Power and Responsibility... (Watchmen - Alan Moore)

Member Name: mcader

Product:	Watchmen - Alan Moore
Date:	06/02/09 (12 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Realism, depth, character

Disadvantages: A bit too indulgent

Read this classic graphic novel with a knowledge of its time: fear and paranoia towards the threat of nuclear war, assassinations of presidents, a lack of trust of those in positions of power in the age of media and subterfuge, and vast modernity sprawling out and producing crime and disillusionment.......

Alan Moore takes on all this pessimism and shakes it down with the Watchmen, using the conceit that costume heroes actually exist and are everyday people. The hallmark is that not much here is black and white. The result is a confronting, engrossing, extensive work, which re-invented and challenged the genre and promotes the necessity for individual opinion in readers, by leaving so much firmly in the grey.

In the end we are left to think about whether or not 'The end can justify the means'....and there is a strong echo of Hiroshima here. Obviously it can't..and must never. But here, a global solution to focus people's attentions away from war was to introduce something alien. The question of 'Who watches the watchmen?' underpins and concludes the whole book. It is one of power and responsibility, and the idea of the Watchmen being free from this, to act freely, and to have greater influence than those people who are restrained from acting properly by their systems and nations, is portrayed with unfortunately, similarly threatening results. It can only prompt individual thought and better collaboration through its lesson.

Although it can be a bit too indulgent, and the 'comic within a comic' is given too much space, other elements that should attract you are its realism, its character depth and the unique figure of the Comedian.

The Comedian has limited hope for the world; he is the ruthless, Batmanesque, out-for-himself, vigilante. He has seen 'its true face'. He fascinates us as we read The Watchmen, because he goes to a deep place in the comic and in everyone's thoughts, where our attempt to rationalise the horrors and behaviours in ourselves fail...where he 'plays along with the gag', working as a unique force of truth, which is without morals, because there is no hypocracy where there are no morals......The uncompromising Rorschach observes and echoes this.

It is where the beginning and the end of the book lie....It is a flawed world, not a good joke....but it is better to play along....?

Summary: Not a joke..