I spent many years avoiding Alan Moore's "
Watchmen". Don't be mistaken. I'm a HUGE Alan Moore fan. In fact, it was because of my admiration and respect for Alan Moore that "
Watchmen" always filled with fear and trepidation. I'm a 1980s comic fanboy and anyone worth their salt who has grown up in that decade have read the Trinity of comic book stories that forced comics to grow up - namely, Frank Miller's "
The Dark Knight Returns", Alan Moore's "
Watchmen" and Art Spiegelman's "
Maus". Students of comicbook history still hail those three works as being responsible for taking comics out of comic specialty stores and attracting the attention of the mainstream media as well as academia. They became the predecessors to works like "
Love and Rockets" by Los Bros Hernandez, "
Sin City" and "
300" by Frank Miller, "
Sandman" by Neil Gaiman, and the various works in our time by blokes like Warren Ellis, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, etc.
The thing was, I read almost everything that Alan Moore wrote. Even his much-criticised run on Wildstorm's "
WildCATS" title remains a personal favourite of mine up to this day. My daughter is also fast becoming a fan after reading "
Swamp Thing", "
The Killing Joke", "
Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?" and "
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". She has yet to try my other Alan Moore books such as "
Tom Strong" and "
Promethea". So why the fear and trepidation over reading "
Watchmen"?
I think it's a kind of religious fear. Remember when guys like Robert Ingersoll used to terrorise the crowds with his passionate agnostic pleas and how your church-going grandmother told you that if you listened to Ingersoll, you'll end up losing your faith and going to hell? It was something like that. I grew up on a steady diet of "
The New Teen Titans", "
The Mighty Thor", "
Fantastic Four", "
The Avengers" and, of course, the "
Superfriends" cartoon. In other words, I was a purist when it came to superheroes. In fact, characters like Iron Man, Hulk, Batman and Green Lantern are as real and vital to my moral/philosophical outlook in life as Elijah, Moses, Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi! I had read enough interviews, essays and commentaries on comics to know that "
Watchmen" was somewhat like Friedrich Nietzsche's "
Twilight of the Idols" to the religious-types. In short, I feared for my faith in superheroes. Growing up dilluted that faith somewhat but I still held on stubbornly to my childhood toys. Question was, will that fragile faith survive the assault of Alan Moore's "
Watchmen"? In addition to all that, there were the rumours of people who had given up on comicbook characters post-
Watchmen. Or that comics all became unpleasantly (not to mention, unsavourily) grim-and-gritty in the years following "
Watchmen". I can easily think of some examples -
Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters,
Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt, and countless other examples. Bertrand Russell loved to reiterate the rumours spread by well-meaning religious types against Jeremy Bentham in that Bentham was said to encourage people to boil their late grandmothers' remains for dinner - after all, the minority should comply to any demands that would ensure the "greatest happiness of the greatest number", right? Of course, that was a false allegation but then it haunted many people for many years. I think those rumours about Alan Moore's "
Watchmen" had the same effect on me as well.
Truth be told, up to this present moment, I have not read the entirety of the "
Watchmen" graphic novel. Like other geeks, I bought the hardcover reprint dutifully but unlike my peers, I consciously avoided reading it. Having it on the shelves was kinda like a mark of legitimacy for me - after all, I proudly tell people that I'm a 1980s fanboy. In other words, this present confession is somewhat akin to admitting that I'm a closet homosexual after being a James Dobson supporter for decades!
But I've since seen the Zack Snyder-directed "
Watchmen" film about half a dozen times. In fact, I'm writing this entry immediately after viewing the Director's Cut DVD. In fact, I'm sooooooooooooo in love with the film that I'll probably rewatch it countless more times in the future. It is my favourite superhero-themed movie of all time (yes - even more than the first and second "
Superman" films, the first and second "
Spider-Man" films, "
Batman Begins", the first "
Iron Man" film and "
X-Men 2" put together). And no, I did not end up cynical or swearing off superheroes. In fact, it reaffirmed my faith in the romantic heroic imagination. The film had a pervasive sense of sadness and nostalgia throughout - a kind of unsecret wish for the "good ol' days" of costumed-adventuring when we could easily tell who the bad guys were and that the good guys did what was right because they were the right thing to do - all mixed in with a dash of swashbuckling adventuring, humour and fun.
Perhaps it's because I'm living in 2010 - and have survived reading far more deconstructive works such as Warren Ellis' "
The Authority" and Grant Morrison's "
New X-Men"? I can imagine the flabbergasted folks in 1985 who were confronted with these new kinds of comic storytelling that was nary to be found outside the indies, the UK magazine-sized strips and weird Euro sci-fi journals. Or perhaps it was the combination of Reaganomics, Thatcher's iron-fisted government and Cold War paranoia that drove people to "
The Dark Knight Returns" and "
Watchmen" (and to a lesser extent, "
Elektra: Assassin" and "
Daredevil: Born Again") and then proclaiming that comicbooks have grown up and transcended the "
Biff! Bam! Boom!" of the Adam West "
Batman" TV show. Too bad so many readers forced to books to deal with "realistic" issues that all they saw were the political, sexual and moral connotations of the works while missing the romance of those same books. Too many people failed to see beyond the bone-crunching violence and suggestive sexuality in those books to notice that "
The Dark Knight Returns" was so very romantic - e.g. when Batman rode on a horse to rally his followers, it was the wild west come back to live in modern day Gotham. In "
Watchmen", the central core of the story was really Silk Spectre's love for two men - Dr. Manhattan and Nite-Owl II - a love that could either save the world or doom it to nuclear armageddon! Both works remind us of the vitality and continuing relevance of mythic archetypes - what would the world have been like without King Arthur, Gilgamesh, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or Allan Quartermain? What would the world have been like if Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster did not dream up the stories of a Superman from the doomed planet Krypton who landed in Kansas? What would the world have been like if Bill Finger and Bob Kane had not dressed up a man in a Bat-costume and paired him with a bubbly sidekick in tight green shorts? Ultimately, both works and countless others after them remind us to always cherish the magic of storytelling - chiefly, sequential and graphical storytelling. We've come a long way since the advent of the four-colour comic strips in the local Sunday papers. But thankfully, we've not gone too far away as to forget the charm and magic of the medium and its many colourful characters. Excelsior!
