Looking Out To Sea

Watchmen by Alan Moore. (That’s the terrifying looking gent in the photo, that looks like Fagin.) One of those stories that was said to revolutionise the graphic novel industry when it appeared, to raise the bar to a significantly higher level. I can’t really comment on this because I don’t have much experience with what comics were like at the time. There’s always a tendency to look at something that was groundbreaking at the time and think “so clichéd” — be it Tolkien, William Gibson or the music of the Beatles. But it is complex and interesting so it probably made quite a splash when it was released.

Zombie Alan Moore
© Loz Pycock

It’s about superheroes. Well, how superheroes would be if they were real. The Batman style of superhero, that doesn’t have fantastical powers. And it’s about the end of the world.

I really enjoyed it, though I found some of the plot not as clear as it could be. Maybe I just read too fast (har har, I’m actually a really slow reader). The character of Rorschach was particularly good — it’s so rare you get to feel sympathy for someone so incredibly antisocial and unsympathetic. Christopher Brookmyre can do it too, but not many people can make you feel that way.

There’s a lot in the book, and I know there will be more to find if I get a chance to read it again (it wasn’t my copy, but borrowed, and there were two people in the queue behind me to get afterwards). The same figures and motifs repeated again and again — the smiley face, the quote that inspired the title, the Hiroshima silhouettes.

But for all its high-brow seriousness it’s still comic too; there’s still humour there. I don’t know the name for it, but there’s a technique that seems most noticeable in comics, where two things are happening at once, and the visuals for one are overlaid with the voices for another, so that each comments on what is happening. Sometimes it’s done in a serious way — the newspaper salesman and the pirate story, for example — but other times it’s just for the sheer hilarity of juxtaposition. It’s the technique that is ideal for sending up sex scenes, it seems.

Below, there’s a little clip of my introduction to Watchmen, including Alan Moore narrating some of Rorschach’s thoughts. Enjoy.