Watchmen

There are some comics that come along and challenge the genre. They make the jump from simple entertainment and become literature. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is one of those comics. In fact, it's probably one of two that really made people believe that comics could be more than simple entertainment.

Watchmen takes place in a world where superheroes are reality. Not like the DC universe or the Marvel universe but like if I opened the paper this morning and was unsurprised to find that a masked vigilante had stopped a bank robbery yesterday. It's an interesting idea, it certainly is played out often enough, but it's not one that I like. Maybe I'm just naive but I like stories where people put on the costumes because it's the "right thing to do". I like when they're treated like heroes, not bought or sponsored or compared to deviants. It's part of the reason I like DC better than Marvel.

It took me a while to actually sit down and write something out for Watchmen. I sort of feel like it deserves a much better review than I want to give it. I liked the articles between chapters, I felt it added a lot to the world that Moore was trying to create. I liked the subplot pirate story that Moore included. It not only showed what people were reading for fun in a world that had superheroes, it was also a companion tale to the story. The two were exploring the same themes but in different genres. Although, I wanted a different artist for the pirate comic, or different colouring, to really set it apart from the main story.

As for the story itself, I almost hate to say it this way, but I think it made more of an impact in 1985 than it would in 2009. The "post 9/11" world isn't as focused on nuclear annihilation as we were back in the 80s and I can't see the world reacting to the disaster as Moore writes it. It just seemed to lack something.

So, here's my problem, I kind of just felt that it was OK. I'd like to give it a 3, but I also recognise that it really changed a lot of things about comics, who read them and why, and allowed for greater creativity in what a lot of people think of as a pretty narrow genre. So, for the strength of literature I'll give it a 4.