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Amazing book, transcends from being an average comic book to engrossing philosophical story. But I was sort of perplexed by some of the symbolism, are the different characters supposed to represent themes or something? I mean what is Ozymandias and the Night Owl supposed to be? What was the point of the story, was it that super heroes face the same dilemma's as the average person?
 
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Each hero is supposed to represent a hero from another comic. Night Owl is Batman and Ozymandias I'm not sure about - may be a character I don't know about.
I think the point of the story was to show the other side of being a hero, getting down to earth with their personal lives. Give us a feel as to who they are and not what. Watchmen actually revolutionized comics as we know it. It took us to bland spandex-wearing heroes who look and act perfect in person to flawed borderline psycho's who fight crime for more personal reasons. Took everything from plain and cartoony to gritty and dark. Personally I liked the change.
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United States3824 Posts
Oh wait, everyone died and the good guys lost! great idea for a comic!
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Watchmen was Alan Moore's last "goodbye" to superhero comics before he realized that most of the money in comics (outside the newspaper strips, anyway) was in superheros and said hello to them again. The point of the story can be summed up in the title. "Watchmen" As in "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" --Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347 A.D. "Who watches the watchmen?" May also be translated as "Who polices the police?" The book is a critique of powerfantasy as entertainment and fear-mongering as a method to coerce the public. There are many other smaller themes as well, but I think those are the main ones. With any luck, the movie will pull off a decent adaptation, but prolly not... they'll either concentrate too much on Dr. Manhattan as God or Rorschach as the "only real hero." Hint: Rorschach was just as bad as any of them, he was just small-time compared with Ozymandias.
cgrinker: there weren't any goodguys in the comic... not really. If there were any good guys it was the background characters that the superheros fucked over with their vigilante-ism.
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I generally don't like reading comics. BUT WHAT I HATE MORE IS THAT NINETY NINE PERCENT OF COMIC BOOK WRITERS USE CAPS FOR THEIR TEXT. WHAT THEY DONT REALISE IS THAT WORD SHAPES AND SUCH ARE STORED IN THE BRAIN in non caps (OFCOURSE THIS ALSO DEPENDS ON HOW THE PERSON LEARNT ENGLISH, FOR ALL I KNOW THEY COULD HAVE LEARNT ONLY THE CAPITAL LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET AND READ EVERY SINGLE TEXT IN CAPITAL LETTERS SO THAT ALL THE WORD SHAPES IN THEIR VISUAL CORTEX ARE ACTUALLY, IN CAPS) which is why it is much easier on the eyes and brain to read something that IS NOT IN CAPS.
But yeah i was recommended this comic by many friends, im just not ready for caps yet.
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It's not comic book writers, it's the letterist and editor's decision. They use caps for legibility reasons. Comics are drawn at 2x the size of the final image and then shrunk down at the printer's. This has the effect of making the art look crisper and more detailed, but also destroys the legibility of hand-written language. Writing in caps made the stuff easier to read. These days, now that most comics-text is "drawn" in computers, it's just a matter of tradition.
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I've noticed Watchmen interchangeably uses capitals. It uses normal text for narration but caps for speech.
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EPT
