"it's tailor-made for a university class, because there are so many levels and little background details and clever little connections and references in it that it's one that academics can pick over for years."

--Alan Moore on his graphic novel, Watchmen (1)

Some of the many, and oft-commented upon, features that made Watchmen distinct:

• Along with Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," Watchmen brought real world concerns into the superhero text much more overtly than most previous texts. Foremost among these was the possibility of nuclear war.
• But also sexual violence (by superheroes), political corruption, fetishism (by superheroes), vigilantism (by superheroes), and so forth.
• It explicitly questioned the viability of the superhero genre when it comes to such real world issues.
• It did all of this with dense web of intertextual allusions. It also had actual intertexts, in the form of mock articles, interviews, book excerpts, and so forth that appear at the end of each chapter. As Moore put it:

what we tried to do was give it a truly kind of crystalline structure, where it's like this kind of jewel with hundreds and hundreds of facets and almost each of the facets is commenting on all of the other facets and you can kind of look at the jewel through any of the facets and still get a coherent reading. (2)

For example, various panels in the novel are excerpts from a Pirate comic book about a man who is driven to such extremes that he destroys what he is trying to protect. This serves as both a visual and textual commentary on the main body of the action:

Copyright 1986, 1987 by DC Comics Inc. See the disclaimer.

In addition to echoing the black sail against a yellow sky, the fallout shelter sign echoes the yellow and black smiley face pin of the Comedian, a cynical government-sponsored "hero" whose death opens the novel. The blood on his pin when he dies is echoed by the red letters of the sign. Blood on a smiley face evokes the violence underlying the United States' social order and global dominance (though the novel is set in 1985, because he used superheroes to win in Vietnam, Nixon is still President).

Also significant is the corner where a little kid is reading the comic and ignoring a news vendors remarks about politics while the shelter sign is put up. This corner turns out to be ground zero for an attempt to avert war by an elaborate hoax (which kills the kid, the vendor, and three million other people). The blood on the smiley face pin is the first clue to an investigation by a vigilante hero that might uncover the hoax and reignite the race for Armageddon. (So the hoax may turn out to be a brutal miscalculation of a deluded man, like the man in the pirate comic.)

The mask of Rorschach, the vigilante who investigates the Comedian's death and uncovers the hoax, is like a constantly shifting Rorschach blot, and hence the opposite of a static smiley face. And yet it is Rorschach's world view which is rigid while the Comedian's was cynically opportunistic. And so forth, and so forth. (3)

Many links come here, so you might just want to hit your browser's back button when you're done.

 

Notes

Take me to the Bibliography

1. Go to the interview where Moore makes this remark. Take me back.

2. Same interview.Or take me back.

3. For a nice discussion of these very panels, see Reynolds, 110-114. Take me back.

For more commentary on specific panels, see the Alan Moore links.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. Dave Gibbons, Illustrator. John Higgins, Colorist. New York: Warner, 1987.

Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Batsford Cultural Studies. London: B.T. Batsford: 1992.