Review: Watchmen

Watchmen by Alan Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was another book club selection that I would not have picked up on my own; mostly because I am not much of a graphic novel type. However, in this case, I was actually surprised that I liked it at all. The book is actually 12 comic books mashed together with some filler text that provided some back-story. The general concept was that what we would commonly refer to as super heroes actually became a fashion for awhile ... and they were seen as what they really were ... masked vigilantes. The premise opens up a very interesting debate on how government should work and what should happen when it fails to protect the governed. The American West (and to some extent, the South) has a significant history in vigilantism, so it was pretty easy to see this world as possible ...

And it was an extremely dark and unpleasant world. I didn't much care for the apparent fascination with blood in the frequent depictations of violence within the story, but I could accept them given the dark tenor of the plot. A few heroes even had intriguing character flaws, but the format didn't really allow us to explore them very deeply. There was a touch on predestination using Dr. Manhattan as the foil that was actually very well done; however, the scene on Mars was almost entirely superfluous IMHO and should have been dumped. Others may argue that it is was a component which illustrated Dr. Manhattan's inhumanness (or at the very least, his isolation from humanity), but I thought that had already been accomplished when he left Earth.

Finally there was the story within a story provided by a character whose sole purpose was to read another comic book within THIS comic book and presented a storyline that was apparently supposed to shadow (or foreshadow) how this story would end ... and I must say that the two stories were only tenuously linked at best and the ending of the main plot was singularly unsatisfying, while the ending of the black freighter story was relatively predictable. All in all it didn't add as much to the story as it should have.

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