The Greatest Superhero Story Ever Told

Once upon a time, superheroes were infallible. They always defeated the villain, always did the right thing, and everybody trusted them. Then, in the early 1960's, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics decided that he wanted to write about superheroes that he (and many other people over 10) would actually enjoy reading about. As he liked stories with flawed characters who (usually) overcame adversity, he decided that his superheroes would be cut from the same bolt of cloth. They would be "heroes with problems." Thus, Lee introduced such characters as the quarrelsome Fantastic Four, the guilt-ridden Spider-man, and the alcholic Iron Man. Lee's characters, however, were still more or less functional. They messed up from time to time, but they usually cleaned up their messes, or tried to.

In the mid-1980's, Alan Moore took a dimmer view of superheroes. He didn't think they would be functional at all. We are, after all, talking about grown men and women who fight violent criminals while wearing flamboyant and often skintight costumes. Moore decided that people who did that wouldn't be merely "troubled," like Lee's characters; they'd be flat out nuts. Thus, <i>Watchmen</i> has such characters as Rohrsach, a child abuse survivor turned masked vigilante and the Comedian, a Captain America type-- but minus the shield and the scruples. Dr. Manhattan is about as powerful as Superman, but has become dangerously detached from the rest of humanity, as his perceptions of space and time are vastly different. He can, for instance, see several timelines at once and even has some precognitive ability.

Moore also decided that the appearance of superheroes would have a major impact on society. In one sequence, Dr. Manahttan uses his powers to single-handedly end the Vietnam War, thus enabling Nixon to win five terms as President. (He's still President in the time of <i>Watchmen</i>.) Both Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, who is described as "the world's smartest man," create gadgets like electric cars that become very widely used, in contrast to most of the inventions concocted by comicbook scientists and inventors. Unfortunately, many people find the heroes' influence alarming, and superheroism is outlawed in the mid-1970's. Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian both offer their services to Uncle Sam, while Rohrsach continues fighting crime anyway (and becomes increasingly demented in the process), and the others retire and try to lead normal lives, with varying degrees of success.

<i>Watchmen</i> starts off with a very simple hook: a murder mystery. The Comedian turns up dead and it soon becomes obvious that foul play was involved. Rohrsach takes it upon himself to try to track down the killer, who he believes is an old foe out to kill all the Watchmen. He turns out to be wrong, but he and the others eventually do discover the evil conspiracy afoot.

Moore uses multiple points of view to tell his story. Rohrsach proves to be a classic unreliable narrator, especially when he's commenting about specific people, most especially when he's commenting about women. (Rohrsach was abused by his mother and is thus decidedly misogynistic.) The Comedian is seen only in flashbacks-- and many of these beg the question why it took so long for somebody to kill the man. The Comedian had fought bravely in both WWII and Vietnam, but he had also sexually assaulted at least one woman. Several issues take the form of dialogues, such as the one in which Rohrsach tells his origin story to his increasingly horrified psychiatrist or the one in which Silk Spectre II tries to persuade the withdrawn Dr. Manhattan to help the other Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan narrates his own origin, and jumps back and forth through time while doing so.

<i>Watchmen</i> is a multigenerational story and its characters roughly parallel Golden Age (1930's and 1940's) and Silver Age (1960's and 1970's) heroes. Both versions of Nite Owl, especially the younger one, resemble Batman, as they use gadgets to help them and often operate at night. Dr. Manhattan owes his powers to radiation, like Spider-man and many other 1960's characters. Silk Spectre is a so-called "legacy character," like the Phantom; Silk Spectre II is the original's daughter. Unfortunately, Moore's patterning his characters on old-time heroes means that most of the Watchmen are white men. There are no minority members in either generation of Moore's superheroes, and only a couple of women. This makes a certain amount of sense as, aside from a handful of exceptions like Wonderwoman, female and minority superheroes didn't really come into their own until after 1970.

<i>Watchmen</i> was considered groundbreaking when it came out in 1986. It was a comic explicitly written for adults, as opposed to children or teen-agers. Along with Frank Miller's <i>Dark Knight</i>, it ushered in the "grim and gritty" trend of the 1980's and 1990's, which put superheroes in the inner city and pitted them against villains who were emblematic of urban living's woes. Its various narrative techniques have since been used elsewhere. (I vaguely remember an <i>X-Men</i> comic in which the story was told partly through a dialogue between one of the heroes and the book's villain.) <i>Watchmen</i> also demonstrated that comicbooks were capable of fairly detailed worldbuilding. Before <i>Watchmen</i>, stories involving alternate worlds tended to be brief and simple. They tended to have plots like "What if Dr. Doom Had Been a Hero?" and they typically spanned only a few issues, which limited the amount of detail a writer or artist could include. <i>Watchmen</i> spanned twelve issues, giving Moore and artist Dave Gibbons plenty of room to include details such as the right-wing newspaper that Rohrsach reads, old photographs of the original 1930's heroes, advertisements for Ozymandias' products, and grafitti, most notably the phrase, "Who watches the Watchmen?"

Some have argued that <i>Watchmen</i> is no longer relevant, as many of its innovations have since become standard in comics. Also, <i>Watchmen</i> is heavily influenced by the Cold War, and there are references to the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan. In fact, the villain's chief motivation is to somehow stop the Cold War and prevent nuclear annihilation. Such touches do indeed date the book, but its big theme seems to be "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions"-- which can apply in any era. Many of Moore's characters mean well, but they don't always do the right thing or even know what the right thing is. In their efforts to do the right thing, they may just make a bad situation even worse.

Moore drives his pessimistic theme home with "The Tales of the Black Freighter" segment, which is, unfortunately, one of the book's weaker touches. Here, a minor character is reading a comicbook that recounts an extremely ghoulish pirate story. The scenes from the comic are juxtaposed with scenes from <i>Watchmen</i> proper. In the story, the protagonist is marooned on a desert island and is maddened by the ordeal he suffers in his attempts to get back home and warn his hometown about an impending attack. Moore seems to be linking the character to Rohrsach, or to the book's villain-- who goes so far as to comment that he dreams about the ghostly ship in the comic. Um, right. That's lame and "Black Freighter" gets way too much space.

<i>Watchmen</i> comes with fantastic extras. Comicbook extras tend to be embarrassingly lame: a reprint of an earlier issue, a "pin-up" of an attractive female character, extremely detailed (and geeky) descriptions of someone's powers or weapons, etc. Moore's extras, by contrast, include a character's autobiography, Rohrsach's psychological profile, interviews of different characters, and an ornithology article written by one of the heroes.