Events grow even sketchier: I am standing in deep snow… I am killing someone. Their identity is uncertain.
– Dr. Manhattan
There’s some brilliant storytelling in the series. Chapter 4 reveals the history of Dr. Manhattan, only since Manhattan experiences every moment simultaneously, it’s not linear. His history jumps around while Manhattan walks the Martian landscape. (In a nice touch, even though Manhattan knows what’s going to be happen, he still has to be surprised when they do happen, because that’s how it works. It’s a sort of reverse Calvinism.) Rorschach narrates big hunks of the series in his journal, which reveals a paranoid, deeply disturbed mind. This undercuts the obvious appeal of a faceless, trenchcoated vigilante who works in the shadows. Especially in the 80’s, Rorschach was sort of the Platonic ideal of a “cool” character, and Moore presents him as a broken man.
There’s a displaced style of narration that’s a fairly common technique now, from comic books to movies, but I don’t remember anyone using it extensively prior to Watchmen. The narrative from one scene transposes to another scene, with generally ironic or tragic results. The obvious example is the famous bit where Adrian Veidt’s televised gymnastics exhibition plays over clumsy middle-aged sex. The announcer’s breathless commentary on Veidt’s perfect performance makes Dreiberg’s impotence even more humiliating.
Throughout the story, there’s a man at a newsstand reading Tales of the Black Freighter, a pirate comic book. (In a nice touch, the birth of real vigilantes means that superheroes never took off in the publishing world, so pirates are the prevalent genre in comic books.) The comic book story runs parallel to Watchmen, foreshadowing the end, and also making the reader wonder which of the main characters the Freighter lead represents. As a man who loses his humanity in an attempt to get back to civilization, he could stand in for the no-longer human Dr. Manhattan, the brutal Rorschach, or even Adrian Veidt, who commits a monstrous act in the final chapters.
I’m ashamed that I didn’t pick this up until my most recent reading, but Chapter 5 is a visual palindrome. The first panel of the story is exactly the same as the last, and throughout the chapter, the panel layout, camera angles, and composition mirror each other from beginning to end. This is jaw-droppingly impressive once you realize that it’s happening.
It’s worth mentioning Dave Gibbons’ art. While most of the adulation for Watchmen focuses on Moore’s writing, Gibbons art is beautiful. The storytelling is fantastic. There are a lot of scenes that are nothing but people talking, and Gibbons makes them visually interesting without detracting from what’s being said. He nails the emotions in every scene, and he’s a master at depicting different faces. He can draw people wearing normal clothes making a sandwich just as well as he can draw a gorgeous crystalline construct on the Martian landscape. His skillful rendering brings certain motifs into clarity, like the silhouettes of lovers. This image appears frequently, invoking both Hiroshima and a scarring event in Rorschach’s childhood. Gibbons manages to put this image into the story over and over, sometimes so subtly that it barely registers on a conscious level.
It’s worth noting that Heroes pays homage to Watchmen regularly. Linderman’s stated endgame in Season One is based on Adrian Veidt’s plan from Watchmen’s conclusion. Sylar’s pre-villainy job as a watchmaker (as well as the recurring visual of falling gears) owes a debt to Jon Ostermann’s Depression-Era job. This is not really key to an understanding of Watchmen, but it’s worth noting the genre influence it still has, as well as serving as a plug for my Heroes recaps.
