OneMetal.com book ARTICLE:
Must Read: Watchmen

In the first of an ongoing series, Dean Reilly takes a retrospective look at some of the best, most influential and innovative comic books and graphic novels ever. First up in the Must Read spotlight: Watchmen.

In Short:

Spread across 12 issues and released by DC Comics in 1986/7, Watchmen was created by British author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. It tells the story of an alternative world where superheroes are as real, as flawed and as human as the people they protect. Outsider, vigilante and borderline psychopath Rorschach believes he’s uncovered a secret plot to murder the heroes – and millions of innocent civilians. In the shadow of 1980s Cold War paranoia, Rorschach attempts to reunite his old team-mates one more time to save the world… and their lives.

Why Is It So Good?

The story. It’s tempting to leave this section filled with just those two words, because above all else, Watchmen is a masterpiece of storytelling: intricate, detailed, and real. It’s a credit to Moore that the word ‘real’ could be applied to Watchmen, especially when you consider it features a blue, glowing super-human demi-god, glass fortresses built on Mars, and a genuinely bizarre apocalyptic climax unlike anything seen in comics before – but real is exactly how it feels. When the retired heroes reluctantly don their suits again, they take deep breaths to hold back the middle-aged spread. They struggle with the decisions they’ve made in the past, how they were once needed, used and then abandoned by their country, and how their actions are inevitably going to shape the future again. Watchmen made comic book readers take an evolutionary leap forward from thinking simply how cool it would be to be a hero, to how heavy that burden would actually feel.

Watching the world go bye... Ozymandias

It also pushed the boundaries with Dave Gibbon’s innovative artwork. Every front cover featured a close-up detail of a frame from the following page, with Gibbons describing it as a real-world portal to another world that’s slowly turning into a comicbook. Every frame was crammed with hidden details. Easily missed headlines on discarded and windswept newspapers fleshed out the narrative, and rewarded readers who spent time examining every inch of the page. Panels without a single word of dialogue spoke loudly to the reader thanks to Gibbon’s emotive art style. Even Tails of the Black Freighter, the comic book within a comic book that’s read by a supplementary character, had more care and attention to detail devoted to it than most of the books that shared the shelves with Watchmen in the late 80s.

Visually, Watchmen followed a fairly rigid 9 panel grid, only occasionally breaking out of the format to emphasise key moments in the story. Unusually for comic books of the time, the main heroes were often pushed into the background, with characters viewed from a distance. Sequences where the reader’s viewpoint never moves from one static point, whilst we watch a key conversation unfold reflected in a mirror on the far wall, are typical of how voyeuristic Moore and Gibbons made their readers feel.

It’s aged fantastically well, but it’s true to say that Watchmen is very much a product of its time. It was published just as the Cold War started to thaw, with US President Ronald Regan and Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev holding often tense meetings to discuss reducing the number of nuclear missiles both countries kept in Europe. Readers would flick from real-world news headlines talking about nuclear weapons on TV to read of the building tensions between the USSR and America in the comic book. In my bedroom, Watchmen could be found lying next to Protect and Survive, a frankly terrifying information leaflet issued by the British government informing people how to prepare themselves for the onset of nuclear war. It was the year that the promise that science would lead to a better world looked less likely than ever before. The US exploration of space was thrown into doubt when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take off and that the Russian nuclear powerplant Chernobyl went into spectacular meltdown. The parallels are inevitable, and goes some way to explaining why Watchmen resonates so deeply for people who grew up during that period.

He's got the whole world in his hands: Dr Manhattan

Yet there are only a finite number of people who can claim to have experienced Watchmen first time around. As vocal as they may be, it takes more than them to keep the book at the top of so many charts for so long. Clearly more and more people are discovering it, unpicking it and getting drawn into its world. The 2009 Zack Snyder movie wouldn’t have hurt either, with many people being steered towards the comic books after emerging from the cinema and wanting to know what started it all. Watchmen remains as relevant now as it was then, and has left its mark on popular culture as a result.

The Legacy

Few comic books have received such critical and widespread acclaim as Watchmen. It’s triggered thousands of pages of analysis, study, and deconstruction. Students on everything from philosophy, creative writing, English literature and sociology courses have spent hours pouring over every frame as they craft their dissertations. An often quoted fact that it remains the only graphic novel to make it onto the Time Magazine Top 100 Novels list, alongside Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and 1984. Moore is in good company there. In fact, when starting to write this first ongoing retrospective, I paused over whether or not to actually profile Watchmen at all, because it almost feels a little too clichéd to put it in a “Best of…” list. It’s the comic book equivalent of raving about Citizen Kane. Yet stripping away all the baggage that comes from praising Watchmen, and looking at it in the cold light of day, let’s be honest: it’s earned that spot. Watchmen really did set the bar when it comes to what a comic book can do.

Its legacy and influence is almost too large to measure. Marvels, the gorgeously painted mini-series from (unsurprisingly) Marvel Comics, is just one example of a countless number of comics that owes a big debt of gratitude to Watchmen, running with the theme of what life would be like for normal people coping with and reacting to costumed heroes and villains clashing on a regular basis. Shows like Heroes that explore the real lives of unreal costumed heroes are following in the same path that Moore and Gibbons laid out more than 20 years earlier. In fact, stick a pin in the contemporary comicbook map and you’ll probably find a link back to a story that started with a smiley face badge splashed with blood.