Review: Watchmen

Watchmen by Alan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adapting this from something I wrote to a friend, for personal reference and so that I don’t forget. It’s technically been years since I last read Watchmen, so it remains to be seen how much my opinion of it will change when I get around to re-reading it.

Watchmen strikes me as one of the better comic storylines I've seen, but mainly since the majority of American superhero comics I've come across, frankly, aren't that great to begin with. A lot of them tend toward forced complexity or drama for the sake of appearances without really doing anything interesting with it, and thus wind up feeling like fluff. On the other hand, I can see a certain level of calculated design behind Watchmen that I can appreciate—heck, even the panel arrangement is intentional— to a point where I'd go so far as to call it literature (or the comic book version of it).

To be honest, I find that the characters are not really one of the graphic novel’s strong points. But at the same time, I think story is less about the development of its characters to begin with and more about how ineffectual they are at being heroes because of their obvious character flaws. None of them are really sympathetic or likable, and their approaches to the world's problems range from apathetic (Manhattan) to impotent (Rorschach- his inability to interact with the storyline to me is intentional) to nihilist (the Comedian) to cruelly utilitarian (Ozymandias). And all of this stems from, or in spite of, their shared history together as superheroes. In other words, a failed Justice League (not that the Justice League doesn’t have its own take on failure).

It's basically a subversion of everything the superhero genre is about, since these qualities are arguably more common in actual world leaders than the idealized altruism you usually see in those works, which often take it to the point of fetishism/escapism. And I'd venture it’s a better reflection of what costumed superheroes would look like if we had them in society and forced them to deal with real world issues, since the nature of being a famous costumed hero is kind of an extreme in itself. It's a way of saying: look, the human psyche isn't actually that well-equipped to deal with the kinds of expectations we heap on superheroes. And here's what could happen.

That's more or less what I like about Watchmen. It feels the least "dated" to me out of any of the comics I've read from the 80's because of how well it's written in comparison (aside from other ones that usually get mentioned - Killing Joke, Year One, Swamp Thing, and so on), and I find it more interesting to talk about because there's a lot that can be said or even debated about it on an analytical level. It's not really a work I like so much for its characters (honestly don't give a crap about most of them having said all of the above), but more for its overall story and themes. I feel like half of what I like about the superhero genre are its deconstructive works anyway haha.

But I have to admit that it's probably harder to appreciate without some familiarity with the genre and the tropes/conventions it was trying to fight against. I kinda had it tossed on me as a must-read rec and I didn't really appreciate it as much at first (the ending left a foul taste in my mouth), but I wound up appreciating it more as time passed. The movie (which I didn't enjoy as much) made me like the comic more ironically lol.