\u00a0<\/p>\n we are incapable of dealing with the problems caused by our existence.<\/span><\/p>\n Caroline Fraser. <\/span>NYRB<\/span><\/i> April 23, 2026<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n human nature is incurably mad.<\/span><\/p>\n Virginia Woolf. Ditto<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At some point in the late 1980s or early \u201890s, when I was working to establish cred with <\/span>The Comics Journal, <\/span><\/i>I told an editor that I considered <\/span>Watchmen<\/span><\/i> the best novel of the last decade. Oops, I later thought. I should have said <\/span>Love and Rockets<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Watchmen<\/span><\/i> had been lauded at the time. It is taught, I see, in high schools today, which means it has been deemed no more troublesome than <\/span>To Kill a Mockingbird<\/span><\/i>. It does not excite Moms as do transsexuals and Toni Morrison. (Only in Missouri have school districts banned it.) Was it not the driven and demented work which had hooked me? It has fallen out of the conversations in my cafe \u2013 if it ever had been part of them. Perhaps the poorly received movie, which I didn\u2019t see, or the highly lauded HBO series, which I\u2019ve been unable to watch, had overwhelmed the knife\u2019s edge I had sensed sheathed between its covers. When I told a friend I was writing about the graphic novel, he was flabbergasted to learn it did not concern African-Americans. Its place in the pantheon might be worth a second look. While it was the only graphic work on <\/span>Time<\/span><\/i> magazine\u2019s list of the greatest novels ever, the more elitist<\/span> Comics Journal <\/span><\/i>ranked it only the 91<\/span>st<\/span> best English-language comic of the 20th century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I.<\/span><\/p>\n Watchmen <\/span><\/i>had appeared as a 12-issue (32-page) monthly comic in 1986 and 1987, before being collected into a single volume in November that year, the twisted vision of a 33-year-old Englishman, Alan Moore, possessed by the Ban-the-Bomb fervor of a Trafalger Square Sunday soapbox. The cover credits the illustrator Dave Gibbons as co-author and the title page gives equal billing to the colorist John Higgins, but I suspect both were but enablers of Moore\u2019s mania and <\/span>Watchmen<\/span><\/i> soap bubbles without it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The book presented as a superhero saga, and I had never been a superhero fan. I\u2019d read scattered issues but none after turning ten when EC peeled the blankets from the sordid and steamy. When Marvel hit the scene in the early \u201860s, my eyes were on <\/span>The Stranger, <\/span><\/i>and I remained ignorant of DC\u2019s universe (or universes). <\/span>Watchmen <\/span><\/i>may have drawn from established conventions, but I am sure much was as shake-out-the-synapses original as it seemed to me.<\/span><\/p>\n Actually, it is unclear if <\/span>Watchmen<\/span><\/i>\u2019s protagonists<\/span> qualify as superheroes. Moore incresses this confusion referring to them variously as \u201ccostumed heroes,\u201d \u201cmasked adventurer(s),\u201d \u201cmasked avengers,\u201d \u201cSuper-Hero(es),\u201d \u201cSuperhumans,\u201d \u201csuper-people,\u201d \u201ccostumed heroes,\u201d and \u201ccostumed adventurers.\u201d This last, which seems the term most frequently applied, suggests capacities attainable by all. Only Jon (\u201cDr. Manhattan\u201d) Osterman has powers that set him apart from normal beings. He can alter molecules, \u201cmanipulate… matter,\u201d and move himself and others through time and space due to an accidental exposure to nuclear energy, like the insects and crustaceans in 1950s B-movies, who\u2019d experienced similar exposures and only gained gigantism. The others have trained themselves into physical form reachable at Planet Fitness. Adrian \u201cOzymandias\u201d Veidt also educated himself to become the World\u2019s Smartest Man. Dan \u201cNight Owl\u201d Dreiberg utilized a background in auto mechanics to develop a vehicle that can both fly and travel underwater. Walter (\u201cRorschach\u201d) Kovacs was driven by molten paranoid fury and Edward (\u201cThe Comedian\u201d) Blake an unflinching amoral cynicism. The only woman among them, the Crimebusters, Laurie (\u201cSilk Spectre\u201d) Jupiter, seems to have been pushed into felon fighting by her mother. They brought to their crusade the traumas of illegitimacy, parenting by prostitutes, and flight from the Reich\u2019s ovens. They did not count one sustained, mature relationship among them.<\/span><\/p>\n Moore provides the group a back story, wittily blending comic book and American history. It seems Superman\u2019s appearance in April 1938 in <\/span>Action<\/span><\/i> #1 caused several thrill-seeking do-gooders\u00a0 around the country to don costumes and fight crime, uniting the following year as Minutemen. (The criminals were often as outlandish as they were: The Screaming Skull; Dr. Axis.) Their good works carried them through WW II, but age, alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual deviancy took their toll. Criminals donned suits and moved into corporate board rooms, making fighting them no longer fun. In 1949, just as HUAC was launching an investigation, the Minutemen disbanded,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Then, in 1964 (about when Marvel resuscitated superheroes), the Crimebusters emerged to protect America from sex, drugs and campus unrest. But the public turned on them, attacking them as due process-bashing vigilantes, masked to avoid identification like the KKK. Police departments struck, saying their job had become impossible, and\u00a0 riots swept the country. Congress outlawed them in 1977, except for the Comedian, who carried out covert ops against Marxists, and Dr. Manhattan, whose powers gave the US a geo-political advantage it had lacked since Moscow got the bomb. (He had helped the US triumph in Vietnam, enabling Nixon to continue as president.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Weathermen <\/span><\/i>opens eight years after the ban.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n II.<\/span><\/p>\n Moore immediately<\/span> immerses readers in a bath of\u00a0 vileness. Gutters flood with vermin drowning in blood. Krystallnacht and Pale Horse, with whose names regurgitating the Third Reich and Revelations, headline rock concerts. \u201cThe End is Nigh,\u201d a mad-eyed picketer proclaims. \u201cDoomsday Clock Stands at Five to Nine,\u201d a headline trumpets.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe American dream has disintegrated into a riotous mob,\u201d Nite Owl instructs. Ours is a \u201cworld of horror and madness\u201d (in which)… we are alone… born from oblivion… go(ne) into oblivion,\u201d drones <\/span>Dark Freighter<\/span><\/i>, a comic a teenager reads. Life is \u201ca successful virus clinging to a speck of mud suspended in nothing,\u201d a psychiatrist, concludes. The universe will not notice, Dr. Manhattan points out, \u201cif everyone dies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Russia has invaded Afghanistan. The United States fears Pakistan and Europe are next. Nixon retreats to a bunker. Missiles are expected to fly; America east of Iowa will burn. The Crimebusters may be all that can prevent nuclear annihilation, but when the book begins, one has just been killed and the rest seem to face elimination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These inter-woven story lines \u2013 can the murderer be caught; will Earth escape being reduced to a cinder? \u2013 seem sufficient to keep readers turning pages. But Moore also puts in play a romantic triangle, a stew of mini-dramas centered around a corner newsstand, and, most notably, <\/span>Dark Freighter<\/span><\/i>\u2019s saga of pirates, sharks, and rafts afloat on bloated corpses, which parallels in insanity <\/span>Watchmen<\/span><\/i>\u2019s narrative.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He buttresses his tale with purported memoir chapters, scrap book clippings, academic articles, and portions of medical files. He studs his lines with references to William Burroughs and Kitty Genovese, <\/span>Hustler<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Tijuana Bibles. <\/span><\/i>He<\/span> interjects post-Einstein physics\u00a0 (\u201cAll time is simultaneous\u201d) and issues of moral debate (If by murdering a friend\/colleague you would save millions of lives, would you do it?) He flashes back and leaps forward. Panels flow by wordlessly or are borne upon a voice not directly addressing the depicted. Moore sometimes switches focus after a single panel; other times he advances steadily across pages like a card sharp emptying his deck.<\/span><\/p>\n These independent but interwoven story lines and scattered facts may clarify a larger picture; they may tug free drift away. A reader \u2013 like anyone passing through life \u2013 must make sense of his collected information as he progresses toward an end.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n III<\/span><\/p>\n The best thing about most art in Golden Age superhero comics is they wouldn\u2019t be comics without it. They\u2019d be a bunch of pulp paper with a narrative carried by over-heated captions and cliche-reliant dialogue. Gibbons has deliberately positioned Moore\u2019s characters in this world, working most frequently with its traditional nine-panel page. This\u00a0 allows him to draw identifiable figures and weaponry but allows little room for etched portrayals of human emotion, particularly if you\u2019re humans are masked. His sex scenes whimper like old tea and his nudes suggest he never took a life drawing class. Like many comic artists of mid-20th century comics though, given a shot at pouring sweat and spewing saliva, he was golden. And when he cuts loose in Issue 12 with six wordless full pages of bleeding bodies, sprawled across roof tops, jamming sidewalks, choking gutters, joining the vermin with which the book began, you can practically hear Gotterdammerung playing.<\/span><\/p>\n A nice \u2013 only-in-comics \u2013 use of Gibbons\u2019s art occurs when Rorschach is asked what he sees in an ink blot test. \u201cA pretty butterfly,\u201d he lamely replies, which a panel limply shows. But what Rorschach actually saw and an adjoining panel drops in the viewer\u2019s lap is the bloodied head of a German shepherd whose skull he had halved with a cleaver after it had eaten the remains of a six-year-old girl fed it by its owner. (He\u2019d then handcuffed the owner to a pipe, drenched him in kerosene, and set him on fire. They are teaching this to high school kids?)<\/span><\/p>\n In writing this article, I read nothing about <\/span>Watchmen. <\/span><\/i>(Wikipedia alone offered 163 footnotes, but I wanted nothing \u2013 even facts \u2013 to corrupt the vapor I was trying to flesh.) I relied on my own unfiltered, if uninformed, thinking. This left me no way of knowing whether Moore directed the POVs from which panels were drawn or if this was left to Gibbons. Either way, their variance \u2013 close-ups, long shots, over-heads growing increasingly distant, views behind railings, and\u00a0 between legs \u2013 support the in-and-out, back-and-forth complexity on which the story swings.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/the-comics-journal.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/unnamed.png\")
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