Watchmen

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: You can call Don Quixote the greatest and last knight book of medieval times. You can call Watchmen the greatest and the last comic book from the modern era. Everything after this book is post-modern, post-analog-inking, post-Watchmen.

The story is a complex tangle of killings and conspiracy. The superheroes who got old after years of service for the government are being murdered one by one. If a superguy is immortal, no problem, there's always a way to get him wiped out.

These super-heroes have to deal with the greatest villian alive (I'm not going to tell you who's the one, you have to get this friggin' book) and the greatest world-destruction conspiracy. They also have to deal with the police and their personal problems.

In a world of superheroes who get old or are capable of killing people with no remorse, the comic books are flooded with pirate stories.

I was reading this book on september 10th, 2001. I bought it in august. And the last chapter -chapter 12- is a macabre representation of the day after. This book is a prophetic masterpiece and has to be used as a reference of what the state can do to the common man.

Rating:
Summary: Geek heaven
Review: I read and re-read these comics obsessively when they first came out way back in high school. There is so much going on in them that you are transfixed. I took an art history course, the prof of which said that there are certain vanishingly small moments in art history where everything balances perfectly. The composition, line and coloring in the art fit together so well that they can be compared to that moment when you're on a bicycle, you stop and the bike is in perfect equilibrium, before you have to put your feet on the ground. Michaelangelo and Raphael did lots of stuff like that. This book is that moment spread over something like 350 pages.

You can take this story in so many different ways. Take a look at the characters. It's got the suicidal god: Dr. Manhattan, who is all powerful, denies there's a god and gets along with no one. It's got a Nazi who happened to be the only person saying anything of moral worth. It's got bizarre fetishistic sex between two very human and imperfect people. It's got a narcissist who saves the earth in the short term, but may wind up killing it in the long term. And a love story between a rapist thug and his hystrionic victim.

Then there's the plot. The influences I can see are Robert Ludlum, William Burroughs, Michael Moorcock and possibly some great German Idealist systematizers. Ludlum because some of it looks an awful lot like the Matarese Circle, particularly when we find out what the threat the heroes face is in Chapter 11. William Burroughs because there tends to be a prevalance of degradation of humanist ideals, like in Naked Lunch. Michael Moorcock because Moore is a left-liberal type but doesn't believe in producing agit-prop. The moral model is closer to Bastable's misadventures than Ayn Rand. And the grand systematizers are there because everything falls into place. Like clockwork.

The art by David Gibbons is 100% stunning. I draw a bit and to this day I have no idea how Gibbons managed to pull off such minutely detailed miniscule amendments to drawings that came before. The one thing I found that detracted from the art was the coloring, which was garish in places. Though perhaps that was the intended effect.

There's a reason why this book is the only comic ever to win science fiction's Hugo award. It's perfect.

Rating:
Summary: truly a graphic NOVEL
Review: Watchmen is a stunning work of fiction which demonstrates what can be done in a graphic novel format. The unity of writing and art is unmatched--everything from the recurring images of the clock face throughout the book to the unique chapter (in the center of the book) in which Rorschach, the character whose face is a symmetrical ink-blot, is (briefly) captured by the police--in that chapter, the first and last pages of the chapter are mirror images of each other in terms of layout, as are the second page and the next-to-last, and so on, until we reach the symmetrical double-page-spread in the center. What's even more amazing is that Moore (if I understand the behind-the-scenes story correctly) originally intended to use pre-existing characters, including the Blue Beetle and others from the sixties, but was forced to create a new cast from scratch when licensing didn't work out. As a student and teacher of literature, I can say that only a few comic books deserve the title NOVEL, but this one definitely does. The plot winds a bit, but never unbearably so. And like a great work of fiction, readers become attached to the characters by the end of the piece. Anyone who likes writing that stimulates thinking would like Watchmen.

Rating:
Summary: Doubtless an excellent graphic novel...
Review: ...but a bit too aware of itself. However, it must be said that 'Watchmen' took comics out of the playground and into the library. It's not exactly literature, but it's not exactly Mills & Boon either. The art is quite sloppy in places, and for the first third it doesn't appear to be going anywhere, but if you're prepared for a hard initial slog, and then a second closer reading, you'll be amply rewarded. By no means a masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe historically interesting, but....
Review: I recently read "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I decided to read "Watchmen" after all the rave comments I had been reading.

What a disappointment.

My biggest complaint is that the story was just plain boring. There are 12 issues, and I couldn't get into it until issue 10. It made some interesting points at times, but all the material is covered better somewhere else (like Claremont/Byrne X-Men, or Marvels, or any of the Busiek/Perez Avengers).

I also had a very hard time getting past the humourlessness and lack of any heroic/inspiring material. And sadly, the moral conclusion is WAAAAY off. Great violence leads to more violence - not universal peace. The whole thing left a very bad taste in mouth since the World Trade Center attack.

Rating:
Summary: flawed but still classic
Review: Moore used off-the-shelf characters for this summary of the superhero genre and because it is built from so much insider material and history it dates badly and is all but meaningless to people who aren't suckers for the superhero. The politics and Cold-War paranoia about nuclear holocaust dates the book badly, as does the pretense to philosophical explanations (like the less successful but still entertaining The Killing Joke).

Moore's desire to make a profound statement about the human condition (see Joke) can supplant his ability to write convincing characters, leading to plot developments that just don't justify themselves and long speeches from characters who seem to be ciphers for ideology. On the other hand, the characters are written so well in Watchmen that absurdities of plot and political polemic are mostly forgivable.

Rating:
Summary: Meandering plot, uninteresting characters, dumb science
Review: I have wrestled with this "serious" comic book for about 8 months and I am finally giving up. It is the kind of thing that is trying sooo hard to be deep and witty, but fails miserably because of a lack of ANY REAL STORY. What we have here is the loose frame of a story, which is totally dated and uninteresting. The graphic novel to read for good criminology subtext is "The Dark Knight Returns." Moore seems to want to remind you on every frickin' page how clever his "real super heroes" idea is. First of all it ain't and secondly WE GET IT ALREADY NOW DO SOMETHING WITH IT. When I really lost interest however was with the whole Mars thing. I mean it was insipid beyond belief but attempting to be the ultimate in metaphysical insight. The art also stinks. It's embarassingly bad at times. Plus sides - some good one liners and the Pirate story has some great moments. But this does not alleviate a tiresome, tedious read.

Rating:
Summary: 4 stars, only because I'm in a picky mood, BEST BOOK EVER!
Review: Horschach is so cool! I didn't like the pirate comic. I'd say read it instead of explaining it to you. But there is a lot of adult content, I really shouldn't have read it, but too late, I'm still glad I did.

Horschach is the hero!

Rating:
Summary: Superhero Soap Opera
Review: Watchmen was a groundbreaker when it first appeared as a limited series back in 1986-87. Alan Moore got back down to Earth after his incredible headtripping work on Swamp Thing, and here deals with the private lives of superheroes. In this saga the heroics of the main characters are merely a vague backdrop, while the everyday relationships that they share with other humans are the core of the story. Not unlike the Uncanny X-Men overhaul in the mid-70's, the Watchmen series presents very human "heroes" with very human problems, in a real society that has ambiguous opinions about costumed heroes and villains. Insightfully, Moore adds corporate and governmental manipulation of heroes to the mix as well. A key part of the Watchmen saga is the traditionalist artwork of Dave Gibbons, with a no-nonsense and basic construction of the pages. There is not a single non-rectangular frame in the entire Watchmen saga, and Gibbons' retro style adds to the human feeling of the story. The only weaknesses here include heavy 80's-style Cold War paranoia as the conflict behind the story, which bogs the story down with political moralizing that is getting a bit outdated. Meanwhile, in graphic novel form, the story drags toward soap opera territory in several spots, as the suspense was constructed to work better in the form of twelve separate issues originally. Even so, Watchmen still deserves to be treated as a classic in the art of graphic storytelling.

Rating:
Summary: Like watching a movie in convenient book form
Review: Watchmen is a great graphic novel. The plot was so intricate and involving that it was like watching a movie. Additionally, there is a large amount of foreshadowing throughout the book that will be lost on you with the first reading; do yourself a favour and read it at least twice. The "substory" of the crazed sailor is itself pretty interesting as well.