| |
|
(This was going to be a contribution to Recommended Reading for Beginners, but I've started a new thread with it for two reasons. Firstly, my post was just too damn long, and wasn't really suited to that thread. Secondly, I don't think we've ever had a proper dissection and analysis of this book, and I'd really love to get involved in one. So, I figured that as we've got a series of regular threads in the Books forum for this kind of thing, maybe we could start one up in this forum, too. Maybe. If anyone else is interested.)
Broken record time, as Randy yet again shows that he knows little of comics outside of the work of Alan Moore.
Oh, and SPOILERS, just in case...
Watchmen. I'll recommend it as a graphic novel, that being the format that's most readily available. This was where I started out with comics, and I'm currently having a thorough re-read of it. It takes the theme that most non-comics savvy people associate with the medium - the superhero, the masked vigilante - and fucks it. It's the JLA if the JLA were real.
This book works on so many levels. You don't have to know anything about how comics normally function to 'get' it, but doing so can enhance the experience even more.
Each and every panel contains hints, references to other things going on in the story. They're probably obvious to everyone here by now. Nostalgia perfume. The newspaper headlines. The pirate comic. The graffiti lovers. The ever-present Doomsday Clock motif. Posters. The End Is Nigh.
In one tiny, apparently insignificant panel, for example, there are four completely separate narratives going on that all link together in some way. You've got the newsvendor talking to the kid, saying, "You never know. You never know what's bearing down on you." The kid's reading the pirate comic, the caption to which is "Beneath my raft, something moved." Behind them, Rorschach is going to pick up the note that will lead to his capture. In front of them is the Institute Of Extraspatial Studies, the research from which will become hugely important to both the overall story and the lives of each of these three characters.
That's one panel.
It doesn't just happen on this micro scale, either. Fearful Symmetry is the most stunningly scripted comic that I've read. Panels bleed in to each other, both in terms of composition and theme. A lesser writer would have trouble keeping the story as the most important element when trying to pull off tricks like these, but in Watchmen it feels effortless.
I've read it a number of times now, but there are still plenty of things I'm only just noticing. Like the way that the mariner in the [i]Tales Of The Black Freighter[i] story represents Veidt:
quote:...we experience the frantic mariner's torment at the knowledge that while he is trapped on his island, the bestial crew of the Freighter are surely bearing down upon his town, his home, his wife and his children. Driven by his burning desire to avert this calamity, we see the mariner finally escape from the island by what may be one of the most striking and horrific devices thus far in pirate comic books... we see the increasingly distraught and disheveled mariner trying desperately to reach his home, even resorting to murder to acquire a horse for himself. In the final scenes, thanks to the skillful interplay of text and pictures, we see that the mariner, though he has escaped from his island, is in the end marooned from the rest of humanity in a much more terrible fashion.
This all happens to Veidt. He sees the war bearing down on the world that he loves, and wants to avert it. His desperation drives him to a solution that may be just as inhumane. He kills those he's hired to help him achieve his aim, in order that the plan can go ahead as intended. In the end, he sacrifices his own humanity for the sake of human kind. He can no longer be a part of the world he's strived to save.
The pages at the end of each issue/chapter are all like this; each section contains some of the foundations for the story that Moore is building and each also contains elements that are massively symbolic of the issues that the characters have to deal with.
I only noticed this next one today. The psychologist's report on Rorschach at the end of The Abyss Gazes Also includes a piece supposedly written by Kovacs when he was a child.
quote:I like President Truman, the way Dad would of wanted me to. He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn't, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed. I think it was a good thing to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.
This attitude is completely different to how he reacts when he's actual there to witness a similar act. Veidt does it; he drops the atom bomb on Japan in order to stop the war.
The whole book has astonishing depth. It just couldn't be done in any other medium. |
|
|
