Watchmen has been
hailed as one of the greatest comic books of all-time, the Citizen Kane of comics if you will. It’s one of the few specimens
in the comic book genre that “serious” critics will discuss, let alone look at.
It even made it to Time Magazine’s Top 100 Novels list, the only comic book to
do so. So how is it that I managed to know absolutely nothing about this book
before picking it up and reading it for myself? I remember hearing about the
movie adaptation directed by Zack Snyder, and I saw trailers for it. But that
was the summer of The Dark Knight,
and I have hated Snyder’s directing style with a fiery passion ever since
sitting through 300. So I skipped the
movie and refused to have anything to do with it. Until a few weeks ago, when I
asked for suggestions on good comic-book mysteries. Watchmen came up on the list. I read the plot summary and suddenly
I was kicking myself: it sounded like just my kind of plot! How silly of me to
have passed this book up because a director I dislike made an adaptation of
it!!!
So off I went to fill my digital shopping cart, and to make
a long story short, that’s how I came to read Watchmen. The writer, Alan Moore, is one of the most respected
comic book writers out there, being the mastermind behind V for Vendetta, The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, and The
Killing Joke among others. The book is illustrated by Dave Gibbons, but I’ll
talk about the art later since I’m not an art critic (irony of ironies, I now
work in a paint shop).
