Watchmen

by Alan Moore
ISBN: 1852860243
Format: Paperback
Pages: 424
Publisher: Titan Books Ltd
Publication Date: March 20th, 1987

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About Watchmen

Alan Moore's comic series Watchmen is one of the most popular in the entire world. Since it first came out in the mid-80s, this comic series has fast become one of the top-selling and most-honored comics in all the world. Since it won the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination, the series has only become more and more popular.

Recently made into a live-action film, this comic's plot centers around a group of citizens called the Crimebusters. In this alternate reality, Moore writes a story that retells the United States history. In this world, the Crimebusters are a group of crime fighters who came to be between the 1940s and 1960s and affected the outcomes of such events as the Vietnam War. However, the joy of this comic series is that only one of the crime fighters possesses superhuman powers. Though they are often called superheroes because of their work, these costumed folks soon become unpopular. Moore plays with the idea of social, cultural, and media power, showing how crime fighters become so unpopular that superheroes are outlaw in 1977. Following this legislation, many of the heroes retire, with a couple taking on government jobs and one rebelling against the law.

The comics focus on the Crimebusters, how they develop, and how they come together and out of retirement after the murder of one of the heroes who'd been working for the government. This work leads to the Crimebusters discovering a larger evil: nuclear war. Thus, the comics are as much about how ordinary citizens can do save the world without the ability fly as it is about the manipulation and corruption of the media and government.

Comic connoisseurs are sure to not only appreciate the nine-panel grid layout of the works but also the supplemental documents that add to the history and backstory of the comics' plot. The blood-stained smiley face is a recurring symbol or image throughout the piece. It not only hints at the irony and dark humor in the work but also on the loss of the golden ages, the fall of mankind to itself.

The plot of this piece is as layered as it is political: the characters all evolve and develop with the changing times, and there is a fun backstory with a fictional pirate comic that one of the characters is reading throughout the series. Thus, the comic within a comic idea becomes yet another layer to the series. For many people, Watchmen was moment of change for the comic world. The series garnered both mainstream and comic-based media attention and soon become one of the most acclaimed, promoted, and talked about comics in the world.

Synopsis/Review

From Amazon

Has any comic been as lauded as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns but Watchmen remains the critics' favourite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and recently From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to garner praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterisation is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling, rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it retains its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite