Watchmen was great as obvious by all the reviews and praise it's received over the years. Rorschach and Ozymandias were awesome truly dark shades of grey in the areas of Hero/Villain and whats best about the series was it backed us into a corner there was no way out of but to really have to choose to make the harder choice. Let the world end or get blood, enormous amounts of blood, on your hands and do what is necessary to save the world. Take the lives of millions to spare the lives of billions that remain!
I really wish more stories in comics would force the heroes that are so high and mighty to have to make decisions like this without always giving them some last minute or luck would have it magical third option that always allows them to save the day without doing something truly horrific and take some form of sin onto themselves in order to do so. I mean what would the man of steel really do if he'd been put in that situation and he knew this time he didn't have the power to stop it without doing something terrible to succeed and save the rest? What if the Joker locked Batman in a room with no way out and just a button to blow Joker up while he let him watch on a monitor as he went to a school intending to kill every child there and so on till someone stopped him?
What if in all those great stories where the hero gets put in an impossible situation they hadn't found or been given a magic solution or way out this time. Would you really respect the hero more for letting people die just to keep from having blood on their hands or for accepting sometimes you have to make the hard choice for the greater good and live with that the rest of your life?
Don't know how you feel but when they absolutely refuse to ever do anything to get blood on their hands or stain their soul just because they don't wanna be able to be seen as the bad guy, even by theirself, that seems pretty selfish to me. How many people have to die just so they get to sleep better at night because technically they haven't even killed just the one to save others?
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it was good, but not that great. i prefer Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, the occasional Cthulhu mythos comic and more cosmic/escapist fare.
comic "high brow" just feels too compromised, I can read about moral gray in Crime & Punishment (Raskolnikov, obviously but more interestingly in Svidrigailov's character, imo), about the utilitarianism/libertarianism etc ... Watchem just doesn't deliver on the intelligence necessary to make it significant.
it's like a well read 12yr old quoting from Leviathan, impressive yes, but only because of his age.
This is a graphic novel not a real novel. For the space it utilizes it is superb and also the artwork that goes into it brings it on par to the masterpieces you speak of imo.
my point exactly, which is why I prefer the more escapist comics or the gritty detective/horror comics which don't presume to comment on weighty matters so...
I never can accept the crud that passes for "thinking" from Ozymandias, it's much too slight, whimsical even ... like some trivial off-the-cuff piece of wit from the lips of Lord Henry Wotton.
Yes but the story as a whole is a masterpiece in my opinion. You have them all dealing with fighting crime when the world is coming to an end and making tough moral decisions that weren't done in that sort of fashion in superhero comics in that time. Along with the lyrical wit and psychological undertones it became a ground breaking masterpiece in the eyes of critics and fb's alike.
I agree with you, but that doesn't stop me from finding Watchmen a brilliant read. It's by no means anywhere near my favourite comic and I've gone off Alan Moore in recent years, but neither is Jane Autin's "Emma" my favourite novel, it would still be wrong of me to describe it as anything less than a work of genius.
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Oct 5th, 2010 11:00 AM
