Rating: 
Summary: Weak premise
Review: I was expecting a lot from this book, which may be why I was so dissapointed. The authors seem to have arrested their developement sometime in the paranoia of 1972. Today it just plays out flat and naive. The obvious political rants would have been excusable if they weren't so obtuse. All in all, they distract from what could have been a good story.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book but why does Amazon release graphic novels late?
Review: Why does Amazon release graphic novels late? Comic shops get them on time. Retail outlets like Borders and Barnes & Noble get them 1-2 weeks after the shops. Is this because some book merchants mistakenly still look down on comics? Get your act together Amazon! People who read graphic novels deserve the same respect as people who read mainstream novels, which ship on time I might add! If you're reading this and you want to get your graphic novels shipped on time and not one month late then tell Amazon so! If enough people demand it their distributors will comply!
Rating:
Summary: please stop
Review: please, please, please stop writing reviews "reader". you've had more than your say.
by the way, no one is fooled by the name change (at least i'm not)
Rating: 
Summary: Hey not everybody likes it
Review: Y'see, I too read Watchmen again recently, and I read every single word. And just bored me to tears. Oh great, another bit with the pirate comic when we can see all these parallels, like, cos... I didn't get it already! My god. I just wanted to slap it around a bit and say "stop trying to be so f'ing clever!" because it made for tedious reading at times. Also; I thought it was so much cooler when I was younger. (And really, I think it is a comic for kids, well teenagers, y'know?) I think it's only praised in such a way because comics are judged unlike any other medium, and an intelligent comic is such a rare thing to so many people that it suddenly becomes some sort of masterwork.
Rating:
Summary: boring
Review: superheros are owls, a 'comedian', blood runs all over the place, they have sex in the owl mobile, then they fake an alien invasion at the end but they keep that a mystery, its the only way to get them to keep reading this boring story
Rating:
Summary: an observation
Review: all i can say is look at the reviews, and notice how many 5-stars there are. also notice that many of the one stars are written by the same guy (yeah he's anonymous, but he comes from the same place, says the same stuff, and says it in the same way. thus, probably the same guy)
Rating:
Summary: defense of watchmen
Review: first, i wish "a reader from Israel" (who is probably the same person writing mulitple reviews) would stop. one review is enough. second, watchmen is not about superheroes, but about well rounded and convincing characters who happen to be costumed heroes. watchmen does explore the implications of being a costumed hero, but it is only one of many facets to this novel. secondly, it is filled with cleaver imagery and various symbolism which ties into the book from beginning to end. you'll often find yourself skimming back in the book in order to catch them. it also makes excellent work in taking advantage of it's genre and well proves that sequential art is as valid as any other medium. contrary to what "a reader from Israel" may say, the point of the book is not to be realistic (although i find the historical fiction of it to be very interesting). after all, if it were totally realistic, no super-heroes would be involved. if you want realism go read a historical piece, because it's not what fiction is for. finally, watchmen had several compelling, sincere, and compassionate moments which will tug at your heart-strings. i'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys complicated fiction (so dont close you mind to it just because a close-minded review told you to)
Rating:
Summary: failure
Review: This is an attempt to imagine what superheroes would be like in the 'real world' instead of in the comic-book world that Superman and Batman live in. It does not succeed. The author has not thought it all through enough. For example, there's a scientist that is bombarded with radiation in an accident. He turns blue and has the power to destroy things with his mind. Does that sound at all plausible? I think most people had figured out by 1986 that having your body chemistry changed by massive doses of radiation will cause you to shrivel up and die. It doesn't give you magic powers. There's another character who builds a flying owl car - just a pod that levitates with an unknown power source. He keeps it in his garage, while the U.S. government still uses traditional helicopters. This is a kid's fantasy. If you were able to build something like that by yourself (which is unlikely), they wouldn't let you keep the only prototype for your own personal use.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't expect to like it, but it deserves its reputation
Review: Having long heard Watchmen's praises, I resisted reading it because I dislike the late 80's and 90's ultraviolent comics, and I assumed Watchmen to be the quintessential comic of this type. I've finally read it, and I was wrong. It deserves its reputation. Violence serves theme and plot without being exploitative. SPOILER: I'll discuss the story's ending. I'll also compare Watchmen to other works, such as Kingdom Come. I think Watchmen is basically a condemnation of ubermensch theory (Nietzsche's idea that "supermen" are entitled to violate society's moral laws, imposing their will on those "inferior" to themselves. Hitler infamously used the theory to justify Nazism. I concede I am no expert on Nietzsche.), and an accusation that superhero stories endorse this philosophy by lionizing vigilantes. Watchmen also attacks the genre's simplistic good vs. evil morality. Only one character has "superpowers" to justify claims of superiority, yet Dr. Manhattan takes too little interest in human affairs to want to control others. On the contrary, he lets himself be used as a tool, hoping to retain his humanity by pleasing people. Yet he's now too detached to morally judge his orders, becoming a living military weapon. Apparently, desire for power over others is for mortals living among mortals--like Ozymandias, the archetypal Aryan "superman": a blonde, blue-eyed, physically perfect, supremely brilliant, self-made billionaire. Achieving peace through slaughter, Ozymandias, like his hero Alexander, embodies Nietzsche's belief that ends justify means. If paradise is attainable through atrocities, as Nazi and Soviet propaganda claimed, is it worth it? And, once the eggs are broken, should one reap the benefits of the sin? (I ask this sitting comfortably in California, stolen first from Native Americans, then from Mexico.) Rorschach--Watchmen's brutal, uncompromising conscience--says no, and his journal seems to give him the last word. Yet Rorschach tortures for information, sometimes needlessly. Besides, his winning may mean Armageddon. In keeping with a thought experiment in Nietzsche's worldview, Watchmen's universe is an apparently godless one, as stated by several characters. Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov justifies murder through Neitzschean arguments, but then feels remorse and, through this reluctant acceptance of higher morality, comes to believe in God. C.S. Lewis's arguments in favor of God's existence hinge on morality's independence of human preference. Watchmen's ending is too ambiguous for any divinely transcendent morality or providence to be clear to the characters or reader. As a Christian, I acknowledge the realism of this ambiguity, for even assuming that God exists and His will constitutes absolute morality, His moral intent is rarely as discernable in real life as in melodramas (the classic example of divine inscrutibility being Job's sufferings in the Bible). As Hollis Mason says in chapter 3, "Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything really gets resolved." I like Watchmen--but fear I now better understand why the genre degenerated following its publication. It's a damning attack on superheroes, yet publishers couldn't stop printing their bread and butter, so self-indictment pervaded superhero books of the following years as they struggled with Moore's accusations. Also, as Neil Gaiman observes in his introduction to Busiek's "Astro City: Confessions," the easiest "riff" of both Watchmen and Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" for hacks to steal was darkness, not depth. There are other reasons for the so-called "Iron Age's" violent nihilism besides Watchmen and DKR's influence. Such trends were already growing in early 80's comics. DC had ravaged almost its entire stock of characters in 1985's "Crisis on Infinite Earths." There was also the need to satisfy reader bloodlust once the maligned Comics Code, for better or for worse, became a rubber stamp. Universally recognized characters synonymous with virtue in the public imagination became brutal, wrathful, petty--and if heroes became jerks, villains became the most lurid sadists imaginable. This culminated in the near-plotless splatterpunk and exploitative sadism of the early Image Comics. "Good vs. evil" became "merely evil vs. nauseatingly evil." Moore expressed dismay that things took the direction they did in those years. Watchmen's theme is: if Nietzsche were right, as superhero comics claim, that would be terrible. It took a decade for superhero writers to rebut this accusation. Their answer came in Waid and Ross's "Kingdom Come" and was: We never claimed Nietzsche was right--the essence of superheroes is that the stronger someone is, the LESS excuse he has to abuse the weak, and the greater his obligation to them. (As Stan Lee wrote years earlier: "With great power there must also come--great responsibility!" Or, as Moore himself has Superman say in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, "Nobody has the right to kill... not [even] Superman. Especially not Superman!") KC portrays a higher morality--indeed, a God-given one, delivered through the mortal Norman McCay. Perhaps it requires divine perspective to see that an ant who can shatter mountains is no better or worse than his fellow ants. Unlike Watchmen, but like most superhero comics, most of KC's characters have "powers"--flight, invulnerability, etc.--differentiating them from general humanity in a way that even bullet-catching Ozymandias is not. Yet they're not blessed/burdened with near godhood like Dr. Manhattan (staggeringly powerful even by superhero standards, Manhattan perceives all moments simultaneously, and creates and destroys life at will. He has no common reference with humans.). Powerful, yet mortal, they have no more free license to sin than anyone. Probably less. KC portrays a world which needs to relearn this, just as the comics industry needed to relearn it. (One shortcoming: unlike Watchmen, KC isn't self-contained. It assumes reader familiarity with Superman, Batman, etc. and with ultraviolent comics. ) KC and Watchmen bookend the Iron Age. Watchmen unintentionally (I say unintentionally because Moore apparently laments the fact) helped begin it, and KC helped end it. Yet despite spawning these trends, Watchmen itself is breathtaking, complex literature which takes masterful advantage of comics' visual medium. Warning: This is not an acceptable comic for children. An R-rated story with lots of sex and violence, Watchmen is a story for grown-ups.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty durn good
Review: Reading the other reviews of "Watchmen" by Alan Moore, I wonder if there's any stone left unturned, whether any praises have yet to be extolled for this awesome collection. Still, I obsessively post this review because I feel almost required as a comic book fan to say how great Watchmen is.
"Watchmen" focuses on a world which is one step away from nuclear warfare between America and a vague Soviet threat. Takes place almost entirely in New York City which is functionally drawn by Dave Gibbons. The art is different from a comparable story like "The Dark Knight Returns" which has a similar setting and plot. While Dark Knight uses painted art, Watchmen has the four colors scheme which many people are familiar with, I think that the art never holds the story back, but it also never really elevates Moore's story to another level. Functional.
There are a lot of colorful characters; I like Rorschach most, whenever he wasn't on the page, I would wonder what he was doing. Rorschach is actually one of the last masked adventurers left, because the government has prohibited vigilante activity. At first, Rorschach is the sole protagonist of the story, but others are pretty rapidly revealed to the reader, from the blue bodied Dr. Manhattan to the Smartest Man in the World, Adrian Veidt.
I really liked to find out more and more about these people, and whenever Moore chooses to elaborate on a character's personality or origins, it's usually pertinent to the greater plot.
Plotwise, "Watchmen" is remarkable. Although it looks pretty long this is an extremely tight collection, it moves well towards the ending, which is mind blowing.
I would reccomend "Watchmen" to mature people in general, it's appeal reaches beyond the cognoscenti of the comic book world, I had only read "Preacher" and "Dark Knight Returns" before reading Watchmen at first, and I loved Watchmen. However, it's pretty bloody, although not even nearly as bloody as a comic like Preacher, and it's somewhat profane although also not on the level of Preacher. It's probably like a 4 on the violence meter and 2 on the profanity meter, if Preacher was a 10.
A good reason to buy this, as opposed to read this in the store, is that it's pretty long. I guess that someone could feasibly complete Watchmen in one sitting, but it took me a few hours to do, and I think it would have really detracted from my overall experience to rush it. Also this is a pretty serious graphic novel, it has lots of nice layers and it's the type of thing that I imagine most people will read a few times.
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