What follows is the first part of an utterly uncritical reading of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins masterpiece Watchmen. I rarely do such things. In fact, I think this is the first time I'm doing something like this in written form. But seeing that I've decided to reread the book again - a ritual I do every year - and I've been seriously thinking about the book again after the cascade of news late last year - about DC Comics deciding finally to give Moore back the rights for the book, and Moore actually rejecting the offer as it had quite a few strings that he felt were sinisterly tied to the book's neck - I thought it'd be a nice exercise to write about my feelings about the book. While thinking about writing about the book and after the actual writing about it, I realised that I cannot help but be very uncritical of it. It was a very important book for me as far as books that change the way you think about life and art go, and when things are that important to you, you can't help but just gush about them. That's not to say my reading of it isn't academic, of course, as my reading of it changed and grew as my own mindset as an individual changed and grew. This book was my first experience in reading and thinking about a massive piece of text as a work of art that was a product of a certain point in time in history. This book was my first experience in thinking about a work of art not just as a superficially beautiful thing but also as commentary on society. This book was my first experience of thinking about art as a pyramidic process, a referential process, made up by itself, talking about itself. Watchmen was my Ulysses and the Waste Land. I can probably teach an entire semester on it alone. But I have no teaching degree, so this is just me just marvelling on its genius. 


This series of essays will be a series of reading blog entries. This series of essays also assumes you've already read the book. I say a lot of things in it that I don't bother to contextualise properly. In case you don't get most of these things, or if for some reason you don't remember some details of the book, I suggest you also read this excellent set of annotations for the book. I also suggest that we read the book together! And leave comments below.



As I was on a pissbreak from rereading Watchmen, I realised that I have been rereading it annually since I first read it fifteen years ago. I got my first copy from my aunt who gave it to me as pasalubong from London, back-to-back with The Dark Knight Returns and later, From Hell. It was the first part of the second wave of my self-education of modern comic books, hot in the heels of bingeing on Sandman and Hellblazer and Books Of Magic - books that were thrust upon me again by my aunt by way of her friend from college when I was just about to graduate from gradeschool, ie, back when I still really had nothing in mind by way of preferences.

Not that I'm complaining, of course, as that was when my own tastes on basically everything really started to coalesce - that was the time I first watched the X-Files and some Troma films, first read Moorcock and Pratchett, first listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers - much in the same way as most kids when around that age. For me, all that initial education dictated my eventual choice of reading material when I was actually made to choose: Watchmen was on the top of my list, in no small part due to an old Halloween special issue of Wizard Magazine that I borrowed (and never returned [it's actually still in my bookshelf]) from a highschool classmate - it had a rather lengthy Alan Moore interview and the most detailed retrospective of his works that I've read up until the two big books that were published in celebration of Moore's 50th birthday about a decade later.

The entire Moore feature went at great length about Watchmen, about it being more or less the final word in superhero comic books, how it changed the idiom, how it - along with the Dark Knight Returns and Maus and V For Vendetta and Swamp Thing and the Killing Joke - forced mainstream comic books into maturity. How the book was described basically made me fall in love with it even before seeing even one panel let alone an entire issue of the book: among other things, Watchmen is a deconstruction of the superhero idiom by simply making them more real than usual; it is a treatise on the permissability of genocide to achieve a kind of workable peace; it is an apocalyptic scifi story that begins as a murder mystery. In my thirteen-year-old head, it wasn't Wetworks or Spawn or X-Men or even Sandman or Hellblazer - it was the only thing like it out there while being like everything else; it was a work of genius.

And so a few years later I finally got a copy and spent an entire Saturday reading it cover to cover and yes, even for me, at that young an age, the me that hadn't yet read a jot of Pynchon or Delillo or Wallace or Vollman or Davis or Koolhaas or Eco or Rushkoff or D'Agata or Berger or whoever else has shaped my mind since, I recognised the book as a work of genius, and its collaborators Moore and Gibbons and Higgins as geniuses unparalleled.

I got my copy a little under a decade since it first came out in book-form and even by then it was already the sixteenth printrun. Comic books were well into the decade or so of wallowing in Watchmen's initial superficial ripples of influence, ie, "grim 'n gritty", but still half a decade or so away from the handful of comic books that really saw what Watchmen is/was about, ie, the Authority, Planetary, and when you really think about it, From Hell and America's Best Comics and the first few years of Joe Quesada's EIC-hood in Marvel. In short, Watchmen was still new, what it did was still new, still unheard of even after nearly ten years after the fact. And that is still how I read it even after fifteen years of rereading it every year.

Every year I comb through my copy - I eventually sold my first copy half-price when my cat pissed on it, and later bought the Absolute Edition, the one edition that has the best-sized pages for combing-through - and every time I do I discover and rediscover things in it that make me love it even more.

Some things I noticed just in today's rereading, from the first chapter alone:

• I love the rhythm established by the nine-panel grids punctuated by sudden semi-splashpages of the characters, sometimes contextualising their abandoned superheroics - the unworn Night Owl costume haunting Dreiberg, the twisted Ozymandias dolls seemingly comforting Veidt - all but the lone female character. Maybe a hint of Moore's latent chauvinism?
• I love the hints of how precisely plotted the entire book is: at a casual glance, images echo throughout the book up to the final chapter. My recent finds are the mentions of "enemy spies with cyanide capsules" and "erotic novelties" in the text interlude. Or maybe I already noticed this before but only forgot?
• I love how Doc Manhattan casts no shadows at all, is never under the shadow of anything or anyone - a subtle hint that he actually physically glows, is also a light source, is beyond everybody else. I also love how Gibbons draws him with the parallel horizontal lines, evoking Moebius's shading style, and Higgins's flat shades-less colouring of him, both techniques meant to evoke luminescence.
• I love how if you're still not getting that the book is also an epic love letter to Steve Ditko via the nine-panel grids and the origins of the actual original characters (in the same way that Morrison's Final Crisis is an epic love letter to Jack Kirby), there are also the pages upon pages of bug-eyed people sweating profusely looking on the brink of both ecstasy and madness, a hallmark style of Ditko (as opposed to Kirby's etched-in-granite style).
• I love how the first chapter basically begins as the beginning of a murder mystery and it later evolves into a where-are-they-now rounding-up-the-gang enumeration of characters and ends as the beginning of a love story.

And so began love at first sight.

I've been trying to analyse why I have nothing but unabashed love for this book, seeing as this is not Moore's best or even most complex - for me, that'd be From Hell then Swamp Thing then V For Vendetta - nor Gibbons's - that'd be the Time Cops Dragnet send-up short he did with Moore - nor Higgins's - I suppose in terms of colour work, yes, but Higgins is also a great great great artist in his own right, as seen in his stints in Hellblazer with Ennis and Ellis (I'd love to do a collab story with Higgins, given the choice between him and, say, Frank Quitely, whom I also love). After all the years of thinking about it, I think I love it this much because it was really my first real experience of pure genius caught on paper, genius that I had the presence of mind to recognise and analyse as such, even as a thirteen-fourteen-year-old. It's not exactly nostalgia - one book I utterly unabashedly love out of nostalgia is Jean Marc Dematteis and Jon J Muth's Moonshadow, a book I love so much out of pure nostalgia I can't even actually talk about it with other people for fear that I end up sounding like a gibbering retard - or maybe it is, but it is a learned sort of nostalgia.

And everything began with the first page of the first chapter, that initial impossible zoom-out: consider its context - each and every mainstream superhero comic book at that time (the mid80s up until the mid90s) had splashpages for first pages, promising olympic grandeur in bold red letters in exploding balloons as a superhero gymnastically poses, eye-poppingly gesturing towards the readers.

While this book begins with a tight seven-panel grid starting with the extreme close-up of a smiley-face badge with one eye smeared with dried blood as it lies in the gutter where blood pours down in a thick gruely cascade into the sewers, zooming-out exponentially until it ends over the top of a man's balding head as he looks down at the city street from a penthouse window - on all levels, it is saying one thing, in the deep bassy voice of art history: this is the end of the age of innocence.

What also begins in the first page is one of the many idiomatic devices that the book is eventually known for form-wise: that is, the parallel caption-panel narration, where the two elements of the average comic book panel - the words and the picture - comment on one another indirectly, merely by implication. You can see this working (pretty blatantly) in the very first panel, with "true face" in the caption and the smiley in the picture. This device goes on throughout the page - "gutters" = gutter, "shout" = man shouting, "footsteps" = bloody footprints, etc etc - in fact goes on throughout the entire book with only slight variations.

This is by no means the first time these things were done, nor even the first time Alan Moore did these things - Moore had already done the parallel caption-panel narration device in V For Vendetta only not as aggressively as this, and I've seen this done in a few 70s-era Marvel books not to mention a few Peanuts strips - but part of the genius of Watchmen is how it treated the comic book form and its various devices and idioms as if it was the first time these things were being done, as if it was the first time that the comic book was seen as an art form, with the emphasis on form - various other artists have already approached comic books as such, ie, Jim Steranko and Jim Starlin and Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson just to name a few from the 80s mainstream from which this book sprang, but also art spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman (an influence on Watchmen that Moore and Gibbons acknowledge) from the 80s underground - but again, somehow, Watchmen made it look like it was the first book ever that did all of these things.

Maybe because it was the first book that did it not just for laughs or for effect or purely for the sake of doing it. Watchmen did all of this to provide readers with a very unique reading experience, one of precision and symmetry, where events and people who orchestrate them make decisions that reverberate throughout history. In that sense, this was the first comic book I've read that it seemed very deliberately formed as a fractal: one of its main messages is how small events dictate the larger ones that dictate events so large you can't see them even when they're happening right in front of you; one of its art conceits is the recurring image of a clock that is about ten minutes til midnight, echoed in all the covers, and in innocuous ubiquitous things like the smiley-badge with the blood splatter, or the moon partly obscured by smoke, or the perfume bottle glinting in the dark; one of its main messages is that history is dictated and processed by various subjective voices that seem to be singing in different various pitches and tones and tempos but are all merely different octaves of the same grand note. Basically, it was the first comic book that did all these things with any level of ambition that was equal to its artists' skills. Moore would return to this in all his other books after Watchmen, most notably in From Hell, which is probably its thematic height - yes, higher than Watchmen - but then sort of majestically slowly degrades from there, in all his spoken word projects, then Promethea, then in the various League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, then in his essays in Dodgem Logic.

And all of these things are already embedded in the first page of the first chapter. Quite the feat. Not a lot of books can do that, not even today, after all the lessons that we've already learned from this book, and all the other books it influenced, all the other books that came after it. If it was a record, it'd be the Beatles's Sergeant Pepper: after all these years, after all the books after it, Watchmen is still head and shoulders pure undistilled genius.



TO BE CONTINUED NEXT MONTH ... !!!