REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
In narrowed circles, Watchmen will be dismissed for merely being the fare-the-well vision of superheroes. True, the 1986 tale is indebted to genre conventions, but it additionally refurbishes devices from science fiction and the mystery novel, specifically the "murder at the club" sub-species. Here, however, the cast of indelibly delineated members just happen to wear masks. With this, the psychological implications of dressed-up heroism are acknowledged, examined, and then folded into richer, more complex patterns of human behaviour than covered in any crime fighter's handbook.
In fact, Watchmen as a whole represented a richer, more complex, and more ambitious narrative infrastructure than serial comics had seen before. Writer Alan Moore consciously fabricated a fastidious, densely layered, and unfailingly smart dramatic milieu. A chilling realism, but one step removed from normalcy, shapes integrated innovations from the momentous (Nixon's fourth term) to the incidental (the necessitated collateral drugs for same). Arch dialogue, aphorism, witticisms, and good jokes pepper a prose that spoke in tongues to multiple purposes and sustained a level of daunting and unprecedented word-smithing.
Dave Gibbons gave the absorbing clash of familiar and alien a reassuring coherence even while embedding the graphic tie-rods and visual lief motifs. Consciously operating within a strict comics grid, his painstaking and efficacious renderings exemplified the S&M adage that with discipline comes freedom. The series' distinctive presentation - of covers, titles, quotes, text addenda - made a strong, unified thematic statement that stood apart from commercial product.
Watchmen remains dazzling, even glaringly brilliant, so much so that it is impossible to gather it all in one reading. (Follow the sugar cubes! Construct the urban intersection at the cross-hairs! How early can you deduce, with absolute certainty, Rorschach's identity? Watch for visual conceits like the blood-splattered smiley-face that broaden into suggestive geometries the circle slashed by line segment, the circle within circles.) Repeated readings reveal how uniquely it shines.
ALAN MOORE:
(from Prisoners Of Gravity, 1991)
I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence, y'know, this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalization of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I couldn't see any point in doing superheroes, from my point of view, after Watchmen. Unfortunately everybody else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones, or not just specifically Watchmen clones, but this would extend to Dark Knight as well, people who were looking at those faintly grim and post-modern superhero comics of the mid '80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like, you know, post-modernism by numbers. You make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like R.E.M. that'll impress your young readers with how hip you are, um, you throw in some garbled sort of psych-, sub-psychedelic philosophy, um, and you've got a modern comic. It doesn't matter whether it has any substance, it doesn't matter whether it has any direction, but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me, the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream... The people who've taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people. They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerously dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.
REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Moore's writing is remarkable. He catches the rhythms of speech so naturally, presents his world so seamlessly, that the whole seems effortless… Gibbon's art has never been better. Each panel a semiotician's heaven… undoubtedly the most ambitious work of science fiction since Gene Wolfe's Book Of The Sun, and the most ambitious and, in my opinion, most successful graphic novel ever.
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #180, 1995)
For better and for worse, Alan Moore is very interested in structures, and that kind of structuring is what made Watchmen stand apart from other books. It's not the dystopic vision, it's not the Twilight Zone ending, it's the fact that there's something formally at work there that you're only peripherally aware of, as you're reading through this thing, that gives weight and authority to what's being told.
FURTHER READING:
Alan Moore World
Watchmen at Wikipedia
