Watchmen - the comic

In preparation for the forthcoming film version, I re-read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's classic comic book, to see if it's as good as I remembered. Watchmen has been described as the 'Citizen Kane of comics'. This is a fair comparison. Both Kane and Watchmen broke new ground in what you could do in their respective medium - the narrative is multi-layered with different viewpoints, the characters are complex, flawed and psychologically-damaged, and the themes and tone are very serious. But also like Orson Welles' film, Watchmen has dated a little (feeling very 80s), and has a few parts you'd just like to skim over to get to the next great bit.
Watchmen is set in the 1980s. But an 80s where Richard Nixon is still US President and costumed vigilantes have been around since the 1940s, but were outlawed in the 70s. Where all but one of these 'heroes' were without super-powers - just a bunch of people with differing motivations for wanting to dress funny and punch criminals - from civic duty, to sexual impotence and repression, to parental pressure, to fascist or nihilistic political views. A world where the one person with super-powers, Dr Manhattan, has God-like power and is used to shift the political balance of the world.

When one former hero - the vile, rapist-murderer government agent known The Comedian - is murdered, the outlaw hero Rorschach begins his investigation. Rorschach is one of the finest fictional characters ever created. A twisted Batman - a detective as demented as he is driven, right-wing enough to make the reader uncomfortable rooting for him, frightening yet pathetic. Dave Gibbons' character design is stunning - a film-noir hat and trenchcoat, with a fluid black and white ink blot test instead of a face.
Gibbons' rigid 9 panel grid layout creates the perfect atmosphere of tension and claustrophobia - you wait for the artwork to explode along with the plot. The plot may be one of the few things that doesn't quite work anymore. The idea of doing something terrible to unite the world as it moves to the brink of nuclear Armageddon seems very much tied to its era. The nuclear fear just isn't as all-pervasive as it was when I was growing up in the 80s with talk of 4 minute warnings and fallout shelters. The threat is still here, but its one of many now, along with environmental, biological, terrorist, or financial disaster.

But Alan Moore knows how to write comics. You gloss over any minor faults, and a couple of those text only pages in between chapters, because you know you are in the hands of a master. You may not warm to any of his characters but you enjoy the way he writes them, and you are dying to know what happens to them. Watchmen is the first and only comic that many people have read as adults, due to its stature as a classic of literature, not just the comic book genre. Its not my absolute favourite, but its absolutely one of my favourites, and has most of the qualities that make me love comics so much.