Flutterby™! : The Watchmen

I was in Copperfield's recently and, with the buzz over the movie bringing out all of the fans, I picked up a copy of The Watchmen. I read it last night, and I think I'm disappointed.

A good portion of that is simply that in the two decades since the comic was written the general story line has become somewhat trite. We've put madmen like J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy into their historical roles, and understand the Reagan years in the contexts of those who profess love of an ideal and will destroy the individuals who comprise that ideal in order to maintain the purity of it. We as a larger society may not have learned much from it, but the smaller circle of people who comprise my world the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, for instance, the post-mortems which attempt to compensate for the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands with "at least sectarian strife is better than living under a dictatorship", can be looked at with sort of a detached amusement. We've seen enough exploration of how people do evil under the guise of doing good that when the comic about the "Hell-bound ship" that runs as the back-story to various panels and characters is re-constructed (warning, big spoilers), it all feels rather flat and dry. What at first appears to be depth is just that the stories have been interleaved.

I've seen various essays examining Rorschach up as an example of an Objectivist hero, and while I think that's simplistic and goes too far I do appreciate that he's the one who both apparently thinks the least of humanity, yet also trusts the rightness of humans making their own informed decisions. Even there, however, I think this tale ended up with a caricature rather than a character.

Not a bad tale, but not one that I feel explored the soul nearly to the depths of The Dark Night, let alone Sandman.