Watchmen

I stopped reading comic books about five years before Watchmen, the “greatest graphic novel of all time,” came on the scene in 1985. I resumed reading them circa 1991, and it wasn’t until this week that I finally decided to supplement my geek education and prepare for the upcoming Watchmen movie by actually reading it myself. I came to it with tremendous expectations – according to the accolades quoted on its covers, it’s supposed to “turn the superhero genre on its head” and “redefine the medium,” whatever `that means. It’s long been a target for a Hollywood adaptation, but its writer, a very hairy British fellow named Alan Moore, has called the thing “unfilmable” and has refused to lend his name or his assistance to the film version, which has gone through many drafts and potential scribes since its publication.

I think Moore has resisted the adaptation because he knows, deep in his gut, that Watchmen, stripped of its excess sex, blood, profanity, and psychological pretentions, is a fairly ordinary superhero story. Someone’s killing heroes, and as the surviving folks in capes dig deeper, they uncover a conspiracy that leads to a wild-eyed James Bond-style villain bent on taking over the world. He even has a cool lair, complete with a glass dome and everything! I think we’re probably supposed to see this as irony or satire, but it doesn’t quite cut it on that level. As a conventional superhero story, though, it’s pretty decent.

What isn’t decent is the worldview that fuels the characters who clearly share the writer’s perspective. We have a killer vigilante Rorschach driving most of the narrative, and he’s a guy who wears a mask that has shapes that constantly shift. He comes to the conclusion that God is dead and you make your own rules. And then there’s the Comedian, who actually dies at the beginning of the book and whose whole life is told in flashback. He’s a thug, a rapist, and a guy who casually guns down a woman pregnant with his own child without thinking twice. Every protagonist in the story ends up praising this thug for “getting the joke,” which is that life is a dark, miasmic pit of despair, and thus violent cynicism is the only sane response.

The nihilism in this story is black, gooey, and rancid. You can almost smell its foul odor rising from its pages.

It’s also hopelessly dated. It takes place in an alternate 1985 where Richard Nixon is President-for-Life, and war with the Soviet Union is inevitable, because chaos reins supreme, and there’s nothing we can do about it. That looks pretty silly in light of Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, although the doings in Russia today make it somewhat less ridiculous. The idea that the West was right and the Soviets were wrong doesn’t occur to this hairy British guy. They both have nukes, so they’re both bad. That’s like saying the rapist and the one who’s raped are both equally responsible.

This may have been the first mainstream comic where superheroes swear and stuff, so maybe that was considered bold and daring. Annoying would be a better word. The book is also far too busy – the panels are cluttered, and our hairy pal is intent on telling two stories at the same time throughout, including a completely irrelevant tale about a pirate who makes a raft out of dead bodies, eats raw seagulls, and comes home to kill people. In addition, each chapter begins with several pages of non-illustrated text that is a chore to read. It’s an unwieldy, often clumsy piece of literature.

I’ll probably see the movie, though. The trailer looks cool.