Some marble blocks have statues embedded within them

(As a warning, if you don’t want to read any spoilers whatsoever, steer clear. I won’t be incredibly detailed, but I will touch on some end-game plot points.)

Considering that I discovered comics at an early age, I took a surprisingly long time to really experience comics the way that I experience novels: with reflection and a critical eye. Sandman led the charge, as I realized the literary merits that many comics can have, although since I haven’t read much of what by general consensus is considered required reading.

But this week, I read Watchmen. I waited a few days to absorb and reflect, for good reason. Sometimes my immediate reaction to a work is directly contrary to what my later, weighted opinion is – The Departed is a prime example of something I viscerally hated for the first few days which I’ve now come to really love inordinately. At any rate, I have decided that I really like and appreciate Watchmen. But I also have a little slice of strong dislike.

Truly, I love all the mechanics of it. The writing style and the layering and the character-building and all the under-the-skin bits that make this comic such a force, all of that is masterful. Having a framed story, the excerpted Black Freighter comic, mirror the over-arching plot was not as overbearing a device as it can sometimes be, and I always like a story about a relatively good person becoming the thing they hate. This is probably a catharsis mechanism, but that’s how I roll sometimes.

This was one of the first major publications to strip all the romance and fancy out of superheroes and leave them naked and human, instead of the Superman brand of hero. No one here has impeccable morals and willpower and ginormous muscles. I mean, how awesome is a paunchy superhero out there hero-ing? And the only guy with superpowers, he is completely disconnected from humanity because of those superpowers. No Superman nobility here, just straightforward alien-ness that says “I have super awesome cosmic powers, and I’d like to watch the grass grow rather than save a civilization.” Brilliant.

All the human characters are carefully flawed people in addition to being “cape” caricatures. It keeps the reader from ever being fully comfortable and attaching to any one character, and in my experience made me keep questioning the story the way that unreliable narrators always do so that you don’t become complacent. I can’t point to many stories, no matter what the medium, where this sort of tap-dance is executed in a way I feel is well done. A lot of times I become so detached from the story I get ejected (the comic version of Wanted is a prime example), but I actually stayed pretty in touch with Watchmen despite not having a connecting character.

Now, I mentioned that I like stories concerning the good guy becoming the thing he hates. You’d think I’d like Ozymandias becoming a war-mongering, fear-wielding villain in order to bring about the goal of ultimate peace. But I didn’t buy into the depth of self-delusion it would take for someone of his (and this is everywhere in the comic) supposed intellect to decide that this was the most brilliant idea EVAR. Also, I don’t think idolizing dead historical figures and having a penchant for crime-fighting is enough of a backstory to justify his actions. This idea was much more exquisitely crafted in Red Son, when a Communist Superman realizes that he’s just as much of an asshole as some of the supervillains. The evolution of it was well-tempered, efficient, and fulfilling. His shift from utterly moral – if incredibly helpful – bystander to world-crushing, scary bastard ruler isn’t just organic, it seems almost inevitable. Watchmen just didn’t provide enough leverage to transport me to that belief. As revolutionary as Manhattan’s superhuman-means-not-human arc was, Ozymandias’s plot just fell flat. I got the feeling that he woke up one morning and decided to Pinky and the Brain it from now on.

And, OK, this might be nitpicky, but the psychic-backlash art project monster? Was an incredibly bizarre plot device, and the psychic-backlash “information” was rather silly, in my opinion. Its method of delivery (transporting it kills it, and its death triggers the psychic death-show) was genius, but I just didn’t buy that a major city would be wiped out by a psychic imprint of the awful things people come up with on a daily basis. The first issue of Ultimate Galactus remains one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. Not only is the psychic package deeply scary on its own (effectively projected on media as well as psychically, complete with the sound of an alien race dying), which still alone bothers me to read, people who are sensitive enough to the message begin to kill themselves out of hopelessness and fear. Instead of “psychic-backlash head explodey,” these people make a choice. Now that is some powerful mental information.

All that to say, I read a lot of other comics before I read Watchmen, obviously. I live in a world 20 years from Watchmen‘s publication. In my comics world, the unromantic view of superheroes is commonplace – if not the normative function. I can’t “unexperience” these things that have plumbed the depths of ideas first outlined in Watchmen (and subsequently can’t rid myself of my forehead slapping “argh” moment when I realized that yes, actually, saving the world by tearing it up was the big plot), and therefore I am completely disconnected from experiencing that awe and wonder of knowing it blew the doors off of the superhero comic. Despite how much I liked the comic, I still feel sad knowing that I’ve profited from Alan Moore’s seminal work and still seen it done better in other places since then.