he time is an alternate 1985, in an America where Richard Nixon never left the White
House. Thirty years ago, the world was changed forever by the emergence of masked men and women who called themselves crime fighters. Most of those old names are gone or retired now, kept off the streets by a congressional Keene Act, which declared their activities criminal. But a few still remain, functioning as government contractors or as hunted vigilantes.
The most traumatized of these figures is Rorschach, who lost what was left of his sanity while investigating a particularly brutal kidnapping. A physically repellent, wandering figure in a filthy trench coat reeking of the public trash bin he stashes it in whenever he's not wearing it, he wanders the city streets, dispensing a justice that now goes beyond the violent into the realm of the murderous. The journal where he records his adventures provides a dark portrait of an unbalanced mind. But when investigating the murder of Edward Blake, an elderly though physically fit man tossed through the plate glass window of a high-rise penthouse, it is Rorschach who discovers that Blake was also the masked vigilante known as the Comedian, for many years now the "wetwork" specialist for an administration that has consolidated its power through assassination and terror. (Nixon remains in power, it seems, because the Comedian offed Woodward and Bernstein.) Rorschach believes that Blake's death portends a common threat to the heroes of the past.
Rorschach's investigation introduces us to the rest of the dramatis personae. The most famous is Dr. Manhattan, once a young scientist transformed by a radioactive experiment into a glowing blue man with godlike powers over the atom. Dubbed America's secret weapon, Manhattan's powers have imbued him with perceptions that have not so much alienated him from the rest of humanity as detached him from ordinary human concerns like past, future, life, death, right and wrong. Just about the only thing that allows him to care for humanity's fate at all is his love for the
embittered, unhappy Laurie Juspeczyk, once the slinky crime fighter known as Silk Spectre. Laurie, who took on that role only because her mother used that identity in the 1940s, is now deeply disgusted with her past and deeply unsatisfied with her current life as Manhattan's kept woman. She has nothing but contempt for Rorschach and sees no reason to mourn Blake, a violent man who tried to rape her mother many years before.
Other past heroes include Adrian Veidt, now retired from his role as Ozymandias, the world's
smartest man, who has parlayed his fame into a vast corporate empire, and Dan Dreiberg, who once fought alongside Rorschach as a high-tech adventurer known as the Nite Owl, but who is now a pudgy, lonely failure trying to repress his memories of past glories. Veidt seems bored, and Dreiberg seems to have no social life beyond occasional visits to Hollis Mason, who played
the Nite Owl during the 1940s. None of these past colleagues credit Rorschach's theory of a mask-killer. But when Rorschach terrorizes the the elderly, cancer-ridden supervillain once known as Moloch—a man who now only wants to die in peace—he learns that Blake expected to die. The threat is real.
The many parallel storylines include regular visits to a certain street corner, where a newspaper vendor expounds on the events of the day for the benefit of a teenage boy who likes to hang around, reading and re-reading a comic book called Tales of the Black Freighter. A therapist suffers his own crisis of faith after his unsettling psychoanalysis of an imprisoned Rorschach. A lesbian cab driver turns abusive toward her lover in the aftermath of a breakup. The world races toward nuclear war. And as more heroes fall to what seems a massive conspiracy, the remaining supermen learn that all their efforts on the behalf of humanity may have been irrelevant all along. ...
A masterpiece of dizzying detail
First things first: Watchmen, originally conceived by Moore as a vehicle for the pre-existing Charlton line of superheroes (a group that included Captain Atom, the Question and the Blue Beetle), labors against a certain undeniable cheesiness at its core. Superheroes aside, there's also the nature of the culprit's secret plan, which Moore lifted, more or less outright, from an old episode of The Outer Limits; he could have done better. That the series
succeeds otherwise—that it is, in fact, a graphic novel, as opposed to a fat collection of reprinted comic books—is entirely due to the depth of its detail and the sheer brilliance of its execution.
Watchmen was thought out to a degree unheard-of before or since. The streets surrounding that busy news vendor, which provide an important role in the climax, have a geography so internally consistent that they can be mapped. The dialogue is so intricately
planned that casual remarks slipped in in one issue have payoffs three or four issues later. A jar of individually wrapped sugar cubes in Dreiberg's home pays off in any number of ways as contents pilfered by Rorschach show up all the way to the penultimate issue. The comic book within the comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter, itself a powerful, horrifying piece of work, threads in and out of several consecutive issues, its story of a seaman's damnation providing a constant, ironic commentary on the events of the main storyline.
Then there's the scene transitions. Throughout all 12 issues, every single transition between one scene and another—and there must be hundreds of them—involves visual or verbal puns. The patterns on Rorschach's mask become a pair of embracing lovers. The most innocuous lines of dialogue have second meanings that provide bridges to other locations.
Reflections in puddles, background music, the accidental activation of a flamethrower, Rorschach's ironic asides and the Nite Owl's self-deprecating manner, all pay off in unexpected, intricately designed ways. For instance, during the jailbreak involving Rorschach, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre fly in to free their unlovable colleague, who is at that very moment pursuing an old enemy through the corridors of the prison. Their comments as they fight their way to Rorschach's side repeatedly echo Rorschach's own relentless pursuit of his quarry. Multiply the intricacy of this device with hundreds of similar double meanings throughout the book and you get a work worthy of examining in retrospect, by readers who just want to marvel over the narrative's fiendishness.
That said, it's the story itself that provides the true plot engine. This reader identified the culprit from clues provided in the first four chapters, but the novel has more surprises than just the guilty party. Alternate chapters, providing the background of key characters, provide many more stunning moments of revelation. The hidden secret of the lonely Dan Dreiberg, provided in one soaring interlude, is one. The secret Laurie Juspeczyk discovers about her own past is another. The chilling flashback to the incident that drove Rorschach around the bend—communicated via a long, wordless sequence that culminates in a moment of truly horrific realization—is a third. And there are moments of truly poetic prose, with soliloquies ranging Rorschach's embrace of a dark, nihilistic worldview, to the epiphany that restores Dr. Manhattan's own faith in the ultimate worth of human life. Combine those moments, masterful as they are, quotable as they are, with a character-driven plot that really does feature its own share of memorable superhero action sequences, and you begin to see why Watchmen remains a milestone, oft imitated but never equalled.
