Originally posted by Symmetric ChaosI liked it thought it was a good story but nothing special to right home about. Maybe it is the Old Movie syndrum. When it first comes out it is ground breaking like Star wars for Special Effects but now not so much.
I enjoyed it quite a lot, certainly among my favorites. Unfortunately something is clearly lost from having not lived during the ColdWar.
I just didn't like some of the elements of the story and in some ways it seemed crammed with information that I thought took away fro mthe overall story. Of course this is just me.
Originally posted by Newjak
I liked it thought it was a good story but nothing special to right home about. Maybe it is the Old Movie syndrum. When it first comes out it is ground breaking like Star wars for Special Effects but now not so much.I just didn't like some of the elements of the story and in some ways it seemed crammed with information that I thought took away fro mthe overall story. Of course this is just me.
That's part of it. Watchmen and Alan Moore's style has become very influencial in comics as a whole; he and Frank Miller were the big two that hepled shape the medium from that time onward.
If people are capable of standing back and reading it - it's like old movies. Many are influencial in forming later movies to come, but some of them don't age well for new viewers. Me, I know how important Marvel Comics was in re-shaping the medium in the 1960's & early 70's, but I don't find a lot of them very readable, anymore.
hm. Watchmen . The classic "graphic novel."
Watchmen is a masterwork, and it's clear that Alan Moore was trying to elevate a desperately puerile and decaying medium, and to a vast extent, it worked. Without Watchmen in the canon (and here I use canon in the literary sense, not in the silly fan-boy sense), we don't get Dark Knight Returns, Arkaham Asylum; A Serious House on Serious Earth, Doom Patrol, or Sandman, in the same way that without Muddy Waters we can't have the Rolling Stones, the Who, or the Doors. It's also a stunning indictment of Cold War-era America, and her crippling cultural insecurities. It is, deeply, (and in some ways, this does hamper it) a product of its time. It's much more Jack Kerouac, Christopher Lasch, or Rudyard Kipling than it is Dante, Allen Ginsburg, or Jean-Paul Sartre. To use a comic book example, it's more in the vein of (and this is not an insult) Liefield than it is Morrison. Liefield could only exist and write in the nineteen nineties; the themes of Invisibles are far more universal than the contextual and aesthetic specific work characteristic of Liefield's work. I'm not saying Watchmen is anything like, say, X-Force artistically, I'm saying they both exist to a particular time.
However, Watchmen is more than just about the legacy it inspired, or the fact that The Times named it as one of the greatest 100 novels of all time. Even if you do cut it out of its contextual time, and consider it outside of the Cold War, you're still left with a massively impressive piece of literature. The philosophical force of each character, and the questions raised by their conflict, are powerful and still, years after it was written, pressing when you read it.
The brilliance resides in the prime emotive movement of the plot and its deconstruction of the central characters. The theme, which in a lesser work would be extremely mundane, is the effects of the questioning of authority- IE, after the breakdown of trust in government and institutions that accompanied the Civil Rights movement, Watergate, and Vietnam, would the average citizen be inclined to trust an institution that declared itself a public guardian- the superheroes. Ergo, the human decline of the individual costumed adventurers mirrors the institutional decline of public trust in our "real " world in the United States Government and the military. A fascinating subject when written about well- Norman Mailer and Louis Menand are prime examples of this- and it's indicative of Moore's genius that he didn't attempt to dilute this comparison.
Of course, the other major conflict in the work isn't sociological or political, it's philosophical. Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach play out the difficulties of determinism, rather obviously put in Manhattan's observation: "We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings." Not for nothing (and again, Alan Moore goes out of his way to make this obvious) was Dr. Manhattan growing up as a watchmaker, the classic determinist symbol of the functioning of the universe. In counterpoint, the conspiracy theorist Rorschach acts as if events are inevitably outside of his control; although in action and in purpose he aims to halt the Ozymandias forced plot, he is disillusioned by the fact that he believes, in the grand scheme of things, no human being can possibly be an actor in the movement of destiny.
The artwork is damn near perfect. Clearly inspired by William S. Burroughs' work on the underground Brit mag, Cyclops, in which Burroughs adopted the term that T.S. Eliot would cleverly define in his exegesis of Hamlet as "the objective correlative," in which a set of items would be adopted and repeatedly used, and thus, become infused with meaning and emotion, the technique works perfect. The gritty and realistic feel of the art matches the subject's tone pitch-perfectly.
Does this mean that the work has carte blanche, and should automatically be assumed to be the perfect comic book? I would disagree. Moore's failings come across in two ways- one, is the extent to which he took three of the major characters, Ozymandias, Rorschach, and Dr. Manhattan, and reduced them, basically, into labels, shouting "post-modern utilitarianism," "moral absolutism!" and "determinism" (in that order). The work is staggeringly unsubtle, and while, to an extent I believe that was intentional, it's obvious that Moore could have made his message just as clear without insulting the reader by bashing you over the head on every single page, and on every single panel, with the exact subtext of what was being said was. The subtext overwhelming the text, is, while a great method of getting your point across, makes at times for rather poor literature.
The other problem is that at many times, Moore is simply too erudite. He knows he's smart, well-read, and clever. So he goes out of his way to display how smart, well-read, and clever he is. The function of the pirate story, at the surface an example of what comic books might be like on a world where superheroes actually existed, is also to function as a sort of Greek chorus for the plot- expounding, explaining, contrasting, and sneering at the action of the main plot. But it's knowingness, and Moore's need to display in every other line, just how intelligent he is heavily detracts from the overall motive force of the work. The major problem I have whenever I pick it up is being annoyed at how Moore hits me over a head with something and at the same time shouts "I'm smarter than you!" (and I picture him saying this in a jeering British accent), and it's a double insult to the capabilities of the reader, and it crowds and dirties a work that is otherwise elegant and clean.
I've never understood why people adore Rorschach (and apparently, some poster above who loves rape, loves the Comedian) while panning Nite-Owl. In my opinion, he's one of the most enduring and powerful characters not just in Watchmen itself, but in comics fiction as a whole. He's one of the few truly pragmatist (and I mean this not in the blase-day-to-day way, but in the tradition of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Pierce, and James Dewey) characters we see in a spandex-clad expolision laden universe of idealist costumed characters, and he's much more representative of the every-man hero, than say, Spider-man, regardless of how much Marvel wants us to believe Spider-man represents the everyman. William James argued that ideas are tools- we seek out the ones that will get us through the night and discard them when they are no longer useful, and Nite-Owl is the epitome of that philosophy. Plus, it's thrilling to see him go out into battle one last time (and the sub-plot with his sexuality being re-reinvigorated by superheroing was fantastic).
All in all, is it perfect? Hell no. But it's impossible to intelligently discuss the history of comic books or why comic books are the way they are today without having read it, and it's still an amazing piece of work. My hat is off to Moore for it.
Originally posted by tjcoady
as if anyone is going to sit down and read through that pretentious chunk of text I just wrote.