Watchmen is a so called graphic novel, which is basically a marketing term I gather, it's a comic all right. Author Allan Moore is one of the big shots in this genre, among his more prominent works are V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Swamp Thing. The three first have been made into films as you may know, with mixed success (Moore hates these adaptations, and usually has his name removed from the credits).
Watchmen is a masterpiece if ever there was one. I caught myself stroking the cover while I cackled maniacally as I was reading it. When I finished it I walked around shaking my head in disbelief over the brilliance of it. It's that good.
It's about superheroes, well more like masked adventurers really, because there is only one of them that has superpowers. The party is over, the population don't like them any more, so they got banned in '77. Only two government hired heroes are operative, one being the one with super powers - Dr. Manhatten, and the other - The Comedian - just got murdered, which is where the story begins.
It's all set in an alternate reality, Dr. Manhatten's powers helped USA win the Vietnam War, Nixon is still in office (the present in the story is '86). The masked heroes of the past, have gotten fat, depressed, insane, killed - times are hard. As the story progresses we jump from perspective to perspective, each piece unravelling the puzzle of the past and adding to the complexity of the present.
The story and drawings work so well together, you get totally sucked in to the universe. The characters are psychologically very complex, and are so believable they spring out of the pages. The attention to detail is extreme, like in a panel in the start you see a guy take a bunch of wrapped sugar cubes from a bowl, 30 pages later he takes one out of his pocket and eat it, 10 pages later a guy is making coffee and can't understand where the sugar went etc. That's just one example of many, it makes for a very coherent world. The same applies to names, shops, events you name it.
The comic uses some elaborate story telling mechanics, like first-person point-of-view, flashback, symmetrical stories etc. etc. It also has a wonderful piece of metafiction, a young boy reading a comic in the comic (see picture above). The action in the comic-in-comic is juxtaposed against the action in the "reality", underlining the drama of these events.
I could go on and on, but I hope you got the picture by now. And don't take my word for it, Watchmen is the only comic to win a Hugo award, as well as the only to appear on Time's list over the 100 greatest books from '23 'till today. The film (of which the photos I've seen looks promising - but of course it could be catastrophe), is being made by Zack "300" Snyder, due out in 2009.
I could go on and on, but I hope you got the picture by now. And don't take my word for it, Watchmen is the only comic to win a Hugo award, as well as the only to appear on Time's list over the 100 greatest books from '23 'till today. The film (of which the photos I've seen looks promising - but of course it could be catastrophe), is being made by Zack "300" Snyder, due out in 2009.
Still from the film. Compare with panel above.
1 comment:
Here we are, two and a half years later, and I've written my master thesis on Watchmen - I guess I really was smitten.
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