Watchmen

The Watchmen, the seminal work by Alan Moore that helped redefine the superhero in the minds of comic readers everywhere. Moore tried to envision a world where superheroes are real (or rather masked vigilantes), and if that was the case who would take to such a life? The only people who would be drawn to that world would be psychopaths, sociopaths, and the impotent who can only feel powerful if they’re fighting crime. In Moore’s alternate 1985 things are very very then the real 1985, my personal favorite difference is the fact that Richard M. Nixon is a 5th term president, scary thought, technology is more advanced, but the cold war was a frightening as ever. As Moore explored who would be drawn to the world of masked vigilantism in a very realistic light, so too did he explore how the world’s dynamics would change if a real superhero where brought into the world, via Doctor Manhattan. As soon as Dr. Manhattan came into existence, of course, the government snatched him up and used him as a weapon, he ended Vietnam in a week, and he was the single biggest deterrent the United States had against nuclear war. Moore’s world building was so fluid and dynamic I couldn’t help but get sucked into this world of dank back alley crimes, and big international crises. I’m also a big fan of David Gibbon’s artwork throughout the book. His characters have great form and are wildly appealing to look at, and few of them follow the usual big tough body structure that most superheroes do (Night Owl 2 is overweight for Pete’s sake!), Rorschach is one of my all time favorite costumed vigilante ever, what I thought was always really cool was his use of color. While Moore was weaving a narrative that subverted the usual hero archetypes the usual hero colors, the primaries, red, blue, and yellow, were replaced by dominantly secondary and tertiary colors, greens and oranges and purples, and a great deal of brown. These visual choices helped set Watchmen apart from any other super hero comic the moment you read your first page.