Lower Decks

In a few short months now, assuming Fox doesn’t actually screw it up, Zack Snyder unveils his movie adaptation of the most famous graphic novel in comic book history. While I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about the film once it’s released, for now we’ve got just the original story to talk about. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ masterwork has been hailed among the best pieces of literature from the past century, having in its lasting impact escaped the usual limits of its medium, which set a standard by which every new comic book must be judged. 

A few months back, you’ll recall that I devoted a column to my ten favorite comic book stories, and Watchmen wasn’t on it. At that point, I had already read it, but my history with the seminal project is a short one. The rest of this column will be reprinted from my review of it after I read Watchmen for the first time, in October of 2007. While I was certainly familiar with its existence during the majority of my comics experience, I had never gotten around to reading it for some reason (hey, there are plenty of people catching up now, and they needed considerably more prompting, dating back to the trailer at the start of The Dark Knight, when a lot of people no doubt heard about the film for the first time; the trade collection has since become a continuous bestseller at my bookstore). By the time I did, I had my own experiences, most of which dated later than 1986. In many ways, though the lessons learned from Watchmen were certainly relevant to the creators I was reading, being the beneficiary of it made the book less relevant for me. At least, to a point.

And while I was aware of the many reasons Watchmen was important, having read it I came away with my own thoughts:

I know, I know. I’m reviewing something that came out two decades ago, and not only that, a book that’s become revered as one of the greatest accomplishments in the comic book medium. How pretentious, right? What am I going to say that you haven’t heard a million times before?

Let’s start with the truth: I’ve just read Watchmen. Not terribly remarkable? Get this: for the first time. I’m some kind of neophyte, right? New to comics? Maybe, like thirteen years old? Ha! No, and I just got around to reading Dark Knight Returns this year, too. I’m almost but not quite two decades familiar with comics, a few years shy of the months in which everything we understood was transformed, forever altered. I never knew the comics Alan Moore grew up on. I’m not saying you have to be, but I bet Watchmen makes a different kind of sense if you happen to. As it is, my comics experience, roughly equivalent to the moment I read how readers polled Jason Todd to death in a newspaper, doesn’t know what it was truly like to have seen Superman have every imaginable strength, and a color Kryptonite to match.

In fact, my Alan Moore education started just a few weeks ago, when I read the DC collection of Moore’s experience writing for the company, including the heavyweights “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and The Killing Joke. The former is an elegy to the age Moore continued to dwell on, the one that informed Watchmen directly, and the latter is the proof that his understanding of how it was all supposed to work was always going to doom him into self-determined exile.

The dirty secret about Watchmen is that most of its readers, its adoring masses, probably went away not understanding it a stitch. To understand only the surface, you would have to view Adrian Veidt, self-proclaimed Smartest Man on Earth, as in fact an idiot, a reactionary one at that. In the age Moore wrote Watchmen, the Cold War was still going on, the Nuclear Clock, as it is in the comic, was still ticking meaningfully, and Dr. Strangelove was less a cautionary satirical tale than, like Watchmen itself, a story of coming times, the inevitability of mutually assured atomic destruction between the poles of America and Russia. It is a world modern readers are only dimly aware of, but one that Moore and his characters understood all too perfectly.

Problem is, it was never going to live up to the hype. The Japanese developed Godzilla, after all. I’m not making light of very real present concerns. I’m just saying, we don’t live in Red Scare times anymore. And that era is as dead as the one Moore’s patriot, Adrian Veidt, unintentionally echoed. No, not Alexander the Great, or Ramses II. Veidt, Ozymandias, was a regular Hitler in a Tricky Dick Nixon world.

Think about it. On the surface, Veidt is an idiot made the buffoon by the most disconnected man of the whole story, Jon Osterman, Dr. Manhattan, who points out the extreme shortsightedness, at the very least, of his supposed genius plan for world peace, which, mad scientist-like, is withheld until the penultimate chapter, to be foiled in the conclusion. If the reader were to assume anything at all from the surface of it, they would have to assume Moore is not the master storyteller he’s been known as ever since Watchmen. Based solely on the surface, the reader would also assume Moore doesn’t believe in the concept of the superhero, much less in superhero teams. Well, he’s been writing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, hasn’t he? The man believes in superheroes. He simply assumed, as in the world he imagined, that the rest of the population didn’t. Watchmen was an ode to superheroes as much as “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” was to Superman’s Silver Age incarnation.

Truth is, there are three main characters in Watchmen, three characters who carry the story, three characters whose story it really is. One is Adrian Veidt. The other two are even more peripheral to the twelve issues that followed Doc Manhattan, the Comedian, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach, who easily became the most famous of every character in the story. Those two? The shipwreck survivor in the comic “Black Freighter” and the newspaper vendor. The two happen to share the same subplot which ran along the rest of the story. Except the story it was paralleling wasn’t the quest to discover the identity of the Mask Killer or the bleak outcome of the superhero era, but Adrian Veidt’s plan to rescue humanity by becoming its greatest villain.

Hey, if you want to view him in familiar religious light, think of him as if God thought Satan and not his own son was going to bring about salvation.

Veidt thinks he’s the smartest man alive. His own account of his origins belie that easily enough, if you understand it. He hatches a plan with the same logic as Hitler, play a scapegoat and hope it actually rallies everyone. He watches the news and sees exactly what he wants to see, even though the media is already piercing his impeccable logic, even though Hitler couldn’t unite the world, just his own desperate country, in his grand vision against racial miscreants. In our own even more recent history, the fall of the Twin Towers hardly united the whole world, much less all of the United States, for more time than it ultimately took to blink again. Veidt believed his own fallacy. The shipwreck survivor becomes grotesque and his own undoer as he attempts to be a hero, too. The newspaper vendor believes he’s found the perfect job to know everything, to understand everything. Veidt is wrong. The shipwreck survivor is wrong. The newspaper vendor is wrong.

Watchmen becomes a study not only of the times Alan Moore grew up in, the accumulated experience and history the world at that time understood, not only a chance to explore superheroes, for the first time, as realistic people living lives that progress through time and generation, but as a distinct melding of the two, of what happens when you transpose one reality onto another, an archetype that does not work in the real world, in the present day, and a myth that everyone believed so completely in. The disillusionment that was the true reward for the death of John Kennedy, the key moment in Dr. Manhattan’s early development crept its way through the whole culture, until people, in this story, need convincing to save humanity, to damn humanity, to think they actually have that power.

I’m supposed to read this story again, and again, and find new layers, new meanings? Some stories, you understand immediately why everyone thought they were so important in the first place. This is one of those stories. It’s an important one. It’s also not what everyone thought it was, and it was exactly what they thought it was, and it’s a million things more. Watchmen’s legacy, unfortunately, has somewhat been reduced in scope. Far too many fans think only of the gimmicks, of the superficial things it did to change superheroes. They’re still missing the big picture. They’re still missing its story, its message. Why Moore wrote about the need to know who was watching these watchmen in the first place. His watchmen were never in the story. He was writing a warning of his own. He wrote of this era that is now history, that has no lasting relevance, not as it once was. But he was writing about today, about arrogance, the kind we still don’t see around us. No need for heroes? That’s not what he was saying at all…