Watchmen is a comic book created by writer Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. The series was published by DC Comics in single issue during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently reprinted in collected form.
On Examining the Theme of the Watchmen, the main Theme was to examine what superheroes would be like "in a credible, real world". Characters of Watchmen were Moore's admonition to those who trusted in 'heroes' and leaders to guard the world's fate.
To place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to the Reagans, Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world who supposed to 'rescue' us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process. Moore specifically stated in 1986 that he was writing Watchmen to be "not anti-Americanism, but anti-Reaganism," specifically believing that "at the moment a certain part of Reagan's America isn't scared. They think they're invulnerable."
Visuals:
Talking about the Visual Structure of Watchmen, Structurally, certain aspects of Watchmen deviated from the norm in comic books at the time, particularly the panel layout and the coloring. Instead of panels of various sizes, the creators divided each page into a nine-panel grid. Gibbons favored the nine-panel grid system due to its "authority". Moore accepted the use of the nine-panel grid format, which "gave him a level of control over the storytelling he hadn't had previously", according to Gibbons. "There was this element of the pacing and visual impact that he could now predict and use to dramatic effect."
Talking about the Art and Composition of Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons designed Watchmen to showcase the unique qualities of the comics medium and to highlight its particular strengths. In a 1986 interview, Moore said, "What I'd like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating", and emphasized this by stressing the differences between comics and film. Moore said that Watchmen was designed to be read "four or five times," with some links and allusions only becoming apparent to the reader after several readings.
Gibbons described the series as "a comic about comics". This graphic novel takes a combination of reading and visuals skills to really understand. The book starts out with text from a journal overlaying a series of images that we dont get to see clearly until the bottom of the page. Each of the yellowed pieces of texts helps set context, while the images play off the words were reading. In the very first, the text of a dog carcass and true face are matched with red that might be blood, and a strange, smiling face. In the third frame, the text says to look up and look down while the image becomes increasingly far away. While these images and word pairings seem fairly obvious, they give the reader a sense as to how you will have to continue to read the book carefully analyzing the relationship between words and images to get a more full understanding of the text.
Looking at a graphic novel this way makes you use both your verbal and visual reading skills to understand what is going on. Unlike a movie, graphic novels also allow you the chance to go back and forth between pages, actively looking for clues to what is going on. Watchmen is masterful in this respect. The combination of verbal and visual information is rich and complicated.
Metafiction: Watchmen self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually, irony and self-reflection.The comic book pages of the Watchmen are intercut with full-length, primary documents like newspaper articles, government files and diary entries as well as a comic within a comic entitled "Tales of the Black Freighter." Some critics have called Watchmen a "multi-layered" work of metafiction. Later, the novel uses metafiction techniques by alternating frames of a comic book adventure titled Tale of the Black Freighter and the story were already involved with. Although this combination seems, at first, unnecessary, when you go back and compare the story told in Black Freighter to what were learning from the other main characters, the parallels again help illuminate the symbols in the story. While the comic book tale most closely parallels the tale of the storys main villain, there are also important clues for the other main characters. One of the most interesting things for me was going back through Watchmen after the mystery had been figured out to see what sorts of visual clues have been left to let you know who the criminal was all along. I completely missed it, but hindsight is 20-20.
This graphic novel serves as a great example of something that uses storytelling a different way from a traditional book. Watchmen combines cinematic and written techniques to create a story that is complicated and well worth a number of re-reads. Moores deconstruction of a superhero myth makes you rethink the things you thought you knew.
Throughout the Watchmen the reader is presented with many different characters. The novel presents the reader with two extremely different characters, namely Ozymandias and Rorschach their only similarities being their staunch belief that the ends justify the means. The characters of Rorschach and Ozymandias have a Manichaean relationship. The line between good and evil has been blurred with these two characters: it is unclear to the reader which of the two is good, and which is evil. One is rich, liberal, and handsome. The other is poor, conservative, and ugly. However, despite all of their differences, these characters share a common philosophy: they believe that the end justifies the means.
Context:
Watchmen illustrates an alternate history of the United States in which Richard Nixon is still the president, the US is on the verge of a nuclear war with Russia and two generations of "costumed adventurers" acted as vigilantes until the passing of the "Keene Act" which outlawed any non-government affiliated superhero. The plot is set into motion when one of the adventurers is murdered.The story was written during the period when America was edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The story reflects contemporary anxieties and deconstructs superhero concept. The story starts when The Comedian / Edward Blake is found murdered in New York and the vigilante Rorschach warns his former colleagues of what he believes is a conspiracy to kill costumed heroes. As the story progresses, the protagonists discover that one of the heroes has devised a plan to stave off war between the United States and the USSR by carrying out a plan that will kill millions of innocent people.
One of the reasons it's been proclaimed great by such disparate crowds as Time Magazine readers and comic book nerds alike is that it manages to spin so much depth into a medium that had been undervalued as a literary resource for so long. In other words, it surprised the hell out of everyone. The premise of the book is that superheroes are actually just real people that have to deal with their own situations and issues, nothing more special than that. In fact, very often Moore and Gibbons point out that there is something a little masochistic about anyone who would want to done costumes and try to fight crime in that way. The story runs very much like a detective story readers are invited to work along with the superheroes to try and figure out what exactly is going on. In our world, treaties prohibit nuclear weaponry in space. This is not true in their world, apparently, because the US Congress approved the building of nuclear silos on the moon.
In their world, the Nazis had costumed saboteurs in the US (Screaming Skull and Captain Axis). There is no evidence that the second nuclear bomb was used on Japan in Nagasaki in their world, but there's no evidence against it either. In their world, Action Comics #1 (with the first appearance of Superman) helped touch off the masked hero craze. Superhero comics continued for a while (the Flash existed, possibly as "Flash-Man") but dwindled in popularity due to the existence of real "superheroes." The '50s led to pirate titles dominating the market, led by EC. The anti-comic sentiment came to nothing; the government came down on the side of comics to "protect the image of certain comic book-inspired agents in their employ." In 1960, DC premiered Tales of the Black Freighter by Max Shea and Joe Orlando [who exists in our world, and has worked with Alan Moore], which proved to be groundbreaking. Pirate books continue to dominate into the mid-'80s, until the "alien" comes to New York; horror comics become more popular after that.
Note that pirate comics have never been popular in our world; with the exception of Classics Illustrated's adaptation of Treasure Island, I can't think of a single one offhand. (EC may have published one as part of their "New Direction.") A popular street drug is KT-28, which doesn't exist in our world (at least as such). : Blimps/dirigibles are not a common form of transport in our world, but they are in theirs. They've replaced other forms of mass transportation; nowhere in the series does a bus appear, and subways are only referred to in the past tense. Taxis are the only form of public transportation common to both worlds.
The cover of each issue serves as the first panel to the story. Gibbons said, "The cover of the Watchmen is in the real world and looks quite real, but it's starting to turn into a comic book, a portal to another dimension." The covers were designed as close-ups that focused on a single detail with no human elements present. The end of each issue (save for issue twelve) contains supplemental prose pieces written by Moore.
Talking about the Symbols and Imagery in the Novel, A blood-stained smiley face is a recurring image in the story in many forms. It produces "rhyme and remarkable configurations" by appearing in key segments of Watchmen, notably the first and last pages of the series. one form of the circle shape which appears throughout the story, as a "recurrent geometric motif" and due to its symbolic connotations. Gibbons created a smiley face badge as an element of the Comedian's in order to "lighten" the overall design, later adding a splash of blood to the badge to imply his murder. Gibbons said the creators came to regard the blood-stained smiley face as "a symbol for the whole series", noting its resemblance to the clock ticking up to midnight. Moore drew inspiration from psychological tests of behaviorism, explaining that the tests had presented the face as "a symbol of complete innocence". With the addition of a blood splash over the eye, the face's meaning was altered to become simultaneously radical and simple enough for the Watchmen first issue's cover to avoid human detail. Although most evocations of the central image were created on purpose, others were coincidental. Moore mentioned in particular that "the little plugs on the spark hydrants, if you turn them upside down, you discover a little smiley face".
Other symbols, images and allusion that appeared throughout the series often emerged unexpectedly. Moore mentioned that "The whole thing with Watchmen has just been loads of these little bits of synchronicity popping up all over the place". Gibbons discovered photographs in a book of craters and boulders on Mars that resembled a smiley face, which they worked into an issue. Moore said, "We found a lot of these things started to generate themselves as if by magic", in particular citing an occasion where they decided to name a lock company the "Gordian Knot Lock Company".
Watchmen intensifies the reading experience, the negotiation of the spaces between panels and between the pages. It registers postmodern scenic space - the clutter, the illegibility, the surface textuality - but provokes the modernist disruption of the rational grid in the mobilization of the reader as textual walker.
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