I watch the Watchmen
 

Started reading Watchmen, and I'm liking it so far. Rorschach is pure awesome. And I really like Doctor Manhattan, too. I'm really enjoying reading this, though I do think I would appreciate it more if I had read comics from before this came out.

Watchmen was okay, but was a tad too depressing for my tastes.

Not to knock it, but it was a tad too nihilistic for my tastes. I mean everything they did was pointless. The bad guy wins. Rorschach dies, and no one cares. Thousands die, and the the bad guy fucking wins. Not to mention the story of how Rorschach went off the deep end.

See, its all about moral greys. Theres very little Black or White, Good and Evil. Rorschach sees evil in mundane lawbreaking, such as owning banned medicine, meanwhile he kills anyone for just about anything. Manhattan, while having done the world a lot of good, ultimately does not care one bit whether the world ends or not. In the end, Ozymandias is just the good guy who was willing to do anything to acheive world peace, even if it meant killing 3 million people and damning his self. He sees how many people would die in a Mutual Assured Destruction, should he decide not to act.

I just finished Watchmen the other day after delaying on buying it for a while. I had been meaning to read it for a long time...finally with the movie coming up I decided that that I might as well just get it. I found it to be reminiscent of the movie Amadeus (What with the bad guy "winning" and well that sort of thing...if he is indeed the bad guy...I think he is but...). I enjoyed the book though I must agree in many ways it was nihilistic...other characters did not have such traits, Laurie and Dan for instance. The writing is amazing and the art is also very good. It really is a book of grays and many people will be unhappy with it. In fact I don't think that most Americans would like the ending of this book or would even be able to understand all of the different levels of things going on. Not to knock my fellow countrymen and women but it really is a complex book and most Americans like the whole happy ending thing. There is no happy ending here really. Peace shouldn't have to be achieved as so great a cost. I'd talk more but it would just really stretch this post out to very length proportions.

DBS

***SPOILER***
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/5...verendswb6.png
***SPOILER***

Imagery is fairly obvious. Ozymandias didn't win. Either because of the discovery of Rorshach's journal or more likely simply human nature, the "end" is inevitable, and the return to conflict equally so. At best Ozymandias delayed it, maybe for his lifetime. In the end, his utopia will collapse as surely as Rameses II's statue or Alexander's empire.

Cutting the knot is not true genius.

I am very looking forward to seeing this movie.
The creature will be awesome. Rorschach's death made me sad. I think Ozymandias was wrong, he only suspended the inevitable. Someday, people will find out the alien was a fake, or they will be like, "I guess the aliens aren't going to invade." So... yeah. I'm sure that Manhattan knew this, so I wonder why he still killed Rorschach.

Yeah, basically the whole idea of Watchmen is to take superheroes and then break the fuck out of them. Either you like that kind of thing or you don't.

As I understand it (What with being not alive during that era), up until Watchmen most superhero stories consisted of, well, I am reminded of when Captain America put magnets on his shield and on his arm, and Thor - the god of thunder and lightning - was blown away by the sight.

Basically comic books were a lot like that up until Moore and Miller and a handful of others changed it all.

Speaking of Miller, I recently read Batman Year One, and dammit, he just HAD to make Catwoman a prostitute?! The man really can't help himself, then or now.

Anyway, putting Moore and Miller on the same level just shouldn't be done. Yeah, Miller has made some contributions to breaking comics out of the mold, but it's like comparing termites to a God, as Dr. Manhattan put it (sort of). Miller's attempts just seem juvenile in comparison. Err, but anyway, yeah, Miller and Moore sort of broke the mold. Yet people are fairly critical of the "dark ages" probably because 98% of them were just DARK and EDGY and EXTREME instead of meaningful like Watchmen.