The Watchmen Comics, the 12-series book created by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore, is not your usual graphic novel. It is not a scam of any virtuous and flawless superhero story that we are used to reading. It’s dark, dingy, pulpy, and off-kilter in every way.
Moore’s description of dystopia is meant to reflect today’s dilemmas. The background of the plot is an alternate history of the United States, where the country is on the brink of waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The pages are populated by the highly humanized and flawed characters that Moore created. These characters reflect the very nature of humanity and the reality of existence. Each character possesses an ambivalent wave of emotions, despair, violence, and moral bankruptcy. Also, the creators wanted to show readers what these characters are all about without sugarcoating them. In an interview, Moore said, “What we wanted to do was show all these people, warts and all. Show that even the worst had something going for them, and even the best had their flaws.”
Unlike all the other heroes depicted in epics and other graphic novels, the Watchmen characters, although in disguise, do not have superpowers, except for Doctor Manhattan.
The characters look nothing like Superman. They are not friendly or stable enough to be reliable. They conspire, cheat, and give in to the urgency of their own worldly needs. These characters are more of the deconstructed concept of a superman. This is an aspect of the comics that is firmly grounded in realism.
Moore and Gibbons aim to show the different facets of the human condition through their characters. Doctor Manhattan is a representation of a murderous mind; The comedian is the peacemaker; Nite Owl, the vigilante superhero; Ozymandias, the representation of goodness; Rorschack, a symbolism of the gray area of life; and Silk Specter, object of desire and lust.
In the graphic novel, five radically opposite constructions of the world are presented. Instead of dictating to readers the demarcation line between the spheres of good and evil, the novel launches the audience into a moral debate. The creators allow readers to engage in an active discussion about what is black, white, or gray on the morality scale.
This comic is a marriage between fantasy and realism. The unique plot and even more humanized characters send all other comics to shame. Watchmen was not created to give readers a good read. Instead, it was intended to make them think and accept the multi-level conflicts that human existence brings.
Watchmen doesn’t just boast of having a cleverly written plot. His art and visuals also highlight the strengths of mid-rise to premium comic books.
The Watchmen comics have deconstructed the superman and have remained totally faithful to the reality of the human being. It has twisted and reinvented the comic book genre in feats never seen before. In short, he has dispelled the myth of the superman and proved that humans, even those we consider perfect, have flaws.