Welcome to N. Vivian Appreciation Month!

Sorry folks for forgetting to update this as I should. I know, I know...your lives just aren't complete without my book reviews. I shall try to do better in the future. To make up for my lack of reviewing here, I'll post a review every day for the next few days.

Since it's on everyone's mind, I'll add my review of Watchmen as well. Warning: some spoilers.

The Watchmen by Alan Moore and David Gibbons, reviewed by N. Vivian on 3/6/2009.

Watchmen is a comic about superheroes, but it isn't a superhero comic. Instead, it is Moore's playing with the genre to the point of awesome. Picture New York City 1980's; a New York where people really did (at one point) dress up in wacky costumes and fight crime. A New York (and a world) where superhero comics don't exist, because who wants to read comics about real life (people read pirate comics instead)? Of all the costumed crimefighters, only one is actually parahuman: Dr. Manhattan. Created by a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong (betcha never heard that origin story before, eh?), Dr. Manhattan exists outside of time, and can change the physical world on an atomic level simply by will and thought alone. America is using him to hold the pinko commie bastards Russia in check ("the superman exists and he is American"), leading America to behave like a spoiled brat who is always threatening to take his ball home if other kids countries don't play by their rules, and who keeps talking about his big brother who'll beat everyone up if they don't do what he says.

Yeah, I know, it's an America that defies belief.

The comic opens with the murder of Edward Blake, the alter ego of the superhero "The Comedian," one of the two superheroes who works with government sanction. The other, is, of course, Dr. Manhattan; the rest were forced into retirement back in '77 after the passing of the "Keene Act" which basically just said no to vigilantism. The one costumed crimefighter (a more accurate term [though I use them pretty much interchangeably] than superhero since none of them have powers save Dr. Manhattan) who did not go gentle into that good night is Rorschach. Rorschach is, by my thinking anyway, the most interesting character in Watchmen. First of all, his moral code is awesome. On the one hand, he truly believes that the ends justify the means; breaking the fingers of a small time crook to get information is completely okay, but at the same time, he freaks out on another character for having an unlicensed gun. Rorschach never compromises; his entire outlook is purely black or white, right or wrong. If something is wrong, it must be persecuted to the fullest extent (and not necessarily by the law). Like his mask, which is a never-ending swirl of black and white, his views never mix into a neutral gray. Much like Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, Rorschach never questions his actions or his motives--he is action, pure and simple. In order to find a missing girl, he tortures fifteen people for information; upon finding she has been murdered, dismembered, and fed to dogs, he kills the dogs, handcuffs the kidnapper, sets the house on fire, then hands the man a hacksaw and says, "Shouldn't bother trying to saw through handcuffs. Never make it in time." Brutal, man, but chillingly effective. His response to the Keene Act? To murder a serial rapist and dump his body in front of the police station, with a sign that says "Never!" pinned to the corpse.

Rorschach believes himself to be Rorschach; he refers to his mask as his 'face' and sees his alter-ego (who is not revealed for several chapters, but you can pretty much guess his identity right off) as the not-real him. This psychological break occurs during the the kidnapping scene, though it builds on several decades of fucked-uppedness: "It was Kovacs who said 'mother' then, muffled under Latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again....Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose...It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us....Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach." Seriously, his psychology is amazing, and that's before we get into the crazy that was his childhood.

The whole comic book is a deconstructionist text (if there's one thing I can honestly say I've learned at Clark, it's lit. theory. Still don't like it, but at least I [sorta] understand it now), looking at the worth and value of superheroes. First, it looks at the kind of people who would become costumed crimefighters in a modern, fairly realistic setting, at the dark psychology behind such a drive and motivation. It's one thing for Superman and Spiderman to do so--they've got special powers that creates within them a special responsibility. Batman, however? Plain, mortal Batman? Screwed up in the head. It warns of the danger of having a weapon that we place all our hopes and power in because when it goes, or becomes obsolete, we have nothing left and our enemies swarm around us and our newfound (or even newly perceived) weakness. Lastly, this is also a cautionary tale; Moore is warning us about putting all our hopes and trust into powerful beings, either political or paranormal. By doing so, we absolve ourselves of all responsibility and agency. First we give them the power to do as they please, and remove from ourselves the power to protest against them, and then we follow them down into moral decay since, freed from any notion of personal responsibility, we feel empowered to do as we please.

Oh, and let me talk about Tales of the Black Freighter for a moment, Watchmen's comic within a comic. The reader gets to read the story "Marooned," during several points of the comic, as the events in that story coincide with the events in the actual story. "Marooned" is about a sailor who washes up on an island (along with the bodies of his dead comrades) after the Black Freighter (the eponymous ship of evil from the comic) attacks his ship. The sailor realizes that the Black Freighter will be sailing towards his undefended home, and will kill everyone in the town, including the sailor's own family. In order to make it home before the ship, the sailor starts doing the most insane things, slowly stripping away him humanity (and sanity!) in the process. He makes a raft out of the gas-bloated corpses of his friends, catches and eats a raw sea gull, kills and eats a shark that has been drawn to the smell of his raft, and then, once he gets home, begins murdering his friends and neighbors who he assumes are collaborating with the pirate...who never came.

This theme of sacrificing everything to achieve victory has a certain central importance in the main-comic, as you can see if you read the comic yourself (I'm pretty sure that if I spoil the ending, I will be placed on the hitlist of the Geek Mafia). It's not exactly like a Pyrrhic victory--it's more of a deliberate setting out to do insane and horrible things, in order to bring about a "happy ending."

Like Watchmen itself, Tales of the Black Freighter are aspects of the theater of the absurd. They illustrate that life is inherently without meaning, parodying reality, or using seeming absurdity to show the real absurdity that is everyday life (like a comic book about superheroes to hold up a mirror to Reagan-era politics, for example...) It's all about the tragicomedy, yo.

This is a very thought-provoking comic. On the one hand, the story is interesting, the characters multi-faceted, and the gimmicks (comic-within-a-comic, the text afterwords from the Watchmen universe, etc) both enrich and illuminate the story. On the other hand, this comic is a veritable treasure-trove of literary criticism. Two of my students last semester are writing their major papers about Watchmen; the first is looking at Watchmen and comparing it to the Theater of the Absurd, and the second is reading this and V for Vendetta and discussing the concept of 'masking.' It's not a surprise that Watchmen is considered a 'literary' graphic novel. You can peel this text apart like an onion.

4.75 stars