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Watchmen 

Author: Alan Moore (Writer) Dave Gibbons (Artist and Letterer) John Higgins (Colorist)

Volumes: 1 Deluxe Edition

Publisher: DC [click HERE for Amazon complete edition page]

I will try not to rant too much during this one. It’s a comic written by Alan Moore though, so there’s going to be somebody out there that thinks a premise is the same as the outcome (or they forget the outcome and preach the premise). In Watchmen’s case, it’s all centred around Dr. Manhattan, a character that for a large chunk of the story lives a passive life due to the fact he has practically already lived through the oncoming events due to his super powers. To him anything and everything that can happen already has happened and now he simply follows the blueprint left before him.

What a lot of readers forget however is that this is proven wrong, and it’s a MASSIVE character flaw of his. I won’t spoil events too much, but it’s always important to understand why an author would start with such a grim premise in such an already grim world. It may be easy for some to forget, but you can always put a light at the end of even the darkest tunnels and it doesn’t have to be a train when we get closer to it either!

Take the image above for example, the Comedian is asked not to shoot the future mother of his child dead by Dr. Manhattan, but Dr. Manhattan is fully capable of stopping the gun whenever he likes, however he likes, instead choosing to allow time to flow the way it can be seen because he wrongly assumes there can be no change.

Watchmen is a story where Super heroes are put in a more dystopian setting, where their powers are more down to earth, and their function is more militaristic. It takes place in a world where most of the heroes have since retired in a world that finds them old fashioned, and are all in one way or another dealing with what comes next. Running parallel to the main plot is a comic very much tied to the core theme, about a lone surviving pirate stranded on a deserted island with the corpses of his crew, and how if he ever makes it back from such an ordeal, he will forever be a changed man from that point on if he hasn’t experienced that change already.

Dave Gibbons and John Higgins work amazingly well together too. At first glance, it’s easy to pass off all 80’s DC for having a fairly samey style regardless of the story being told, but especially in Dave’s pen work, there’s a level of subtle detail that you won’t find anywhere else, and combined with John Higgins ability to further render the more grotesque and raw scenes you have one of the greatest compliments to Alan Moore’s writing style you could ever hope for.

Additionally I’d like to mention that I have still never seen any of the adaptations to this day. I only recently learned that there was apparently a video game tie-in to the 2009 movie too? From what I hear, similar to Death Note, the adaptations perpetuate the entirely wrong message when compared to the source material, but on this occasion I couldn’t really comment since I don't know how true that actually is.