4 Andrew Hoberek is to be commended for taking on such a daunting task-especially in one of the relatively slim volumes composing Rutgers University Press’s new Comics Culture series-in his recent book, Considering “Watchmen”: Poetics, Politics, Property. 3Įven a thoroughly lauded and canonized work like Watchmen rests on more or less untrampled snow, and setting foot on it takes considerable nerve. 2 As memoirs about their authors’ struggles with identity, those works more straightforwardly “fit” with preexisting notions of a great work of literature and, thus, had an easier entry into academic discourse than any book about superheroes, even one as richly and carefully constructed as Watchmen. However, Watchmen has not been taken up by academic critics to the same extent as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis for a variety of reasons related to the development of the field-in both the everyday sense of an area of scholarly inquiry and in Bourdieu’s sense of a distinct arena of social relations. Its masterful exploration of the formal possibilities of visual storytelling in comics and its historical role in ushering in the self-aware, deconstructionist approach to the superhero genre have guaranteed its place in any survey of the medium’s history. 1 It is inarguably one of the comics world’s most celebrated products.
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Take, for example, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, originally published as a twelve-issue limited series by DC Comics beginning in 1986, and first collected into its more familiar single-volume edition in 1987.
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There are innumerable works, creators, and topics that have yet to be the subject of any sustained scholarly attention, simply because comics and graphic novels (even in a narrow definition) were being produced for the better part of a century before there were professional “comics scholars” to study them.
Just so that know, "The Watchmen" is the the only comic novel that is included in the list of 100 best novels of 20th century.One consequence of the relatively late emergence of comics studies as an academic field is that we have a very long to-do list. When you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you." - One who starts knowing things about matters that are very different from what he is, he takes back a piece of it with himself and that piece changes him. Nietzsche was right with his observation "He who fights with monsters should be careful least he thereby becomes a monster. Interwoven with the main story, is another totally different and gory tale about a pirate ship and and a survivor who in his lust for revenge, is blinded by the all consuming hate. In the end, the heroes lose without having to fight the villains as there were none, the context and their inner dreads being their enemy.
Also the storyline is non-linear and jumps to different space, time, context and even stories. Also remarkable is the imagery and the subtle meaning of symbols that have been used multiple times, like the doomsday clock. Never before, have we seen super heroes fail, or go mad or become a hired mercenary, but this novel captures the baser instincts of lust, of power and propensity for violence and makes a case against vigilantism.
These heroes, fighting to save the city from crime, but themselves are a disoriented bunch. The mood is set in New York, with all its malice of the congested city life where no one looks out for one another and crime. In this all engrossing pessimism, the book captures the story of costumed super heroes out there to save the world, but in the end they manage to save the peace, only to lose themselves in the utter grotesque of violence and madness and insanity.
It is seventies and tension is high between US and Soviet Union and both on trigger alert for nuclear weapon. The novel on the other hand has been quite a revelation not only with its storyline and the novelty of the idea but also the context. I have been reading the comic novel "The Watchmen" after watching the movie, which for all practical purposes I found to be an utter waste of time.
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