as they probably should have been understood all along: the characters are all too human figures, products of a fascist political tendency in our psychological response to societal evil. Psychologically, in Moore’s hands, the superhero was more than a common vigilante. He or she was at best a neurotic loser, more likely a narcissistic sociopath, and at worst a real psychopath.
Moore’s “Comedian” was a nihilistic mercenary, a right wing bully and rapist, without a trace of humor. “Rorschach” exhibits the brilliant but almost autistic behavior of what Simon Baron-Cohen would call the extreme male brain, his vigilantism is deeply violent and driven by a childhood wounding that makes Batman’s upbringing seem normal. Moore’s “Nite Owl,” a character clearly modeled on Batman, is a super-smart and extraordinarily strong nerd. But his strength, braininess and underappreciated good looks are overwhelmed by his awkwardness, his self-consciousness and self-doubt, and ultimately by the pointlessness and uselessness of his work as a “hero.” What he does mostly is long for past glory, and engage is clumsy and goofy costumed play. Teamed up with Rorschach, Nite-Owl’s talents are channeled towards futile brutality, and ultimately, towards cooperation with the cynical and horrific eschaton which Nite-Owl feels powerless to oppose. The
The female hero named “Silk Spectre” is, deliberately I think, portrayed as ineffectual and weak. What drives her is a tortuous and mildly perverted family history. She is a girl in a man’s world, and the sexuality of her character overwhelms her heroism. This is, I think, a deliberate critique of the role of female heroes generally. Unconsciously longing to replace her missing father, she finds herself trapped by her costume, and constantly in the orbit of men playing superhero. Although she’s a talented martial artist, she plays a role which is at best adjunct to the various other heroes in the story, and along with Nite Owl she is forced in the end to acquiesce to a final nightmare posing as millennial utopia.
The utterly strange character of Ozymandias — he is the true superman of the book, in the Nietzschean sense of the term — has as his main talents an unrivaled capitalist brilliance melded with super good looks and Olympic-level gymnastic abilities. The character is fascinating; he lives his life in imitation of a great Egyptian solar-king, longing to surpass Alexander the Great in greatness. He has merely to speak, and he spews words reflecting an unfathomable genius for understanding social forces; well, pseudo-genius (it’s a comic book, after all). Without warning, he drops a reference to the total warfare described in the stele of Mereneptah. He is a twisted product of an excellent liberal education. The genius Ozymandias himself engineers the eschaton, driven by the isolation of his brilliant mind and far-reaching fortune to play God… the God of Genesis 6-9.
Meanwhile, the only true superbeing of the bunch, Dr. Manhattan, is not really a superhuman because he is not human at all. Endowed with truly God-like powers, this formerly human being, represents, I think, the unlimited destructive capacities of science — particularly nuclear science. He represents as well the tendency of our science and technology to outstrip ethics, rendering them entirely irrelevant, blown away by the larger perspective of the detached scientific mind, which finds magnificent, almost endless power in the vast reaches of space and in the void which separates atoms. At these scales, the desires and spiritual strivings of mankind either appear insignificant, or they appear to be best approached through the cold logic of unaccountable utilitarianism.
These are the heroes who together “save” humanity in Watchmen. What they offer us is vacant brutality, moral forgetfulness, and self-righteous paternalism.
At the heart of this book there is a really interesting pirate story, a comic within a comic. Oblivious to the eschatological scenario unfolding around him, a boy repeatedly visits a newsstand to read the story “Marooned” from The Tales of the Black Frigate. In the tale a deranged man is shipwrecked on an island. He had been driven there by a pirate ship. He becomes convinced that the Black Frigate is heading towards his homeland, and he longs to save his people from destruction. Fashioning a raft made from the corpses of his former crewmates, he races to the mainland, hoping to stop the slaughter of his family and neighbors. He arrives, he thinks, too late to save them, and so steals into town to take revenge. But he is psychotic. The ghostly evil Black Frigate had never threatened his family. It has come for him, and his soul. Mistaking friends and neighbors —fellow townsmen— for enemies, he kills and murders the people he meets. Arriving home, the would be hero then slaughters his own wife and child, mistaking them for the evildoers he fears. Finally, he is permitted a tortured self-anagnorisis. He accepts his fate as that of the damned, and swims out to join the devilish Black Frigate, which is waiting for him off shore. His story is the story also of the Watchmen. “Who watches the watchmen,” reads the graphitti on wall after wall through the book. Our “heroes” use villainy to fight an evil only they can see, and we are all the victims.
For the film, I hear they changed the ending. I had forgotten, or repressed it. If they changed it the way now I expect they might have, then certainly I understand. New York city has been purged and slaughtered in apocalyptic/post apocalyptic fantasy way too many times (most recently, in the film Cloverfield, which I recommend by the way). There’s just something about that particular fantasy that moves the modern world… I guess New York City is the New Babylon. In the Watchmen, it therefore makes sense that Ozymandias conquers it; but unlike Cyrus or Alexander before him, he accomplishes what the prophets of Israel and Christianity had only prayed for: its utter punishment for its service to the tyranny of Zion’s God.
One has to respect Moore for his capacity to utterly reframe the comic book hero, and to rethink it in an era of Republican militaristic and Christian right wing ascendancy. For that reason, it seems to me that a reissue of the comic as a movie would have made more sense in 2006-2007. Maybe that was the original plan. I understand that there were massive production delays. I really look forward, even in today’s more hopeful time, to seeing this story brought to life with 21st century effects. There is something timeless and moving about this dark apocalypse. Thank you Alan Moore (writer), Dave Gibbons (artist) and John Higgins (colorist), for your terrifying visions. May we remember your warnings and take comfort that we haven’t yet murdered all our own.