Anyhow – Watchmen, with a little historical context. During the 40’s to 60’s, a few of the small comic companies conglomerate and form the “big two” comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, and with their success comes a lot of attention and eventually regulation. The government would like very much to protect the children, and so we get a period of artistic expansion, but literary drought, where comics become tame adolescent power fantasies – ever-burlier-chested noble heroes gallivanting around in spandex saving the world from formulaic villains who rarely do any real harm. This infantilization kickstarts the reputation surrounding comics – that “comics are for kids” and starts a vicious cycle of turning more and more adults off of a really interesting medium.

In the 80’s, as the audience who grew up with comics is getting older and demanding more sophisticated realistic stories, the pendulum swings the other way, and indie studios start doing big business. The big studios, catching on, start letting “reality” creep into their stories as well, and plant the seeds for a number of darker themed comics. This is where all the stuff is being mined from nowadays for movies – from this period onwards, Alan Moore (and Millar, and Gaiman, and Chaykin) had a string of critical hits, and they get progressively more and more dark and bleak as he moves further and further from the rigid confines the other studios are stuck in and keeps getting praised for it. While he’s earning successes for breaking all the rules, the big studios decide Superman ought to start having a midlife crisis, the Green Lantern Corps are genocidally hunted down, the X-Men get -really- ugly, the universe is destroyed a few times, everyone starts sporting silly haircuts.

So – this is my beef with Moore – the guy is a virtuoso, and created really fascinating stories that I admit I admire and (sometimes) even enjoy. And he and his contemporaries brought a sophisticated level of storytelling to a long-neglected medium. But in Watchmen what he’s doing is taking everything I loved about superhero genre as a kid, and then intentionally running in the opposite direction with the genre, twisting it into an obscene, horribly bleak parody. And it’s just too much. He goes too far!

Watchmen pages stolen from Wikipedia

He goes to such enormous lengths to break all the rules of the superhero story (and cram in some bizarre story experimentation) that the plotline starts to come apart, all so he can cram a few more rape scenes, prison stabbings murdered prostitutes and vietnam flamethrower flashbacks in. It’s impossibly thick with backstabbing and shady family secrets, to the point where it’s beyond awkward, it’s just awful to read and full of contempt for decency. There’s no “action” or redeeming heroism on display – just scene after scene of this gang of misfits running eachother down, all boiling down to an ending that made me want to throw my book in a fireplace.

Is it brilliant? I guess so. Clearly this was the point of the comic – and people frustrated with cheesy comic heroics applauded. I can understand where all of this praise comes from, I mean it’s so clever to tear down heroes and mock the genre. But having read the comic or seen the movie, are you any better for it? Is watching 3 hours of bad people – really bad people, going to make you feel good? Shouldn’t art and storytelling elevate? All reading the book did for me was make me really mad – then regretful that I’d wasted so much time on so much unbridled negativity.

Worse, it opened the floodgates for the kind of negativity that’s now pervasive in comics – every writer seems to want to reinvent every character with even more tragic flaws. The superhero format, as a genre, isn’t the place for stories about genocide and rape. Superheroes are shining representations of our values – expressions of an ideal. The lesson from Watchmen should have been that we ought to better appreciate the sanctity and tremendous value of constructive, socially conscious, morally redeeming stories, and learn to better understand the lessons we impart through the actions of heroes.

… and don’t even get me started on Spider-Man’s organic web slingers!!!! (Just kidding)