There’s No One Coming to Save You
In a world awash in brightly colored superheroes of the big screen, we might find we have more to gain by turning back to the two-dimensional world of Alan Moore’s Watchmen.
Retroview by Jake Casale
In a media culture where superheroes have become synonymous with Hollywood excess, comics themselves are an oft-overlooked form of storytelling, even when—as in the case of Alan Moore’s Watchmen—they end up on Time’s “List of the 100 Best Novels” published between 1923 and 2005. The same fever-pitch fandom that pumps billions into the superhero cinematic machine has done very few favors for the struggling ink-and-paper business that is ultimately responsible for talking trees and “Wakanda forever.”
And that’s a shame—because, whatever your feelings are about the present ubiquity of Marvel and DC’s most mass-marketable intellectual property, the graphic novel itself is a provocative medium. Where else can you engage long-form narrative complexity through a blend of artwork and words? While it may have been born in the newspaper funny pages and is known for characters that embody adolescent wish fulfillment (and that’s coming from someone who still enjoys superheroes as an adult), the graphic novel is still young. It has rich potential as a medium. And Alan Moore’s Watchmen is notable because it prompted the world to notice that potential.
Watchmen, set in 1985 and published in serialized installments from 1986 to 1987, deals with an alternate history in which American costumed vigilantes publicly emerged in the late 1930s, shifting key events in the decades that followed. America won the Vietnam War, Watergate was never exposed, and only a few superheroes are in the government’s employ, while the rest are outlawed or in retirement. When the Comedian, one of the state-sanctioned heroes, is found dead at the story’s opening, some of his former teammates begin to piece together a conspiracy to eliminate masked adventurers that may have even more insidious political ends.
The plot revolves around uncovering the nature of this threat, but it becomes a mere backdrop for exploring our main characters, all former costumed heroes—their values, priorities, and the influences around them. At its core, Watchmen is a set of character sketches and world-building exercises. These are the vehicles by which Moore interrogates Cold War-era anxieties and the concept of heroism in general. Indeed, anxiety—mixed with a generous dose of nihilism—is the narrative’s overriding mood palette. The specific character of these worries might feel dated to modern generations who never experienced American life in the Cold War, but if a pandemic year has taught us anything, it is that fear for personal and public safety always lurks at our doorstep, waiting for crisis to give it fresh life. Consider some of the sociological parallels: nuclear bombs and novel pathogens both easily slip into the role of metastasized menace, threatening to irrevocably damage our accepted standard of living, and foreign enemies could be out there enabling them, whether by design or carelessness. And of course, the Cold War and the coronavirus are not the only scenarios that could trigger this kind of collective imagination. The surface details of Watchmen’s political situation might feel distant, but as long as fear remains relevant to our public discourse, so will Watchmen.
Ceding personal responsibility to powerful actors makes you more unsafe, and you may not realize your peril until it’s too late.
And thanks to the graphic novel format, the audience is transported right into the middle of alt-New York’s fears. The world of Watchmen is grim, an atmosphere reinforced by the panel coloring choices. Little is bright; scenes are awash in muted greys, browns, pale oranges, joyless blues. Imagery, such as the cover’s bloodstained smiley face, recurs in the background without ever being acknowledged by exposition or dialogue, setting an ominous tone over would-be narrative breaks like two friends catching up in a cafe. Several sections of the story zoom in on details that seem irrelevant to the action: couples fighting on downtown sidewalks, a newspaper stand owner chatting with his regulars. But these moments, and the entire pages of conversation and texture they offer us, serve to fill out how the everyman in this world reckons with the specter of nuclear war, perceives the balance of power, and looks to particular actors for protection.
Moore highlights these interactions to accentuate the futility of the everyman’s position in this world, juxtaposing them with the ostensible protagonists of the tale who break the superhero mold we’ve come to expect. Moore has made no secret in interviews over the years that he partly wrote Watchmen to introduce an uncomfortable idea to those who believe the balance of political power serves their interests; he contends that the world is full of people who will offer to save you, but this is no more than a siren call. Ceding personal responsibility to powerful actors makes you more unsafe, and you may not realize your peril until it’s too late.
His proofs are the detailed psychological portraits of Watchmen’s retired superheroes, and the argument is persuasive. I would never want these guys to have my back. Each one is compromised as a moral exemplar in his or her own particular way. As the narrative slides back and forth in time, we come to understand why the characters fell into such a bizarre career path; after all, surely there are more lucrative ways to pursue social good than dressing up like an owl to patrol the streets at night. These portraits are rarely flattering, and uncomfortably realistic. From the desire to be important or self-made, to parental appeasement, to sexual kink, there is no pure motivation “to serve and protect” here. Moreover, when push comes to shove at the narrative’s climax, many of the protagonists are willing to turn a blind eye to some decidedly blood-soaked ends-justify-the-means logic. To be fair, the solution does end up averting nuclear war—but do you really care if you’ve been offered up as the sacrificial lamb?
Watchmen doesn’t give a pat answer, instead letting the audience decide which compromised perspective is most compelling. It also doesn’t offer much of a way forward after it finishes deconstructing the archetype of the hero. It seems that Watchmen wants its readers to reclaim personal responsibility for their decisions and how they negotiates life circumstances, but we’ll have to look elsewhere to see how the average joe might embody this value. On the flipside, in his effort to unmask dishonorable motives for pursuing social good, Moore leaves little room to imagine that there is an admirable impulse toward social responsibility in human nature that can find virtuous expression. Certain character arcs imply that some individual relationships offer redemptive flavor to human life, but Watchmen would have us categorically beware those who serve at scale. That strikes me as an overcorrection for the hidden malaise that Moore seeks to redress, one that shoots past healthy caution and lands a little too close to corrosive cynicism. We can’t get around having some kind of social organization and governance in our world, and political theorists have been talking for ages about what it looks like to steward power well. By neglecting to engage the possibility of a virtuous social actor and leader, Moore missed an opportunity to contribute something more generative to the conversation. But then again, on its own terms as a work, the only opportunity Watchmen wants to take is to make us question where we look for hope. At that, it succeeds. And its concerns are made all the more salient by the graphic novel format, immersively showing us the dim road walked by a society lurching from protector to protector, unable to come to grips with the reality that it might be alone after all.
Jake Casale graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 with a degree in Psychological & Brain Sciences and Global Health. As a student, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health, based out of Boston.
Watchmen was published by DC Comics as a single volume in 1987, after being released serially in 1986 and ’87. It was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. You can find it now wherever comic books are sold.
