Watchmen: Preparing For A First Time Read

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Watchmen is somehow both a step forward in comic design and a step backward at superhero writing. It might not have been the intention of writer Alan Moore to ruin how modern writers approach superheroes, and artist Dave Gibbons didn’t set out to change how we view panel layouts, but both those things happened. For good or bad, Watchmen became a quintessential part of understanding comic book storytelling.

And I never wanted to read it.

I know the story, I know what its done, and even if it didn’t change comics forever it wasn’t my kind of story. I’m just not into grim and gritty “adult” superhero deconstruction, and this is arguably where it all began. I can appreciate its importance in comic book history, which no matter what else I think of it the comic totally deserves its place, but it’s not a story I was ever interested in reading, or seeing the various adaptations into motion comics and live-action, or audio dramas, or an HBO program loosely based on the concept, or a video game that doesn’t sound like it was made very well. And I probably would have kept that streak up throughout my life…until Free Comic Book Day 2025.

To promote his comic, The Hollow Earth, creator and Grey Goblin Cartoons co-founder Keith Fields held a game meant to introduce the strange world of his comic. I played the game. I won. The prize was one of the many reprints of the Watchmen trade along with two of the three sequels: Doomsday Clock, which crossed over with the main DC Universe, and Rorschach, which I believe is a prequel. I didn’t make it to the full launch part of The Hollow Earth. Maybe Before Watchmen would also be in my collection if I had. I don’ t know. Hope the comic did well, because Google is pointing me to every Hollow Earth comic and non comic usage except for that one.

So now I had a comic I never wanted to read. I would have felt bad returning them since I don’t own them, and then I remembered I have this site. I have never read this comic. Oh, I’ve heard much about it, including some of the important story highlights, but I’ve never actually read it. It’s near impossible to go over this comic for the first time completely spoiler-free. Due to its historical importance everyone knows this story by now. Still, as someone who read and slowly reviewed Seduction Of The Innocent out of sheer curiosity, to see if it deserved its scorn (it was actually undersold how crap it is but for different reasons than you get from the internet–check out my reviews sometime), why not do the same here to see if it deserves its praise?

And so Watchmen: A First Time Read will do exactly that. It’s my first time actually reading the book. Before I begin, let me show you where I am and what I know going in, to get an idea where my biases are already going to lie as I start. No review is truly unbiased, but I like to put my cards on the table. It’s why I’m a lousy gambler. WARNING: Spoilers from here on out and in the upcoming installments of this and the follow-ups! Just so you’re warned.

So what do I know? Watchmen is a 1986 comic miniseries published by DC Comics. The rights for the characters would return to Moore once the comic stopped being published. The trade collection became one of the few graphic novels, original or trade, to win a Hugo along with the Kirby and Eisner Awards, appear in Time magazine, and I could have sworn it was New York Times bestseller, but I can’t find proof of it. It never stops being published as new fans track copies down, so Moore has pretty much given up on those rights. Now he make porn (he even calls it such) of thankfully aged-up children’s characters like Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland. I’m not a fan of his work because he very much rejects superheroes as a good thing. In addition to this he took replacement superhero Marvelman (after the UK no longer had Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel books to reprint) and drained all the fun out of it. He may be a complete loon today, but he understands storytelling. He just really hates superheroes.

Dave Gibbons was the artist, and is credited for either creating or popularizing the “nine panel grid” layout. Comic pages are based on, but not limited to, those nine panels, and I’ve been known to use the basic design myself in works you haven’t seen because I just thought that’s how it was done. This is admittedly the most I know about Gibbons beyond being a fantastic artist.

So who are the Watchmen? Originally, Moore wanted to use the recently acquired Charlton Comics heroes to tell his story, but thankfully DC realized this was a bad idea. Many of those heroes have a proper place in the regular DC universe, even if a few have been replaced in recent years for “diversity”. That’s been DC’s solution since the 1990s: if the complaint is not enough minorities, just replace a current hero and use the branding on the new hero. It fails more now due to current cultural nonsense, but I won’t get into that here. Instead, Moore used those characters as templates for original characters, and ultimately I think this actually benefits the comic. If you were a fan of those characters, you would have hated this story, but with original characters you can do what you want and have those fans enjoying your story because it isn’t ruining a beloved favorite character. Again, like we see with modern “diversity” swaps. This is why I wanted to wait to read this until I finished the pre-DC Charlton hero reviews. So who were the Watchmen originally?

• The Comedian (based on Peacemaker): Well, maybe the James Gunn version given what I know about the Comedian, or maybe Gunn was inspired by the Comedian. Our peace-loving pacifist weapons-of-death inventor and peace ambassador is now a war “hero” who does a lot of scumbag things. He’ll die rather early, as his murder is the inciting incident for the whole miniseries.
• Ozymandias (based on Thunderbolt): Considering DC only thought they had the license for Mister “I can do it, I will do it, I must do it but only if I’m convinced for five minutes that civilization is even worth doing anything about”, changing this character also avoided lawsuits. Peter Cannon grew up in a monastery and learned amazing secrets that he never planned to actually use, making it rather pointless. Ozymandias sounds like the kind of guy Thunderbolt would make his rare attempts to actually do something about, since he’s the cause of pretty much every bad thing in this story, right up to killing an entire city of people to prove the world needed superheroes. He is not the hero.
• Rorschach (based on The Question): Or rather the original Question. You may know the current version, the “angry lesbian” ruining of Renee Montoya, one of my favorite characters from Batman: The Animated Series. If you do know Vic Sage, it’s probably the conspiracy theorist from Justice League Unlimited that’s come to define the character. This is the original Charlton version, creator Steve Ditko funnelling his following of Ayn Rand’s teachings into this character and self-published character, Mr. A. Rorschach is a homeless bum with strong beliefs of right and wrong. His investigation into the murder of the Comedian is the other inciting incident of the miniseries. Many of the critics I follow consider him the hero of the story, though apparently Moore would strongly disagree and doesn’t understand his popularity. We’ll be looking closely at his actions as a result.
• Nite Owl II (based on the Ted Kord Blue Beetle): I guess his predecessor and mentor is supposed to be Dan Garrett, but it would have to be the pre-Charlton re-imagine, when he was still using gadgets and given superstrength by a special vitamin, rather than a magic scarab. Ted could never use the scarab so he made his own devices instead. Meanwhile, the Night Owl we’ll be following sounds more like Robin wanting to take over for Batman, if the world hadn’t rejected and outlawed superheroes…which gives me the same question as in The Incredibles. What happened to the supervillains with no heroes to stop them? Superheroes came first in comics and thus most shared universes but it’s not like villains would go away without the heroes. Superheroes exist because normal law enforcers can’t handle the supervillains, not just to cut through the red tape and actually stop the bad guys.
• Silk Spectre (based on Nightshade): The government secret agent hid the fact that she had a superpower since her mom was from a shadow dimension where she and Nightshade’s brother were currently trapped in. She couldn’t even tell her bosses that she had a superpower and otherwise focused on her fighting ability. Since only one of Moore’s heroes has superpowers, I’m guessing Silk Spectre, who has more ties to Black Canary as a second generation heroine using her mom’s identity, will just be a real good martial arts fighter.
• Doctor Manhattan (based on Captain Atom): The only superpowered hero in the Watchmen Universe at this point (I believe the introduce a mime with mime powers…and of course evil because that’s how DC does clowns…in Doomsday Clock), Doc Manny is even more powerful than scientist soldier Nathaniel Adam. He becomes so godlike in this story that he no longer loves his wife, Silk Spectre, leading to her getting together with Nite Owl, who had a crush on her. At least that’s how I’ve heard this story go. Doctor Manhattan has no emotions left, clearly Moore’s biggest commentary on superpowered heroes based on what I know about him.

Please understand, I’m going to go into this with as open a mind as possible. I want to judge the story on its own as much as its legacy. I also want to theorize how this would have gone if Moore had used the Charlton heroes as originally planned. There are two more sections to these stories I want to examine separately from the main story:

• Tales From The Black Freighter: In the world of Watchmen, Moore decided that reading about superheroes made no sense since there were actual superheroes. I guess nobody told him about all of the comics starting police officers and government agents that didn’t have secret identities. From what I’ve heard, this story of a man who is forced to make a raft out of his comrade’s corpses to ride a river of blood (you know, for kids) somehow plays into Moore’s themes in the story. I’ll review these segments separately as I review the book.
• The Watchmen Files: That’s what I’m calling these other segments until I find an official name. These are old documents, government files, and newspaper clippings that fill out the story of the world of Watchmen, telling the story of the cast’s predecessors as well as their own history prior to the superhero ban and the events of the story. This is more about the lore than the plot, and from what I can tell are in the back of each issue, so looking at them separately seems the right way to go. In either case this might change as I go through the book.

My version, by the way, is a 2014 edition based on the Definitive Collection and released in timing with the HBO practically-a-namesake not-a-sequel to the movie. So any differences between whatever version you’re reading and mine should be taken into account.

This will not be a regular series. Despite three trades to go over, as I write this I’m currently working on two weekly series already: the usual Chapter By Chapter book review series on Mondays where I review a book one chapter at a time, and CBS Transformers on Fridays, going over the failed pitches to bring the Robots In Disguise to CBS’s Saturday morning line-up. While that’s getting close to the end, I don’t want to have another weekly series taking up time. As it is I had to pre-empt the CBS Transformers for breaking news last week as I write this. Instead, this is a filler series, a series of articles I’m hoping to usually add to a buffer when I’m unable to write an article or there’s nothing to discuss. I do want to get the first issue done to get this going quickly, but the other issues, and the Doomsday Clock and Rorschach follow-ups that will be given their own article titles in the same form, will be whenever I have a moment and among the other filler articles I want to do. Since this is already not my kind of story I want to give myself a break from reading a story that already seems to be a depressing anti-superhero screed.

So now you know where I’m coming from as I go into this series. You know what I’m expecting going in, what I think of the story without reading it, and how I’ll be approaching the reviews. Join me next time as I read the first issue and get my first proper taste of the Watchmen.