Watchmen
The big reading list continues, and despite having four — yes, four — books on the go, last night I managed to check yet another title off my spreadsheet. While I didn’t intend to read this particular title so soon, circumstances (namely being stuck in Lethbridge waiting on a tire repair and a Chapters within walking distance) found me idly reading the first part in a bookstore, buying a copy, then ploughing through it over a handful of night time reads. Thus, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel now sits on my bookshelf aside the small handful of other comic compilations I’ve perused in recent years, but not likely for long: I’m thinking of a re-read in the near future.
The mini-review:
I won’t belabour the story. Likely — particularly since ninety percent of the folks who have not read the actual comic from the eighties have now probably seen the film adaptation (though, I have not) — you know the story: a loose collective of publicly-exiled costumed quasi-superheroes investigates a plot to have them killed off as the world edges towards a nuclear showdown with the Russians. The story, I found myself thinking, was recently poached by Pixar (to a small extent) in the movie The Incredibles, though in that version it was deeply Disney-fied. Watchmen is much darker, of course, full of gore and destruction, politics and powerful overlapping narratives that twist the story across twelve volumes of ever-building plot. But in the end I found it to be very much a story of megalomania gone deeply awry: man becomes a real life super hero and then transcends beyond that role to become the director behind a fanciful drama of life and death upon a worldwide stage, killing millions to save billions, and self-righteous in the part. A critique of the very concept of super-heroism? Or an indictment of propaganda? Neither would be far off Moore’s stylings.
Jebus, you only just now got around to reading Watchmen?? I’m shocked… shocked and disappointed. Shocked, disappointed, and a little bit hungry.
As for your analysis, I think you got it about right. Really, I think of it as Moore asking a simple question: If superheros are real, what kind of weird, messed up people would actually make the choice to dress up in silly costumes and run around risking their lives as glorified vigilantes? The answer: The megalomaniacal, the anti-social, the misanthropes, the psychotics. And he’s probably right.
Yeah. I kinda suck on the comic book front. In my youth I admittedly went straight from reading Archies to a bit of a sci-fi/trekkie fixation and skipped a lot of the superhero stuff. I did have a fairly respectable GI Joe comic collection, but I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing to admit. Since, I’ve been playing catch up, now that I can actually afford to do so.
And had I read it in my teens or early twenties I probably would have missed the more philosophical aspects anyhow. So, it might have been a good thing anyhow to wait until my cynical thirties to absorb these stories.
Dude, putting Watchmen in the same league as Archie and GI Joe is not cool. :)
Oh, and if you’re interested in a continued foray into the graphic novel medium, I strongly recommend the somewhat lesser known (as compared to Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight, etc) Maus and its sequel… that is, assuming you’re in the mood for a WWII story told from the perspective of a concentration camp survivor. It’s absolutely fantastic, at least in the opinion of this not-so-humble reader.
Yeah, not really same league at all. That was more of a self-deprecating slight to my own youthful comic book ignorance. When your mother is the gatekeeper of your reading material, the good stuff never makes it onto your list. And, yeah, Maus is definitely on my reading list. I’ve been eying up that for a while. Though I think my next purchase is likely to be some Sandman. Read those?
Yup, I have the first… six or so? They’re really very good, but Sandman is a different experience from something like Watchmen. While the latter is structured as a single narrative (similar to V for Vendetta or The Dark Knight), hence the moniker “graphic novel”, the former, being a longer running series, is more traditional in it’s structural approach, in that Gaiman builds a (very intriguing, strangely literate) universe, along with a host of permanent characters, and then each volume (which, itself, is composed of a small number of issues) is concerned with a plot arch involving those characters along with a number of temporary pro/antagonists.
But the narratives, themselves, are quite intriguing, and the series is particularly notable for telling some pretty unusual stories of the type that had never really been tackled in western hemisphere, mass-market comics (like, say, a tale about Shakespeare and his troupe performing a work for a host of mythical creatures). In particular, Gaiman, being very well read, loves making literary references, and I have a strong suspicion that I’ve missed more than my fair share while working my way through the series. :)
And as a result of this conversation you got me thinking… now I’ve gone off and ordered both the first volume of Sandman and the box set of Maus. Hopefully they arrive soon. Oi.