WATCHMEN or Who Watches the Watchmen (before reading it)?

As expected, I have decided to make my next post about the "graphic novel" that has been in the news the most in the past couple days/weeks/months...WATCHMEN. The movie came out last Friday, so I'm assuming that anyone reading this blog will have already seen it or, at the very least, is planning on seeing it soon. Either way, as I mentioned before, I'm not here to talk about the movie (as much as I'd love to comment on it), but rather the source material that it was based on.

Let's start with the men behind it...writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. They were essentially paired together by DC Comics after Alan Moore proposed a series based on the classic Charlton Comics line of superheroes with DC owned. Once it became clear that Moore's story would change the world/characters so radically that they'd be usuable for future use, DC allowed the duo craft their tale using completely original characters, thus giving them the creative freedom they needed to turn Watchmen into the brilliant piece of fiction that it is recognized as today.

As much as I love Dave Gibbons, the artist of Watchmen, I still believe that the person most responsible for the work is writer Alan Moore. There is no doubt in my mind that Gibbons was the perfect artist for the comic mini-series--his ability to capture both the scope of the world and, more importantly, the subtleties in the characters is almost unmatched still today. Yet, in the end, the story, the dialogue and the themes that came from those elements all began as mere thoughts from the wild mind of Mr. Moore, who eventually put pen to paper so that we could partake in the craziness too.

Alan Moore is a man that I will undoubtedly talk about again on this blog. He is single-handedly responsible for some of the greatest works in the comic book medium, while also being one of the most controversial figures in it. To call him eccentric is to call the Pope moderately spiritual...let's call it how it is and just say it out loud: Alan Moore is bat-shit insane. Here's a good look at him. You may think that I purposely chose the picture with the long hair and the creepy stare to prove my point, but trust me, this might as well be a Glamour Shot considering how he looks in other "portraits." Either way, it's clear that his general off-the-beaten path view of life helps him craft his stories the way they are. But I'll leave a more in depth exploration of Alan Moore for another day because today I'm here to talk about his most celebrated work: Watchmen.

Watchmen, which started off as 12 individual issues that were eventually collected into a single volume to create a "graphic novel," has received so much acclaim that just recounting some of its accolades should be enough to persuade an average educated person to check it out. The only comic book/graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, the only comic/GN to be placed on TIME magazine's 100 Greatest Novels Since 1923...the list goes on and on. But if you ignore all that, you still get a beautifully-crafted and intelligently-written work about the Cold War, comic books in general and the nature of humanity and salvation itself.

First of all, as a piece of historical fiction, it has a stamp placed firmly upon it as commentary about the world during which it was written. Like Dr. Strangelove or Reagan's Trickle-Down Economics, Watchmen gives us a chilling view into what COULD happen if the wrong people stayed in power too long during the paranoia-filled days of the Cold War. This is a double-edged sword, since this clearly dates the book, but (as the movie proved) it's still very much a relevant work of fiction despite no longer having to fear the aggressive, militaristic policies of a totalitarian state known as the Soviet Union...now we just call it Russia! But seriously, folks, you feel the dread in the air in this book and it's rare to find a comic that so delicately straddles the line between sci-fi horror and human drama.

Moving on, and this is what truly sets it apart as a work within the comic book medium, is it's commentary on comic books and super-heroes themselves. You see, Alan Moore wrote Watchmen as a commentary on super-hero conventions. To do so, he made characters that represented a skewed version of the most popular comic book heroes.

For example, Dr. Manhattan is Superman (as they even say in the book: "The Superman exists and he is American" - clear reference to the fact that Superman as a character is so blindly patriotic to the "American Way")...specifically, Manhattan is Superman without the moral convictions that makes him choose the right thing time and time again.

Along those lines, he took the most complex of comic book characters, Batman, and split his psyche in a sort of Freudian multiple personality experiment: the Id is very clearly Rorschach -- the sociopathic element whose only goal is to eliminate crime and has no real restraints placed upon himself. Next is the ego, which is a moral compass of sorts that place limits on right & wrong and puts importance on honesty of self -- that is clearly Nite-Owl. Lastly is the super-ego, which defines the extreme drive for perfection...right and wrong are irrelevant as long you achieveyour goals, but unlike the Id, the Super-Ego IS capable of projecting emotions...so that would represent our character in question, Ozymandias. Freud's basic theory is that a person can only be complete (mentally, spiritually and physically healthy) if all three parts of the psyche balance each other out, so by splitting them all up and creating characters that represent the purest form of each, Moore managed to give us the most precise analysis on how a hero would act depending on his psychological state.

I think now would be the right time to mention that Watchmen is NOT an easy read. I know people who have picked it up and assumed that it can be tackled in a couple hours...not the case. There are several parts of the graphic novel that are essentially chapters from a book in full prose and skipping those sections is a travesty, as they add so much to the characters and the world in the book. Not only that, but the multi-narrative threads that engulf certain chapters make it crucial for you to pay attention to every panel, lest you find yourself blending several storylines into one and completely losing the flow of the story. So readers beware, this is not for beginners, but at the same time, if you really allow yourself to become engrossed by the story and characters, you won't find a more rewarding graphic novel out there.

I could obviously go on and on about this book, but I don't want to unintentionally give away too much plot for those of you who haven't read it yet, so here it is in its cheapest form: http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen-Alan-Moore/dp/0930289234/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236810565&sr=8-1
I will gladly address any other elements of the comic, so feel free to post any questions/thoughts in the comments section. In the meantime, I would love to hear what you all think of the work if/once you've read it.

More posts coming soon, but in the meantime...keep reading!