Watching the Watchmen: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Review of  Watchmen by  Sylvia Bond

I have just finished my second read of the Watchmen comic book. I’d call it a graphic novel like everyone else does, but that seems a bit pretentious, rather like calling vanilla pudding “crème brulee” because it’s been in the fridge long enough to have grown a crust. At 300 pages plus, my copy of Watchmen is long, but it’s still a comic book, albeit a comic book with a spine.

I’ve also finished a read-through of other reviews of Watchmen, both from 1988, when it won its award, and from recently, by followers getting all excited on account of the movie coming out next year and all. (And everyone knows that’s the reason why I’m here, so we don’t need to go into that again.)

I was a bit beguiled by the amount of time that went into the reviews, some were clever and witty, and others were ponderous to say the least, using words like “leit-motif” and “trope” and stuff like that. Not to mention the annotated Watchmen website that my webmaster told me about when I admitted to him that I just didn’t GET it. He was as gentle with me as the clerk at Time Warp Comics was over the phone when I told him I’d never heard of Watchmen, and assured me that I would get it, if I would read it a few more times and let it sink in.

You know, I plan to do that, when I have an extra couple of days or even years, which is what it would take to get every nuance and in-joke and reference and subtext and everything else Watchmen is full of. So instead of trying to outsmart the thing, I thought I’d give you my honest and true reaction, straight from the gut. I might come off looking stupid but it’s a damn sight better to do that, I figure, than to pretend I live in an ivory tower and give myself airs of grandeur. After all, it is just a comic book.

Right?

As I exhale a long suffering sigh, I must be honest and say, alas no. It’s like Tolstoy, only with pictures. Nobody reads Tolstoy on purpose, right? I can only remember reading The Death of Ivan Ilych because of an English class, led by a professor who touted other cheerful classics such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Hedda Gabler, The Black Pearl, To the Lighthouse, and so on, which scarred me so badly that I almost became a math major, if you can believe that.

Plus, Watchmen has won a Hugo award, the only graphic novel to ever do so! That’s a chestnut that’s been flying around for ages and ages. True, Watchmen won the award in 1988, but since that was 20 years ago, it seems to me that there must have been some pretty awesome other graphic novels since then.

So I checked it out. The only reason that this graphic novel won, and that no other has since then, is because that was the ONLY year there was a category that graphic novels fit. According to the “admin” for the site in comments dated 2/28/2008, “…Watchmen probably wouldn’t have been in the Hugo Awards in 1988 at all had the 1988 Worldcon not created a one-shot, catch-all category for it…” Which is rather like being the most beautiful girl at the local cotillion. If you’re the ONLY girl at the dance, what’s the distinction then? There is none.

Recently, however, there was an announcement at comicmix.com that the Hugo Awards were going to add a graphic novel category, so that should up the ante and the quality of what’s being produced.

Back to the matter at hand. Overall, Watchmen rather depressed and overwhelmed me. It’s dense and complicated and very, very busy. Apparently Moore and Gibbons have never heard that less is more, in fact, they seem to believe that MORE is more.

One thing I noted about Watchmen was the number of plot lines weaving in and out of each panel. There’s the story about the Blue Man, the superhero’s club, that Ozymandias guy, the mystery of the Comedian’s death, and then the subplot of the comic book the little boy at the newsstand spends his time reading. Not to mention the chunks of text interspersed between the pretty drawings, as if the drawings weren’t enough and the thing had to be pumped up to be thick enough and heavy enough for a Hugo. I’ll admit, around halfway through, I started skimming the text parts, on account of it was just going to show me more background and motivation than I felt I needed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like my reading to be complex and involved and all that, but there’s such a thing as overkill. The multiple narratives, man, I get that a story needs texture, but does it need THAT many layers? If you have to create a mirror story of your original story in order to further explain your original story? There’s something amiss with your original story. I’m thinking here about the pirate comic books that the little boy at the newsstand is reading, and once I figured out that the story in the comic books reflected the main story about the destruction of humanity and all, I started skimming. Although, at the same time, I did like the idea that in a world of superheroes, comic books are full of pirate stories because you always want what you can’t have.

As for the drawing of Watchmen, I found it interesting that unlike most superhero-type stories, there was very little action being drawn. There’s no running or flying or fighting. Yeah, the Comedian falls from his window, and at different points, people point and shoot guns, but for the most part, the characters are static, and do a lot of standing and talking. Others have pointed out, and I’ll add it here, that the narration is not contained in any omnipotent visual voiceover, but instead is told through dialog. Which is quite a trick because it’s a LOT of dialog you’ll need, but which might also explain the static feel to the text.

Also, I found that the men were drawn better than the women. Particularly in the scene where the superheroes come together to talk about joining forces, everyone’s standing around, and the women look they were based on Barbie dolls, while the men look natural. At least as natural as they can look, given their superhero gear.

This might have to do with the fact that the artist is a man, and because comic book people are artificially proportioned to begin with and women tend to come off as alarmingly top-heavy, with long legs that go up to their armpits. They also wear inappropriate footwear, regardless of the weather, very high heels that I suspect might be a fetish for Dave Gibbons (the artist), or, who knows, maybe Alan Moore (the writer) told him to put them in.

As for the Blue Man (aka Doctor Manhattan) don’t get me started. While I rather enjoyed the human heros, who tried their best in spite of not having super powers, the Blue Man irritated me. And it wasn’t just that he walked around with his meat and two veg hanging out. I’m all for nekked nudity, right. But he seemed a waste of ink and space. He was always bemoaning his fate, ditched his girlfriend at the first sign of a wrinkle or two, and jetted off to Mars to build pretty pink castles in the sand. What use was he?

Not to mention how he became the Blue Man in the first place. When he was human, he was foolish enough to a) wear and leave his jacket in a high-powered, dangerously charged, nuclear powered transmogrifying machine instead of a clean suit and b) to go BACK and get said jacket without checking any of the settings or c) for anyone in the room to not warn or stop him NOR were there any warning signs reading: “Test to start in 30 seconds, dumbass.”

It all seems somewhat foolishly contrived, and he’s really like one of those silly girls who thinks its okay to walk down an alleyway in a big city at 2:30 in the morning. In those situations you will pay for your stupidity, in this case, the Blue Man pays, and pays, and pays. He pays by being super human powerful, and, more visibly, by being blue and naked, wearing fewer and fewer clothes as the story goes on, with his meat and two veg hanging out there as he looses touch with his humanity, going from being IN a state of nature to being a FORCE of nature. Clever, huh? Unfortunately Watchmen is chock-a-block with such cleverness, by the time we get to this particular offering, I’m overwhelmed. Or, honestly, as underwhelmed as I would be if I were standing on a corner of a street in Paris and could only see three Starbucks and no real cafés. Why go to Paris at all if this is what I’ll find?

Also a little draggy was the whole reveal done by Ozymandias to the two superheroes who want to stop him and his nefarious plot to change the world. His reveal goes on and on, and by the time it’s done, it’s too late to save humanity. I mean, I did like the telling of it, I enjoyed the reveal about the Comedian, he seemed more interesting on account of it, but my initial thought was, “Do we have to go into this NOW, because, hey, the world is about to end, here.” Turns out Ozymandias did it on purpose, like he did everything – and if the Blue Man had known, which surely he could have, given that whole “seeing across time” thing that he’s going on, then why didn’t he stop him? Not as dramatic that way, I guess.

Ozymandias’ goals and ideas remind me of the book The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom, which talks about, among other things, how a common enemy unifies groups against it, be it microcells, monkeys, or people. The same concept was explored in Independence Day (in a much funner, more entertaining way, of course, thanks to Will Smith), that if we as a planet have something coming at us from beyond space, then by golly, we’re all in this foxhole together, regardless of all those superficial markers by which we usually separate ourselves. Ozymandias also had it in mind that a little culling won’t do the herd any harm, and so his alien comes equipped with death rays that wipe out enough of the population to make life on this planet sustainable for a good long while yet.

But at what cost? You can’t play The Price is Right when your currency is human flesh, but apparently Ozymandias was thinking of the bigger picture, the survival of the species, regardless. That in and of itself is heavy enough for one college English paper, thank you, but then there’s more. Too much more. Hell, Tolstoy would be easier than this!

I didn’t totally hate Watchmen, really, because even though it’s not something I would read again soon, there were parts I liked. For example, I enjoyed reading about the characters themselves, desperate and overwhelmed, imperfect and trying to do right by the world. Although, you kind of have to question the sanity of someone who feels they need to dress up in a costume to do society a favor by killing the bad guys before they clog up the law system’s docket. Wouldn’t a mask do?

I enjoyed reading about Nite Owl’s semi-shy, semi-diffident development into avenger/vigilante. The care with which he designs and tests his outfit was really quite sweet, and it rather made me think of Superman, you know? Or Batman, or any of them. Why do they wear what they wear, and how did they go about choosing the various aspects of their outfits?

I especially liked the Comedian, who, like Willie Loomis from Dark Shadows, finally encounters an evil greater than himself. He definitely is a rogue of the first water, drawn with these HUGE arms and shoulders that could do damage in short order (and probably have), but I kind of got the feeling that he made everything a joke because he felt things too much.

I also liked Rorschach. Yeah, I know. Weird, huh? He’s another psycho, ginger-haired like so many of them are. And naturally, his mother was a hooker, and there may have been inappropriate touching along with the clouts to the head and the ragged living conditions. Just once, I’d like to see a psycho brought up by a normal family. You can explain Rorschach by his background, but what if you couldn’t? Wouldn’t that be more creepy? Anyway, poor Rory wants to find out who has been killing superheroes, though I’m not sure why he cares, if he’s a psycho and all, but his path through the book to solve the Comedian’s murder was actually the most interesting one.

Overall, Watchmen is a good story, but it’s not a great story. Though, in not really liking Watchmen much, I feel rather like I’m the only one who can see that the Emperor is naked, because there’s this cult-like feel to the fans of this work, and I get the feeling that if I can’t see the GENIUS of it, then I should consider myself considered too stupid to live.

But I don’t. Honestly, I have friends, fellow geeks, fans, and techno nerds among them, and none of them had ever heard of Watchmen. And it’s not to do with popularity either. It has to do with a works ability to reach people. All people. So, while the message might be fantastic and futuristic and all that, but if no one hears the message, what’s the point? Yeah, sure, it’s going to be made into a movie, but that’s not saying very much, because lots of graphic novels and comic book characters have been brought to the screen, some with tons of success and others with less.

Spock (Kirk’s Spock, not the baby doctor one) once said that sometimes having a thing is not so pleasing as wanting a thing. To paraphrase, reading Watchmen was not so fun as buying it.

Sylvia Bond is a ten-year technical writing veteran with too many degrees under her belt to count. She lives in Colorado, but does not ski, preferring instead to spend her money and time at the annual Great American Beer Festival, taking road trips across the United States, and reading historical fiction from the comfort of her fluffy green arm chair. She has been involved in fandom since 1993 and been writing fanfic since approximately 1993. What she finds most amazing about fandom (besides the open heartedness of fans and the sheer amount of creativity) is how visible fandom has become. “In my day,” she says, “we had to hide behind P.O. boxes to get fanfic. But nowadays, people wear t-shirts that shout their affiliation and share their shiny toys on the internet.” It’s a wonderful world.

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