Is Watchmen Worth The Hype? (Patreon)

By Masha Zhdanova

I've been reading comics for most of my life. When I was 8 one of my career aspirations was to draw the comics in Nickelodeon magazine. In middle school, while attending an educational summer camp to study mystery suspense, and horror in literature and film, I saw some graphic novels in the program's bookstore that were required reading for the graphic novel class of the program. I asked if I could buy a copy of Understanding Comics even though I wasn't taking that class, and was permitted to do so. They were also selling a graphic novel with a yellow and black cover I didn't recognize, and I thought, "that's probably not my kind of thing" and did not buy it.

Eleven years, two comics-related degrees, and an editorial position at this humble Eisner-winning establishment later, I still have not read Watchmen.

I've heard all about it, of course. I know it's good and important and changed the industry or whatever. But I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Until my local library sold me a used copy for a dollar, and I thought, "might as well."

A lot of my friends were very excited when I said I was going to be reading Watchmen for the first time. Multiple people told me it was the comic that got them into comics and was very important to them personally, which honestly scared me a little bit and made me feel like that Pingu image: well now I am not doing it.

Part of why I'd resisted reading Watchmen for so long was the intensity and amount of emotions surrounding it. It feels like all my comics-reading friends have takes on this book, and it's been that way since I started participating in comics spaces both online and in real life in high school. By not reading Watchmen the summer before eighth grade, I created a situation for myself where no matter when I decided to sit down and read Watchmen I would always be late to the party on Watchmen. Whatever I think about it has to be extra clever and brilliant to make up for the fact that I'm reading it nearly 40 years after it was first published, and a decade after I started reading comics at all.

But what if I don't have anything extra clever and brilliant to say about it after all? I don't even really like superhero comics. I've seen some of the movies, but not most of them. I learned exactly as much superhero comic history as I needed to learn to pass my history of comics classes in college. I had to be told there were more than ten X-men by a friend.

We're nearly 500 words into this and I still haven't said anything about what I think about the comic itself.

I was surprised by how much text there was, even though I knew this was an Alan Moore book and I'd read V for Vendetta before. I had to take a break after the first two chapters because there was just a lot to read, and also I got hungry.

The other big surprise when I started reading was Rorschach's personality because I've mostly heard his name in lists with Rick Sanchez, Walter White, and Tyler Durden as an example of a fictional man nerdy guys mistakenly idolize. I was expecting someone charismatic and charming, funny and witty, but this guy's a complete wreck! And a conservative? I guess sticking to your principles is an admirable trait to have, but I can't understand how he captivated so many people to the extent he did. I can't even call him a poor little meowmeow.

Watchmen #12 by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins

The next thing to surprise me was the interstitial about Doctor Manhattan explaining the Russian attitude towards the second world war because it was very accurate. V-E day is a national holiday over there, with parades. When I visited in 2015, Moscow was plastered in posters celebrating 70 years of victory.

In all the Watchmen discussions I passively absorbed as a member of comics communities over the years, I don't think I ever saw anyone talk about the Cold War anxieties of it all, which is interesting because that's the part that stuck out to me the most, as someone from the other side, so to speak. (For those of you who don't know me, I was born in post-Soviet Russia and moved to New Jersey at a young age.)

It's interesting how The Russians(tm) are this looming distant threat throughout the course of the story, but never make an appearance firsthand. The Burgers and Borscht and Tarkovsky signs on the second to last page of the book indicate that the Cold War is over and world peace has been achieved and Russian things are now allowed in Manhattan, apparently, but it's just set dressing for this post-apocalyptic world Ozymandias built.

The Burgers and Borscht thing got to me because those two foods do not go together. Unless the burgers were like sliders. It's weird because I grew up near a post-Cold-War New York, where there are Russian restaurants and grocery stores and doctor's offices on lots of streets throughout the city (although mostly in Brighton Beach these days), with big signs in Cyrillic and doors my family and I go through on a regular basis. It was kind of a shock to see the world I'm most familiar with depicted as the horrifying aftermath of a megalomaniac murdering half the population of NYC in the name of world peace.

I wonder how that sort of thing would've played after 9/11.

I've often seen an internet acquaintance describe the final conflict of Watchmen between Ozymandias and Rorschach to be the most affecting moral dilemma she's ever seen in fiction, and just as often seen my friend refute this, explaining that the moral dilemma isn't the point of the story. Having finally read this moral dilemma myself, I agree with the latter. I don't think I can definitively say what the point of Watchmen is for sure, but "which superhero is right" is not it. Their disagreement is just the trolley problem with extra steps: is it more correct to die for your beliefs or kill half a city to save the world?

I really enjoyed how much of the story was not clearly spelled out for the reader. In a time where people are obsessed with clarity and overexplaining, a narrative that leaves breadcrumbs and hints that make more sense later if you're paying attention is refreshing. I worry a lot about clarity and whether a reader can easily follow what I'm trying to say in my own comics, but maybe I can trust my theoretical readers more to pick up on implications. I liked that one page that implied Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice were gay.

I was surprised there were lesbians in this but less surprised all of the lesbians that make appearances did not exactly have happy endings for themselves.

I also really liked John Higgins' colors, especially towards the end of the book. I thought they were incredibly striking and bright in a way the limitations of 80s color reproduction really helped. The occasional painterly effects on explosions stood out, and the complementary palettes of non-local colors were extremely appealing. The colors complemented the inking perfectly and made the paragraphs and paragraphs of text slightly more bearable.

Watchmen #4 by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins

Overall, I kind of wish I'd either read this in high school or just not at all. I'm glad I can understand what everyone's talking about now, and what the memes are referencing, but I've read so many comics made after Watchmen that whatever new and groundbreaking things it did first I've seen a thousand people imitate. It's very impressive technically, and it was interesting to me as a snapshot of Cold War anxieties circa 1985, but I don't think I want to read it again for a while. Or ever, maybe. But I finally read Watchmen, so I'm sure my official Comics Critic Club membership card will be coming in the mail soon.