Rorschach’s journal: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it’s true face.”
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, 1986
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Long before superheroes were mainstream and even required deconstructing, Alan Moore turned the genre inside out with Watchmen. Imagine an alternate history where masked vigilantes began proliferating when comic books first emerged in the 1940’s. As the years wore on various laws came into effect to clamp down on unauthorized heroes while costumed crusaders who joined the government’s “sanctioned” ranks helped the United States win the Vietnam War.
Watchmen tells the story of the second crop of heroes, the ones who weren’t able to follow on the straight and narrow path like the generation before. In a way the comic is a kind of critique of society in the post-Vietnam era, and the many complicated coping mechanisms people employed to keep moving forward when morality is relative.
What lengths would you go to to save man from himself? Or is it worth bothering to save him at all?
Watchmen was one of a kind when it emerged in 1986, and its release is viewed by many as the moment when “comics grew up.” It remains engaging today and I’m surprised, given all the comic collecting I did in my teen years, that it took me this long to read it.