Who watches the Watchmen &;#063;

"Who watches the Watchmen? "

or (better)

"Human bean juice"

"Watchmen" was a short self-contained series of 12 comics written by
Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, both Brits. The comics were
published by DC and were later brought together in a paperback
collection, one of the first "graphic novels" and certainly one of the
first series of comics which bought the medium to adult attention and
said, 'this is just a way of telling stories, expressing creativity.
The limitations have been self-imposed'.

The story is set in 1985, in America. The President is Richard Nixon,
(Woodward and Bernstein having been found dead in a garage somewhere)
and the world is hovering uneasily on the brink of war - Russian forces
are assembling on the borders of Afghanistan.

The world is one in which Superman, Batman et al do not exist. There
was a bit of a craze for masked heroes beginning in the forties,
although only on a limited basis, and none had any superpowers, just
muscles, athleticism and training.

There was a further wave of heroes in the early seventies and the story
explores the connections and differences between both teams (reflecting
in comics terms the difference between "Silver Age" heroes and the
modern day characters). In 1977, the police went on strike, because
public confidence in them had deteriorated and there was civil unrest.
As a result of this, the Government passed the Keene Act, making it a
criminal offence to be a costumed vigilante.

At the time the book opens, most of the heroes (better referred to as
'masks', because these heroes operate in difficult waters and are often
not heroic at all) are in semi-retirement. Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl)
spends most of his time reminiscing with the original Nite Owl, Hollis
Mason, who now repairs cars. The original Silk Spectre is in a nursing
home, her daughter Laurie no longer patrols.

Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) - the smartest man in the world, revealed his
identity shortly before the Keene Act and retired from adventuring - he
is now a very successful businessman. He makes perfume, sells toys
based on himself, he runs a Charles Atlas type course of physical and
mental conditioning. Advertising for his products litter the pages of
the book.

Most of the original masks are either dead or in lunatic asylums.
Dollar Bill, Hooded Justice, Mothman, Captain Metropolis.

There are only three masks who are still active - two with government
approval and one who refuses to accept the Keene Act. The Comedian is a
vicious right-wing thug, who carries out dirty work for the government,
Jon Osterman (Dr Manhattan) is very much a special case, being
basically the United States first line of defence.

And then there is Rorschach. His journal opens the book and is in the
tone of a madman. It is echoed by the writings of John Doe in the film
"Seven", Rorschach observes the nasty underbelly of life, he is clearly
quite disturbed. Rorschach wears a mask that obscures his entire face,
as opposed to the others who wear a covering over the eyes or hair. And
Rorschach's mask is not simply inert fabric, it is made with new
technology, the patterns on it shift and move, constantly changing.
This is a significant difference between Rorschach and the others -
they wear masks, Rorschach quite simply is a mask.

Rorschach became a crime-fighter after reading about the rape and
murder of Kitty Genovese - a true crime which some fifty witnesses
stood and observed from their apartment windows, none contacting the
police, although the assault lasted for a considerable time - certainly
enough for the police to have saved her life had they been
called.

He also wears a slightly grubby trenchcoat and striped trousers. He is
quite prepared to intimidate and indeed break the fingers of people in
bars for information. He has murdered criminals in the past. People
remark about a musty smell from his costume. Rorschach was very unlike
any other comic hero at that time. Batman used to beat up villains, but
they would invariably attack first and he never went as far as killing
a bad guy, just because justice would not deliver what was
necessary.

In many ways, Rorschach is the logical extension of a man who puts on a
costume to fight evil - he is a psychopath, charged with an almost
religious zeal to purge the streets - he is more of a Travis Bickle
character than a usual comic-book hero. Faced with a child murderer,
Rorschach handcuffs him to a post in a garage, sets the building on
fire and hands the man a saw, telling him that he would not have time
to saw through the handcuffs - if the killer wants to escape, he will
have to cut off his own hands.

If Rorschach is the darker side of Batman, the bleakness and anger
taken to extremes, then Nite Owl is the other side, a millionaire lover
of gadgets who likes the intrigue and the adventure, but has no real
stomach for the nasty side of life. Midway through the book, it is
revealed that they once operated as a partnership, very successfully.
(I have also read a theory that they are semi-signifiers for Iggy Pop
and David Bowie, in that Pop took things to the very edge whereas Bowie
was playing at being dangerous.)

Alan Moore designed his own characters for this series rather than tell
the story with existing comic characters - partially because the
characters he needed for the story weren't already in existence,
partially because he wanted to do things with these characters that DC
would never have let him do with Batman and Superman. But there is also
a sense in which his characters are designed to provoke echoes of
existing characters, to gently suggest things to the reader.

Jon Osterman was a scientist, a young man who was assisting with some
experiments (a la Peter Parker) - he got caught in one of the machines
and could not be released before the experiment took place. Unlike the
usual superhero creation story though, the experiment killed Osterman,
in front of his friend and girlfriend. It disintegrated his entire
body.

Somehow, over a long period of time, Osterman was able to construct
himself another body. This time it was bright blue, and he had
abilities. He could perceive all of time as though it were happening at
once - he perceives the future and the past as still occurring
now.

Although he knows the future, his response to events is preordained -
he will appear surprised by news, even though he has stated moments
earlier that someone will tell him that news.

He also has powers to assemble and disassemble matter. He can move by
teleportation and his powers essentially seem limitless. By Pentagon
calculations, he would dispose of 85\% of incoming missiles, even if
the Russians launched at full capacity.

In Vietnam, he and the Comedian fought alongside each other, wrapping
the war up very quickly. The Comedian remarks that he thinks that
losing the war might have messed America up a little, as a
country.

It is an important theme of the book, the lack of a place in society
for the masks once someone like Jon Osterman comes about who has
genuine superpowers.

Although Osterman is essentially a Superman-like figure, he has trouble
relating to people. He never tells his family that he is back from the
dead. His relationship with Janey Slater decays as she ages and he
remains the same. He breaks up with Janey and forms a relationship with
Laurie Juspeczyk, the daughter of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk
Spectre, but he is distant from her. He has a great deal of curiousity,
but no compassion. Whatever has happened to him has set him apart from
humans, and to him they are now as ants.

He says to Rorschach early on, "A live body and a dead body have
exactly the same amount of molecules, structurally, there's no
discernible difference".

At the start of the book, The Comedian is found dead, having been
hurled from his apartment window. Rorschach investigates and suspects
that a mask-killer is at large. He contacts Nite Owl, Dr Manhattan,
Ozymandias and Laurie, but none of them are willing to take his
concerns seriously.

Then a chain of events are set in motion that lead to the end of the
relationship between Laurel and Osterman; which also leads to Osterman
abandoning earth for Mars, placing the United States in a very
difficult position vis-?-vis preventing World War Three.

The Russians take advantage of this, by increasing their military
influence in Asia and Europe, knowing that the Americans will not wish
to embark on a course of mutually assured destruction.

Ozymandias is the victim of a foiled assassination attempt, Rorschach
is set up and captured by the police, and Laurie and Nite Owl not only
form a relationship, but get back into their costumes.

That relationship is in itself very interesting - the first hint of it
comes as the two of them are fighting a bunch of muggers in an alley
and at the end of the fight both are panting heavily and then Laurie
turns her head and lights a cigarette. The suggestion is that
crime-fighting itself might be erotic.

Later, they are making love whilst on television, Adrian Veidt is
performing an acrobatic act - Moore juxtaposes the commentary of the
television, "graceful movements", "see how easily he shifts his
position" etc, with desperate fumblings on the couch and ultimate
failure of Nite Owl to sustain an erection.
The subtext of this is that not only is Nite Owl aware that he is
cuckolding a man who could disintegrate him with a gesture, he is also
trying to follow a lover who had genuinely super-human abilities.

After that, Nite Owl and Laurie (she significantly never uses her
'mask' name, even when in costume) rescue people from a burning
building and whilst in costume manage to achieve satisfactory sex.
Afterwards, she asks Dan, "did the costumes make it good ?"

This is heavy stuff for comics at that time.

Eventually, the threads of the story are drawn together, in a sick plot
which ultimately has good motivation behind it - the "villain" is
trying to achieve world peace (which has got to be a unique motivation
in comic books) - while all the heroes are putting elastoplast on open
wounds in society, the "villain" is actually trying to solve the
world's problems, albeit at a very high cost, in that half the
population of New York have to die for it to work.

When the plot is revealed, the heroes express their wish to thwart it
and the "villain" produces a moment of pure genius, telling them that
it already happened, thirty-five minutes earlier and that if there had
been any chance of them preventing it, the plan would never have been
explained. This stands typical comic-book / action movie practice
completely on its head.

By the end of the novel, it is very unclear whether any of the heroes
is really heroic - some are implicitly involved in the deaths of
innocent millions, while another would seek to undermine the purpose
for those deaths.

Personally, my view is that Rorschach is the only character who comes
out of it with any dignity, although he is clearly at odds with
reality. At the same time, it would be possible to make a case for any
of the individuals to be regarded as the "hero" of the book.

A constant theme of the book is the quotation of Juvenal, "Quos
custodiet ipsos custodes ? " - which means, who guards the guards; or
in this case "Who watches the watchmen ?"

Not only is the plot and pacing of the book exceptional, but Moore
deals with characterisation and dialogue extremely well. The masks in
this book aren't cardboard cutouts, they have hopes, fears,
insecurities and foibles. There are also a number of filmic devices,
such as panels which cut between scenes, where the dialogue from one
scene is savagely or ironically applicable to quite another
scene.

As well as moving the story forward, the individual chapters often tell
a particular stand-alone story , such as the psychiatrist who is trying
to assess Rorschach in prison and ends up popping pills and being
deeply disturbed by the end of it; the account of Jon Osterman's origin
as "Dr Manhattan" also dealing with the pain of being immortal and the
way in which the world operates when past, present and future are all
the same.

The artwork is underrated. Gibbons uses 9 panels per page in a 3 by 3
grid for most of the book - he is almost unique in that, most artists
use four or five panels for a page. This technique allows much more
interplay between panels and the cinematic technique of one scene
having direct relationship to another going on at the same time. The
artwork is always done very well, perhaps not the flashiest in the
comic world; but in terms of story-telling, it must be the pinnacle of
comic art.

In Chapter V, headed "Fearful Symmetries" (a reference to the William
Blake poem, to Edward Blake - the real name of the Comedian and to the
levels of symmetry that exist in the book), Gibbons uses some
alternative layouts for the pages, some are 9 panels, some are 6, some
are 4. I have read recently, and checked this myself, that the panel
layout of the first page in the chapter is a mirror image of the layout
of the last, and so forth throughout the chapter; the middle pages
being almost a reflection of each other. I must have read the book
twenty times and never noticed that.

When in the final chapter, Gibbons breaks away from a nine panel page
to do four or five single panel pages, the impact is all the more
striking for the contrast with the earlier discipline.

But for me, the dialogue is what really sings, each major character has
substantially different speech patterns - Jon Osterman is precise and
distant, Ozymandias is thoughtful, the Comedian is vicious, Rorschach
is clipped and disturbed - barely using any pronouns or articles, in a
very militaristic style.

Almost every sentence is appropriate and sounds right, but also there
is not a word in the book which is wasted. Almost everything said
becomes charged with significance when you read the book a second time.
In fact, the book is so densely layered that a second reading is
compulsory.

Example dialogue -

Rorschach challenging Moloch, an old bad guy, whom he has surprised by
hiding in Moloch's fridge and leaping out, breaking all of the
contents.

"You have cancer ? What kind cancer ? "

"Well now, you know the kind of cancer you eventually get better from ?
"

"Yes"

"Well that ain't the kind of cancer I got."

and

Moloch sobbing " please, I spent the seventies in prison, I'm not
Moloch any more"

and Rorschach's grudging apology when he leaves, "Can't make omelette
without breaking few eggs"

Adrian Veidt - " I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I
just wish it wasn't this one. "

Rorschach speaking to the other prisoners who are baying for his blood,
after he has thrown hot fat in the face of one assailant.

"I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me.
"

Another important feature of Watchmen is the richness of it. At the end
of each chapter Moore produces a piece of text, taken from various
sources. Interviews with Adrian Veidt, an essay by a cultural
commentator on Jon Osterman "superpowers and the super-powers",
extracts from Hollis Mason's autobiography about the masked adventurers
"Under the Hood" (a punning title, given his interest in car repair),
documents taken from a welfare file of Rorschach's childhood. This all
adds depth and allows the world and the characters to be explored
further.

There are also small touches - the takeaway restaurant "The Gunga
Diner", the advertisements for Adrian Veidt's perfume "Nostalgia", the
magazines at the newsvendors, the apocalyptic symbolism of even candy
bars (TV adverts for Mmmmeltdowns), the graffiti silouhettes of couples
kissing which are supposed to echo the shadowed remnants of people
after the Hiroshima bomb, Rorschach crunching sugar cubes he stole from
Nite Owl's apartment.

There are so many small cues as to what is to come within the story,
more foreshadowing than any other comic story. Moore has put in a great
deal of structure into the book, small details are planted in an
inconsequential way in early chapters that prove deeply significant
later on. Each chapter has its own recurring motif - The Comedian's
smiley face badge (stained with... bean juice ? Human bean juice), a
bottle of Nostalgia perfume, a statue of the Nite Owl, a radiation
symbol.

Perhaps the best is very very subtle - in the midst of a picture
showing total carnage amongst New York, bodies strewn everywhere, in
one corner is a billboard advertising Adrian Veidt's system of physical
improvement, the strapline being, "I'll give you bodies beyond your
wildest imaginations".

Watchmen is clearly the best piece of comic literature, though there
have been subsequently some very good writers producing comics for
adults, such as Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano and Neil Gaiman. But I
think Watchmen is an important piece of literature per se, as well as
being the impetus that launched a great deal of writers treating comics
in a different way.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took a medium that had basically had the
potential stifled out of it and exploded it until the possibilities for
comic books were endless. They saw that comics are a way in which a
person who can write and a person who can draw can make a film, that
people read.

You don't need a budget of $100 million to make a film since Alan
Moore, you just need to be able to write and find someone who can draw.
And your film can be about anything at all. Superheroes were the
jumping-off point for comics, just as silent movie melodrama was the
jumping-off point for films.

Moore has said in interviews that comics actually offer something that
film doesn't, in that the image created is permanent rather than
temporary - it is the reader who decides when to move on to the next
panel, rather than the film which moves at the same pace for each
viewer. The reader can choose to linger, draw significance from it - if
later a theme or motif recurs, the reader can move back to compare the
earlier scene - in film, this would involve a great deal of
fast-forwarding and rewinding. This, in Moore's view allowed him to
charge the book with themes and images which the reader could either
let blur past and read the book as a plot, or interpret and
analyse.

That being the case, the book has far more depth than most works of
prose fiction. Innocent off-the-cuff remarks made in passing,
seemingly, at the outset of the book, come back later with huge
poignancy.

The book is an interesting comment on heroism and the differing shades
of morality that exist. It is also deeply poignant. Throughout the book
Moore introduces characters who have lives that are continuing in their
ordinariness throughout the book, incidental to the large plot
involving the masks. These people have lives and hopes and it is
genuinely moving when in the final chapter, you realise that these
people have perished.

It is sad, it is exhilarating, it is puzzling, it is humorous, it is
thought-provoking.

I would love to be able to have written or produced any of the works of
fiction I am writing about in this collection, but if I had the choice
of having produced just one, I would want to put my name on Watchmen in
place of Alan Moore, I think that would be the one which would make me
most proud.