Title:
Absolute Watchmen (Click to go to the release post)
Writer(s):
Alan Moore (Click to see other books from this writer released on this site)
Review source:
Hilary Goldstein (Review 1) and
Brendan Wolfe (Review 2) (Don't click it, read the review here...
)
Review:
Review 1 - The greatest comic-book ever written has been made even better.
No comic book has been the subject of more essays and serious literary discussion than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. It has been named one of the 100 greatest novels of the past century by Time Magazine. Released 20 years ago, the 12-issue maxi-series was a groundbreaking achievement for comics. Written "for adults," Watchmen opened the doors for thought-provoking and intelligent comics in the mainstream. Two decades after its arrival, there is still no greater comic book.
In honor of the 20-year anniversary, DC Comics released a $75 oversized hardcover, Absolute Watchmen. For the first time, the series can be enjoyed at a considerably larger size and with completely re-mastered color. Few would argue the brilliance of Moore's book, but get this -- the Absolute Edition makes this epic tale even better. That's right, the story lauded by critics and loved by fans is now more powerful than any version you have previously read.
The bigger size is certainly a plus and the 50 pages of supplemental material is an excellent bonus. It's almost disquieting to see Moore's page-long descriptions for each panel in his script excerpts. But these bonuses are not what make the new edition the true Absolute. Wildstorm FX and original series colorist John Higgins re-mastered the color for the new hardcover. While it may not be obvious to the casual reader, the new coloring makes a surprising difference.
Compared to the standard softcover edition that has been floating around for a decade, the new colors allow for greater contrast. The color tone has been adjusted on almost every panel and some background colors have actually changed completely. While Gibbons' art has always translated Moore's emotional sentiment, the re-mastered colors make this all the more powerful. The final issue begins with six one-panel pages, which were shocking even back in 1985. Now, on a bigger scale and with adjusted colors, the six silent pages are explosive. The story builds to this moment and more so than in previous printings, this climactic scene reverberates with power.
Moore's tale of a world without heroes is eerily relevant to today's America. Set in 1985, eight years after costumed vigilantes were outlawed, Watchmen is part murder mystery, part political drama. When America's only regulated super-being, the god-like Dr. Manhattan, decides to leave Earth, Russia begins a series of bold moves that could lead to nuclear proliferation. While the world at large is facing crisis, someone has begun killing the retired costumed heroes of America. A few of the old guard begin an investigation, one that leads to a shocking revelation and an unexpected finale.
In Watchmen, Moore shows us a world that has gone completely mad. Not only is the escalation of Cold War hostilities and the idea of nuclear annihilation insane, but the characters driving this tale are all touched with madness. Nixon, the perfect mixture of power and paranoia, has managed to remain President through the '80s. Everyone's favorite hero, Rorschach, is a violent, delusional sociopath. Even the pragmatic Dr. Manhattan cannot escape the manic nature of the human condition. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world and Moore depicts its darkest corners.
Watchmen is the greatest display of Alan Moore's gift for juxtaposition. Employing parallel storytelling, often through a kid reading an old swashbuckler comic book, Moore manipulates the emotional pitch of Watchmen. A great deal of time is devoted to the common man on one specific street corner. It seems, at times, almost like a waste, distracting from the murder-mystery plot. The relevancy of one street corner, of the lives of a handful of New Yorkers, becomes tragically clear in the final two issues. Much like D.M. Thomas' novel, The White Hotel, Watchmen illuminates the ordinary lives of a few so that we can understand the tragedy that strikes the millions of others just like them.
As much as the story of Watchmen shaped the future of comics, Dave Gibbons' art altered the way people viewed the graphic medium. Gibbons isn't afraid to leave central characters off-panel or focus on an object in the foreground, making the speaking characters visually obsolete. There's little action in Watchmen, a story that runs more than 350 pages, so Gibbons uses cinematic tricks to keep our focus through pages upon pages of dialogue. My favorite is a short scene between Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre, where the two are pushed to the edges of the panel and we watch their conversation unfold in the mirror behind them. Gibbons' art is the perfect compliment to Moore's words. It's hard to imagine Watchmen with different partners.
Much smarter folks than myself have provided in-depth analysis of Watchmen over the years. I won't even try and plunge into the depths of this major work. Suffice to say it's quite a dense read and not the kind of book you pick up for a fun time. This is my fifth or sixth reading of Watchmen and I've found that each time I read through this book, I discover something new. Now with the Absolute edition, I've gained an even greater sense of Moore's story. This is a masterpiece. One that has inspired just about every writer since its release. Just as Citizen Kane was the father of modern cinema, the techniques in Watchmen can be seen in dozens of comics on the rack today. Still, after 20 years, no other work comes anywhere close to Watchmen. It remains the best comic-book of all time and the new hardcover is easily the best collection ever released.
Review 2 - Who's watching Watchmen? Everybody apparently. This book -- or comic book, or graphic novel, or whatever you want to call it -- has been picked apart endlessly in the 20 years since it was first published. Every frame has been microscopically studied, its plot, characters and symbols charted out no less elaborately than Ulysses'. Its fans, like fans of everything else, are intensely protective and argumentative. Reading a book like this now, for the first time, is likely to result less in actual criticism than in intellectual alignment. What can be said has likely been said; the issue now is with whom do you agree.
So on the occasion of DC Comics' Absolute Watchmen, a beautifully re-mastered anniversary edition with hard-to-find scripts from writer Alan Moore and sketches from artist Dave Gibbons, I'll agree with everybody and nobody, the geeks and the eye-rollers both. You say I contradict myself? Very well then, but Watchmen contains multitudes: It's big and important and brilliant and insufferable. It's mythic; it's gritty. It's awesome and it's dumb. In its pages are heroes, anti-heroes and giant, blue-peckered superheroes. There are aliens, street-fighting lesbians and pirates. There are ambiguously evil geniuses and average New Yorkers. When its violence isn't intimate, it's global. When the sex isn't tender, it's dirty. Watchmen's story is part whodunit, part philosophical tract, its writing fierce and groundbreaking, pinched and pedantic. The art is always stiff and always utterly appropriate.
Watchmen is everything. At times it's even boring.
Although proclaimed a seminal graphic novel, Watchmen hardly settles the argument of what a graphic novel is. It's just the first. Or, along with Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman's Maus, one of the first. Or if not the first then the best. It depends on who you ask (Time magazine weighed in recently by naming it one of the top 100 novels of the century). Perhaps "graphic novel" is simply the label of choice for those who'd rather not be caught reading comics. Or maybe it's a nod to the modern novel's affinity for anti-heroes. Leopold Bloom, meet Dan Dreiberg & His Spare Tire.
Dreiberg, by the way, is not everything so much as nothing. He is not a superhero with super powers, but neither is he like you and me. He's post-superhero: Since the government outlawed masked crime fighters, his Nite Owl costume has been tucked away in the closet, his wicked-cool hover craft collecting dust in the basement. A little extra weight has sapped his confidence, leaving him to covet from afar Dr. Manhattan's curvy girlfriend Laurie. Now there's a superhero! Dr. Manhattan stands outside of time. The victim of a nuclear accident, he can walk on water or through walls; in a fit of pique, he can even flee to Mars and sulk. The story begins, though, with trench-coated Rorschach -- monosyllabic, probably mentally ill -- and his hunch that someone is gunning for the masked ones. While right and wrong forever shifts around him, Rorschach, ironically, is the one who stays constant. He is Watchmen's terrible conscience.
The plot is complex and hyper-allusive. There's the main narrative, multiple back-narratives, as well as an alternate history that plays out in the background art. There are representations and parodies of all kinds of media: comics, newspapers, television, advertisements, magazine articles, etc. There are endless references to recent American history, antiquity, philosophy, poetry, popular music, other comic books, Watchmen itself...
Writes Tom Shone in Slate: "Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-hatred tricked out as superiority -- that old adolescent standby -- is up to you."
Writes Tim Cavanaugh for Reason.com: "Tom Shone is a douche."
Meanwhile, the comic's various symbols -- watches and time pieces, pyramids and triangles, the famous blood-spattered smiley face, masks, ink blots, birds and butterflies, atoms, perfume, knots, mirrors and reflections, et so many alia -- seem to be almost competitively unsubtle. Pyramid Deliveries. Prometheus Cab Company. Gordian Knot Lock Co. Nostalgia Perfume. Utopia Theater.
Some plot elements seem entirely gratuitous and a step too clever. The pirate comic-book-within-the-comic-book is first on the list. That pirates have replaced superheroes as the subjects of comic books suggests that the Watchmen world is perhaps darker and less idealistic than our own. (At least it's darker than the time when superheroes dominated the comics. What, though, of a world where comics like Watchmen dominate the comics?) But Moore overplays his hand, introducing a morbid pirate adventure that, throughout Watchmen, parallels and comments on the main narrative. At first, it's a neat trick, but after it reappears, chapter after chapter, the reader is left to wonder, So freaking what?!? The pirate comic's author even shows up in a subplot, but to little effect.
The art is self-consciously and at times overly conservative: The jaws are square, the pages reliably nine panels. But the result is an interesting formal tension between an old-fashioned look and groundbreaking writing. Intricate plot and elaborate layout come together like -- what else? -- clockwork. It's interesting on a technical level. There are times, though, when everything feels so determined by the machinery of the plot. It saps the story of life.
A great deal more time is spent on the characters than on the story,. This, too, suggests why "graphic novel" might work as a label ... if you're so inclined. Characters like Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk and her mom Sally Jupiter are all recognizably human and admirably three-dimensional. Everything is complicated and ironic and inconvenient in their world, as in ours.
As for Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and the Alexander-obsessed businessman Ozymandias -- in another literary incarnation, one imagines they might have taken a long, rejuvenating stroll outside the International Sanatorium Berghof, clicking their canes and worrying through the implications of determinism. Alas, in Watchmen they're set loose on all of Earth and even Mars. They're little more than mytho-philosophical types with tortured vocabularies. They hover somewhere above our mere sympathy or indignation.
Watchmen is unfailingly earnest and superbly ambitious. It's big and strives to be important, but too often, it's just self-important. Moore's writing is thick with pretentiousness and periodically turns into a parody of itself. Example from Chapter V: "Good readers, know this: Hades is wet. Hades is lonely." Ugh. Take it as irony if you want. Still ugh. Or from Chapter XI: "As an afterthought, the method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards .... The subject for a subsequent discourse, perhaps." One hopes not. And from the same page: "It must be so disorienting. Their pursuit leads them deeper into moral and intellectual regions as uncharted and devoid of landmark as the territories currently surrounding them."
There is a gut-wrenching moment in Watchmen. It's at the end of the penultimate chapter -- when a video monitor goes white and all is horribly quiet. This is a moment made for myth, for a story that, in the words of Karen Armstrong (in A Short History of Myth), "is about the unknown; ... about that for which initially we have no words." Myth, says Armstrong, "looks into the heart of a great silence." What's remarkable about Watchmen is the way it methodically, sometimes cruelly, exposes its characters' "essential silliness" (to quote Moore in his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns) while managing to maintain the spirit and mission of myth.
It does this despite the fact that, traditionally, myths and novels, comics and novels, are contradictions in terms. Sure, myths may sometimes read like novels, Ruth Franklin argued recently in The New Republic, "but the two forms really have nothing in common. Even the most experimental fictions must rely on psychological realism to some extent; without it, their characters would be unrecognizable, and their plots without interest." Myths, meanwhile, are about the contradictory and the unexplained. The blank. The silent.
Of course, such moments are rare in the loud, hyper-articulate cacophony of Watchmen World -- the silence that results from a few million deaths can seem like a relief!
In the end, though, the visual complexity of Watchmen overwhelms many of its literary failings. It is endlessly interesting to look at. And the world that Alan Moore created is so broadly and deeply imagined that it pulls you in and, in the end, won't let you go ... even if you want to. With minor caveats, one could easily co-opt James Wood on the subject of Don DeLillo's Underworld: "The book is so large, so serious, so ambitious, so often well-written, so punctually intelligent, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ."
More info:
Written by: Alan Moore
Art by: Dave Gibbons
Publisher: DC
Genre: Superhero