Rereading Watchmen
Observations from my nth time rereading Watchmen.
I just got done rereading Watchmen (I’ll be posting something about the book on Instagram, but the two things were unrelated). At this point, I don’t remember how many times I’ve read this book. It’s not a ridiculous number, still single-digits, but I first read it in 2005, so I can’t be expected to have kept track. It’s probably high single digits, though.
This time, I read it one chapter per day, to try and simulate some kind of gap in the reading, to get a sense of the serialisation. I’ve read it enough times now that the creation doesn’t seem as ex nihilo, as crystalline, as it appeared on initial glance.
I should caveat that. In fact, oddly, I didn’t like the book the first time I read it. In 2005, I was still in college, mostly broke, and had a dial-up internet connection at home. I tell the story in interviews of finding this list of “comics – not for kids anymore” in a Sight & Sound magazine in the local British Council library and making a list of comics to read: Watchmen, Sin City, Uncle Sam and so on.
What I don’t often mention is that I couldn’t afford to buy these books, and anyway, I don’t think they were available in the local bookstores yet. Instead, I asked a friend who had broadband internet to see if he could find these on torrents. He found me two of them – Sin City and Watchmen – along with, of all things, Superman vs. Predator, which he thought I might like.[1]
So I read Watchmen first on a desktop monitor, with the pages fit to the width of the screen, scrolling down through each page before going on to the next.
And I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Sure, the story was subverting superheroes, and it was kind of interesting that they were all sad and stuff, but otherwise … eh.
Then over the next few years, I really got into comics, and started buying them, and I started reading more widely, and particularly started reading more modern comics and toying with the idea of eventually writing some. And then, I think in 2010, I was at a bookstore and saw a copy of Watchmen, thought, Oh, that thing, and picked it up – the physical copy – to skim through.
And, reader, I was thunderstruck.
It wasn’t the characters or the superhero stuff that hit me this time – I could suddenly see how Moore and Gibbons were using the page. I could see the recurring motifs across pages, I could see how the grid worked (it wasn’t three rows of three like a comic strip collection, which is how I’d originally thought of it – it was a page split into nine sections), I could see the multiple narratives affecting each other, and I could see the fact that each issue cover was, technically, the first panel of that issue.
The physical comic, I realised, worked in a way that my compromised viewing on the screen couldn’t have communicated. I’d been reading the book wrong. And, of course, the superhero deconstruction – which is most of what I’d heard critics talking about – wasn’t the most interesting thing about the comic.[2] It was how it was engaging with the form of comics.
I bought the copy – partly out of guilt, but mostly because I just had to have it in physical form – and went back home and read it again and became a fan.
Since then, I’ve bought (and lost, by lending to friends) at least four more copies of the book.
Anyway, coming back to my nth reread.
I’d realised this over the last few reads, but you can really see the upgrade from issue 2 to issue 3. Till issue 2, this is still a straightforward comic – erudite and well-constructed, but you wouldn’t predict one of the absolutely best comics in the medium just yet. Moore’s already got the Nicolas Roeg trick of layering unrelated but thematically relevant dialogue over scenes, but it’s just a fun trick at this point. Issue 3 is where you can see Moore has already made all the connections he needs to make. This is where the pirate comic starts, and the multiple layers start playing off each other. From this moment, everything begins to play off everything else. There will be a pirate caption, multiple balloons, and the image of the panel, and they’ll all be commenting on each other. It’s intense.
Issue 3 is where you can see the sheer exuberance of this. Issue 4 is where it settles, and is put to its best use – the Dr. Manhattan chapter, which is still my favourite chapter of the book, and probably one of my favourite single issues of any comic ever. Top 5, at least. Here, not only is the visual commentary still going, it’s also used to telescope your perception of time to give you a hint of how Dr. Manhattan sees the world.
This would also prefigure Moore’s own belief in Eternalism, and here, that view is still nascent.[3] The metaphor Dr. Manhattan uses here, for example, is that of an “intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet”.
Chapter 5 – “Fearful Symmetry”, the one where the entire issue is symmetrically constructed with the Ozymandias murder attempt in the middle the only time the comic breaks its grammar of single pages – is the last one where Moore and Gibbons are giving a bravura performance. After that, things settle, and while the technical performance continues till the end, you get the feeling that Moore has made his point and doesn’t want to belabour it.
This third set of chapters – 6-12 – are honestly weaker in terms of the writing (Gibbons on the other hand just keeps getting better). Particularly, chapters 6 and 9 (the Rorschach and Laurie chapters) I have always found a bit … unconvincing.
Chapter 6 feels surprisingly simplistic after the complexity of chapters 3-5. While the Rorschach character escapes his limits by the end of the novel (both the “not in the face of armageddon” moment and his confrontation in the snow with Dr. Manhattan are incredible – you try defying a god for your principles), this feels a bit cheap as an origin story to me. I’m also not convinced that an experienced criminal psychologist would be this knocked off the course of his life by someone like Rorschach, nor do I buy the unsympathetic shrewishness of his wife.
In Laurie’s case, in chapter 9, the problem is of agency. Her story so far has been that of a lack of agency, and the big reveal is … another example of her lack of agency in her own life. Hmph. I don’t, like some others do, feel Moore is bad at writing women[4] – I think he’s written enough amazing and complex female characters, sympathetic or otherwise, in both his other comics and his prose, and I also generally agree with his contention that sexual assault is a legitimate topic for stories to tackle because it is, sadly, a part of real life. But Laurie’s problem feels like Moore doesn’t find her terribly interesting, and so can’t find much to talk about with her.
The chapter-ending prose pages – I was surprisingly ambivalent towards those this time around. For one, the entire Krakoa era happened between my last read and this one, and I can see how far we’ve come on this count. They do get more complex as they go – I think the Veidt backmatter is the most interesting of the lot, and that’s the final batch.[5] I would love to know if other comics before Watchmen did prose pages (or data pages, as we call them now) as backmatter. Richard Bruning, in a recent interview, talked about how they happened:
Alan [Moore] and Dave [Gibbons] had finished the first couple of issues of Watchmen. I had realized that Watchmen was going to come out like a regular floppy comic with the staples on the side, but it was going to have an ad flat in it. And I said, “You can’t put a fucking ad flat in this book. Every page is just too perfect.” It was so well thought out, and so considered, that on the flight after San Diego Comic Con, I convinced Dick Giordano to take the ad flat out of there. I had to come up with something to do with the back of the book, because now we had eight pages to fill. I got to work with Dave and Alan on creating those back features, which were unique to each issue.
In any case, it’s been a journey, from thinking this book was uninteresting, to thinking it was the best thing ever and pretty much the perfect comic, to now having a more complex view – it’s still a monumental achievement, and staggeringly complex, but it has its limitations, both in form and content. Neither of those hamper my love for it. Sure, it’s not the most pleasant comic – it’s a dour, melancholic read, bittersweet at best – but it is still an absolutely phenomenal comic. One of the finest.[6]
I don’t think much of that book, other than the excellent Kevin Nowlan inking. ↩︎
I still feel that Miracleman does a better job of superhero deconstruction than Watchmen does – if that’s what you’re looking for. Those two books have an odd relationship – Miracleman was begun much before Watchmen, but finished after. It also hasn’t been available to read very easily for the longest time (though now Marvel has put out a collected edition – not sure if this is still in print, because Marvel tends to be iffy about that), so it wasn’t part of the deconstruction conversation in the way it should’ve been. Even the famous “Anatomy Lesson” has its roots in Miracleman. Anyway, it’s 2026, and superhero deconstruction isn’t a particularly interesting strand of culture, but you know, it once was. ↩︎
In a later chapter, Dr. Manhattan talks about being unable to see the future due to tachyon flow interference, which I don’t think particularly jibes with the block universe view of things. It’s just a narrative contrivance, in any case. ↩︎
I do feel he’s shakier on race. ↩︎
I also realised, as I read it this time, that the fake magazine profile of Veidt was absolutely where I got the idea to do a fake magazine profile with an oddly obsequious journalist, complete with photoshoot, for the back of In Your Skin #2. I’d just forgotten that’s where I got it from. ↩︎
An observation I couldn’t find space for in all of this: I was reading Moore’s recent fantasy novel The Great When as I was rereading Watchmen this time (it was in fact what triggered this reread), and I noticed that both books take place around Halloween – the entire action in the case of The Great When, and the final chapters in Watchmen. Maybe Moore feels it’s a good time for spiritual disturbance. ↩︎