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May 29, 2008

Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Book 21 in my 52 books in 2008

This is a graphic novel, perhaps the most famous one of them all in the comic community, though perhaps not outside of it. This is quite likely to change however when the movie version comes out in the near future. When I found out they were turning it into a film, that was my impetus to finally go and buy a copy after all these years.

Now for the heresy - it's not really very good. I found it slow, plodding, repetitive, fairly dull from a superhero point of view, and its politics were heavy handed and obvious. The artwork wasn't my kind of thing either, being fairly plain, flat, and static; I like more colour, and more realism, unless it's stylised stuff like Frank Miller.

The story is an alternate universe scenario. What if a bunch of fairly normal people decided to become masked crime fighters, vigilantees like Batman, but lacking his gadgets and using mainly their fists. I'm nodding off already. This is what happened in the mid part of the 20th century, until there was a backlash, and most went into voluntary retirement. Now, it's 1985 (around the time the novel was published) and it looks like someone is killing them. One of the heroes, Rorsache, starts to inverstigate, writing notes in his journal, which we get extensive passages from that reveal the history of the Watchmen.

Most of the story is detective fiction. The only real superhero stuff is a character called John, who was in the traditional bizarre accident, and was transformed into an omnipotent being who can transform matter, teleport, and see all time. Pretty impressive stuff, but massively underused.

A kid sits on a pavement reading a comic throughout, and this pirate story is also reproduced, interlaced within the Watchmen story. There seem to be attempts to connect the two, and it was either too subtle for me, or too vague, but I just didn't see the point.

I wish I'd read it in 1985, as the cold war and the politics of the day are heavily featured, and our impending armageddon due to mutually assured destruction seemed a real threat then. I think I would have felt more engaged emotionally. The world's problems have changed, and I'll be interested to see if the film being made now updates the plot to include global warming, or the war on terror, instead.

Overall, I was sad not to have liked Watchmen, as I always thought I would. I was kind of saving it for a rainy day, which was a mistake. As always, I think my creed of less politics, more science fiction, would have helped massively.

Posted by se71 at May 29, 2008 09:51 AM

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