'Watchmen' by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (1987)

Thanks to Mal for this great birthday present.

Somehow I managed to miss out on a lot of graphic novels as I grew up. I used to avidly read 2000AD and I read a fair amount of Spiderman and Superman. I have tried to 'catch up' in recent years by reading Batman, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and a few others in adulthood, as well as watching a slew of stories turn into movies (often a poor transformation).

My friend Mal has often said that Watchmen marks the point at which comic books grew up. Having read it I agree with this. There is a postmodern 'knowingness' about it; it is reverential to super heroes whilst focussing more on them as people with human foibles and weaknesses.

To be fair only one of the characters is a true 'superhero'; the rest regard themselves, sometimes ironically, as 'costumed adventurers'. They are people with alter egos. The story takes place in the modern world during the Cold war, in fact on the brink of World War 3. The now retired heroes have hung up their costumes and have been replaced by a younger, less idealistic, set of crimefighters. There actions have been outlawed since 1977 and so they operate quielty, individually and without much cohesion. Someone is killing them off one by one and appears to be manipulating global tensions..but whom and to what end?

There was a great deal I enjoyed about this. I liked that the heroes were far from perfect; in fact they were fairly screwed up on the whole, which is probably why they do what they do. The sense of impending doom which predominates throughout the book is well portrayed. I like the idea that as superheroes are effectively real, the main stories in comic books are about pirates! I liked how prose text (police reports, news articles, memoirs) are interspersed with the graphic text. The graphic style is excellent; pictures are clear and loaded with meaning. Many of the images feel cinematic and cram in more information than could easily be portrayed in words alone (surely part of the point of graphic novels!). I particularly liked how the pictures and the text were sometimes telling different stories which relate to each other (usually bits of a pirate comic forming the captions to street scenes revealing humanity); analogy is not the right word but it is very skillfully handled here.

The only disappointment for me was that the ending felt mundane and unsatisfactory. It felt like really enjoying the journey to a holiday destination, but the destination itself being unimpressive. It also seemed somewhat predicatable (although admittedly not the whole ending!) and given the postmodernistic twists throughout the book I expected more. Maybe that is some sort of postmodern joke in itself!

I would recommend this book to virtually all grown ups! I think anyone would get something from it. If its the only graphic novel someone ever reads then it would be an excellent choice!