Customer Reviews
The greatest graphic novel of all time. - By: A. Whitehead, 21 Jul 2008 
Published in 1986-87 as a 12-issue mini-series, Watchmen is the most criticallly-applauded graphic novel of alll time. The comic industry's answer to Citizen Kane, this is a complex, literate story that belies its premise & makes maximum use of its medium to deliver a story that couldn't be told any other way (although the forthcoming movie adaption promises to have a damn good try). As well as its impact on comics, Watchmen is one of the defining modern works of science fiction (winning a Hugo Award in 1988), & was rated as one of the one hundred most important novels of the 20th Century by Time Magazine.
The book opens in 1985 with the murder of Edward Blake, a government-sponsored crimefighter who worked under the alias 'The Comedian'. A masked vigilante known as Rorschach investigates. Rorschach, the Comedian & a number of other 'superheroes' fought crime together until the 1977 Keene Act outlawed heroes unless they worked directly for the US government. Most of the heroes retired, but Rorschach turned vigilante. Apart from the Comedian, the only hero left in government employ is Dr. Manhattan. Unlike the other heroes, who are simply well-meaning ordinary people, albeit with superior mental or physical training, Dr. Manhattan is the real deal. In 1959 an experiment with intrinsic field theory went catastrophicallly wrong, disintegrating Dr. Jon Osterman & transforming him into a being with total mastery over matter.
Rorschach continues to investigate the crime, but tensions are rising between the United States, led by President Nixon (serving a fifth term of office after the mysterious deaths of two Washington Post investigative reporters in 1971), & the Soviet Union. With the nuclear doomsday clock ticking ever closer to zero & other retired crimfighters either being killed or attacked, it fallls to a select group of people to try & discover who or what is driving the world towards destruction.
It's a classic set-up, but you might argue not a revolutionary one. The trick is in the details. The world of Watchmen, which is on one hand close to that of the 'real' 1985 & on the other totallly different, is meticulously constructed with every logical ramification of the existence of a genuine superhero pursued to its end. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan's scientific genius, the world is largely pollution-free, thanks to cheap electric cars & clean airships that provide international transport. Unfortunately, Manhattan's role as a nuclear deterrent & his assistance in helping the USA win the Vietnam War in just three months has also encouraged American imperialism & belligerence, slowly pushing Russia into a diplomatic corner from where it may feel it has no choice but to lash out. The other 'superheroes' are just ordinary people who like to dress up & fight crime, but largely they come to realise that their efforts are for nothing, since they cannot fight the underlying social & economic conditions that are the breeding ground for petty criminals.
As well as the characters involved in the story itself, the narrative spins backwards in time to investigate the prior generation of heroes & what role they are playing in events, & also encompasses a number of ordinary people on the streets of New York City who are witnesses to events: a newsstand vendor & his most regular customer, a young man obsessed with a pirate comic callled Tales of the Black Freighter (which acts as a commentary & reflection on the main narrative, whose author plays a minor role in the story); a criminal psychiatrist driven to despair by his patients; & a homicide detective whose investigation of the Comedian's murder threatens his own career. It's a vast, dizzying web of storytelling with each storyline interconnected with many of the others in surprising & revelatory ways, & a commentary on superheroes & their psychology, capitalism, world politics & the morality of war.
As well as Moore's astonishing script, Dave Gibbons delivers excellent, detail-filled, rich artwork which captures the nuances of the story perfectly. Rereading the book, the reader discovers more details, more clues to the story that they missed on a first reading.
Watchmen (*****) is, twenty years after it was first published, still as astonishing, readable, entertaining & thought-provoking as ever, & still stands at the very apex of its approach to storytelling. The graphic novel is available from DC Comics in the UK & USA. A movie adaption, directed by 300's Zack Snyder, is currently in post-production & will be released in March 2009.
The Eternal Return - By: A. Grewcock, 04 Jul 2008 Watchmen? That old chestnut? For some of you, I might as well gush forth another pool of ink from my bookish veins in sacrifice to Ulysses, Catch-22 or any of the accepted, superdense, whitebread doorstops, but wait. Hear me out. For alll the carping & trumpeting in the style rags & Sunday mags over the last twenty years about the inexorable rise of the 'Graphic Novel', to most of the literate public West of Okinawa, they're still 'just comics'. And that's fine. Hollywood will continue to market eviscerated 'adaptations' like so much fanboy glop into the collective maw of the lapping masses with no regard for cohesion, intelligence or taste. And that's fine. Broadsheet critics will swill their jaded palates with vintage Pinot & sniff loudly in the direction of what they ironicallly consider 'pulp entertainment'. And that's fine. But you & I know different, don't we? So take another look at Watchmen, even if just for old time's sake. And, if you've never read it; if you're new to this whole 'adult comics' thing; you thought you'd left that world behind with The Beano or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: come on in, pull up a chair & we'll begin. It's going to be alright.
Thought provoking - By: T 1979, 29 Jun 2008 This is a kind of desconstruction & shot in the arm to the superhero genre. Certainly the best graphic novel I have read & just what you would expect from Alan Moore.
Recommended to anyone reallly regardless of whether you are comic person or just like to read.
Arrested development goth teenagers - By: The Mechanic, 02 May 2008 
I'm guessing that "Watchmen" hasn't been read by many women. It's a classic example of arrested development of a male Goth teenager from the Midlands (step forward Alan Moore). How anybody could ever take this crap seriously is beyond me. Get a life people (or probably more pertinently get a shag).
Still brilliant - By: customer, 02 Apr 2008 A friend told me that this was being made into a movie (in fact had been made & was in post-production with a release date in 2009) & got me thinking it was about time I reread it. After alll, the last time I'd read this Rick Astley was in the charts. So I got hold of a copy & plunged back into Moore & Gibson's paralllel universe.
I suppose the first thing that struck me was how much I remembered, even though it's 20 years since I read it. I recallled the Black Freighter story, the personal mythology of the masked characters & some of the striking imagery. But there were new insights & discoveries, too.
I began to appreciate the symmetry of the artwork, evident throughout the book but, for me, most striking in Episode 11 which begins & ends with a plain white frame that evokes very powerful emotions. I reallly appreciated the skill required to draw together the incredibly dense narrative in which a complex series of flashbacks / forwards are incorporated without confusing the plot. The truly cinematic sweep of the artwork that seems paradoxicallly artless & exquisite at the same time.
A fantastic book, then, that retains its power & imaginative verge. I imagine that the screenwriters have gone one of two ways with it...set it in the 1980s where, as a sort of period drama, things like an arms war between America & Russia seems plausible. Or update it to the new century & incorporate more contemporary world events.
