I recently noticed that there was a new (well it's 11 issues into a 12 issue run so newish) Watchmen comic by my favorite Superman writer Geoff Johns. I am very interested in reading it but I thought I ought to first re-read this book as I haven't read it since I was a teenager. I remember not really liking it at all but I certainly had different tastes then. I was more about action oriented comics, this book has very few punches thrown. I also didn't like the art much at the time and now I'm just wondering where my head was at. Right off the bat I want to note a huge positive with this book; the art is phenomenal. I was blown away by some of the scenes in this story. I was so effortlessly transported into the world of the Watchmen by the incredibly dense and imaginative art. The writing is very special too. The whole thing is really gripping and enjoyable to read from start to finish but it is also deeply flawed in my opinion.
This book is pretty convoluted and as a reader you're constantly being hit with a lot of things that are all happening simultaneously in the narrative. By that I mean not everything is happening simultaneously in the story but it's just presented altogether and non linearly. This makes a straightforward review tough, I'm not sure how to structure it so I hope to make my review less all-over-the-place than the book. The Watchmen comes across to me like a universe that Moore overpopulated with a million ideas that he felt needed to be covered in these twelve issues in case he never had a chance to revisit them. I think this was an ultra creative period in Moore's life and an early shot at having real creative control over a project and this book kind of became the victim of his deep well of imagination.
I do really think this book hits strokes of brilliance, at times I put the book down and just had to soak up whatever profound note Moore had struck. At other points it feels like Moore is trying to come across as brilliant but doesn't actually manage to hit the mark. There are pieces written as though they were profound but fail to actually mean or even evoke anything. It often reminded me of a poetry subreddit I once found where novices experimenting with poetry feel like breaking up wispy vague ideas into short staccato lists feels artistic somehow.
I remember during my first reading of this book (which was during a resurgence in popularity coinciding with the release of the movie) I really hated the pirate story which is scattered throughout this book. I thought it was a dumb pointless inclusion that derailed any interest in the actual story whenever it showed up. I must say upon rereading it I feel the same way. I especially found it frustrating the way it was presented staggered alongside the newsstand mans ramblings within each frame. The first few pages I read them in the order they were printed thinking the comic narrative would provide subtext or parallels to the newsstand man's narration but it never did so I began to just read through the pages pirate section and then go pack to the top of the page and read the newsstand portion. By the end of it I hoped the pirate part would have SOME bearing on the story overall, especially with the inclusion of the retrospective text on it's author Max Shea and Max Shea as a person of interest due to his disappearance and later reappearance on the island. While Max Shea does seem to play a crucial part in the plot the inclusion of this pirate comic still feels pointless. Sure it could just be seen as irony or coincidence that Bernie who reads Shea's comics every day is killed by one of Shea's creations. Sure the main character of the pirate story may possibly be interpreted as a metaphor for Shea's or Veidt's actions in the book but even if they could, so what? Why? I like the streets of New York bits where Bernie is reading the pirate comic, I just don't see why we needed to read the whole comic with him. Even Bernie says to himself, in a moment of Moore's own self awareness perhaps, that the comic makes no sense.
The New York streets bits are an effective way of getting us invested before the destructive event happens, without that development of all of those characters the destruction would not have had the same impact on the reader. We know who was in those streets when they were destroyed, we got to know them and we were invested in their lives to a degree.
I was surprised with how right wing so many of the characters in this book were, I doubt Moore himself is so very right wing but he seems to have written almost every character in that way. I would say that the most vocally right wing characters are also painted as kind of scummy people but that just might be my own lefty biases. There isn't even a contrast, there isn't a single character that I could identify as being left wing and this universe seems to have re-elected Nixon for decades. One journalist asks Veidt about Rorschach and the Comedian being pretty apparently right wing, implying that Veidt isn't but Veidt is into eugenics and is utterly confused how he managed to be so smart without any apparent genetic predisposition toward intelligence. He also gathers up as much capital as possible in order to achieve his manifest destiny of unifying the world. He's probably the most right wing of everyone. There does at least seem to be a popular criticism in society towards the right wing paper that Rorschach loves. Just the amount of unchecked right wing ideology in this book left me feeling a little gross. Maybe Moore was trying to point out that a world with unchecked right wing ideology would certainly lead to violent catastrophe. Who knows.
I'm sure you could analyze this book to mean anything in the world, it's such a jam packed mess that any interpretation makes just as much sense as any other. If you read it good luck and just try to enjoy the ride, breathe in the great moments and don't overthink it as I clearly have.
