We told you about the rock’n’roll and nobody fuckin’ listened…

Ian Astbury, Reading, August 26, 2001

It’s been a long time since the last comic revolution. To be more precise, 15 years.

It was in fact in September 1986 that DC Comics started publishing the first issue of the maxiseries Watchmen. Nothing has ever been the same since then.

Timing was excellent: after years of dull superhero adventures, U.S. comics, pushed by a new wave of artists committed to innovating a medium still full of old clichés, were finally starting to lose their naiveté. The so-called "American Renaissance" was about to kick in.

The names are famous: the usual suspects that come to mind are Miller, Claremont, Matt Wagner, Chaykin. And obviously Alan Moore.

The English writer had already built an impressive resume, with his acclaimed runs on the awesome MiracleMan and the seminal Swamp Thing (the latter being considered by many the best ongoing comic of all time), but it’s with Watchmen that Moore becomes incomparable, and, albeit unwillingly, the model to follow.

Incidentally, according to the influential Comics Journal (I totally agree with this thesis, by the way), from that moment on, the success of Moore has provoked his madness: the writer, in fact, too worried about the influence of his charisma on the perception of his opus by the readers, had a nervous breakdown. The result of this is a mainstream-underground schizophrenia that still goes on today, between the works with Eddie Campbell and America’s Best Comics for Homage-DC Comics.

In the U.S., who reads Snakes and Ladders or From Hell will never know that Moore is the writer of Wild C.A.T.s and Tom Strong, and vice versa. Weird, isn’t?

Let’s go back to Watchmen, though.

With MiracleMan and Swamp Thing Moore had tried to adapt the superhero comics to the spirit of the eighties. With Watchmen, instead, the writer starts an "archetyping" plan that, in a different form, is still going on today (as America’s Best Comics easily testify).

The existence, the reasons, the ethic and even the aesthetics (the essence, in a word) of the superheroes are dissected in a surgical way. It doesn’t really matter if the reason why Moore invented the new characters way the impossibility to use the original Charlton characters (whose rights DC had just acquired).

In fact, thanks to the "plagiarism" of Captain Atom, the Question, Blue Beetle, among the others (transformed respectively in Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach e Night Owl), Moore questions the superhero role, creating what is now referred to as the "superhero revisionism". The result is a miracle of critic analysis.

The main characters of Watchmen all represent a different (important) aspect of the superhero mythology, even on the visual side. They complement each other, showing all the contradictions and the neuroses of the American society, in the period when the Rambo attitude was very fashionable.

The capacity by Moore to capture the zeitgeist is impressive, especially thinking that Watchmen was written 15 years ago. The Tatcher paranoia, that the writer has undoubtedly absorbed in massive amounts, fits perfectly with the destruction of the American Dream.

But the greatness of Watchmen is the fact that Moore does not only question it, but he shows what the American Dream (if it ever existed) has become: not Liberty, Justice, God and Country, but the violence of the Comedian, the mediocrity of Night Owl, the inner demons of Rorschach, the ambiguity of Ozymandias, the neurosis of Silk Spectre and the otherness of Doctor Manhattan.

Even the non-superhero element makes us think: from the Knot junkies, to the lesbian couple, the psychologist, the newspaper man, the policemen and the right winged New Frontiersman bullpen, the are all annihilated (like the shadow-like pictures that remind us of Hiroshima) in font of the truth. Not even Adrian Veidt, the most intelligent man in the world, can understand. Only Rorschach has opened his eyes, and he cannot go back. We are alone. There is nothing else.

Watchmen, regardless of the fact that the plot can be summarised in the typical superhero plot (it’s meant to be like that, remember the "archetyping" plan we mentioned before?), gives raise to an incredible amount of reading levels.

Each shows two different antithetical situations, juxtaposing them: it is not possible to go through each of them, given the richness of Watchmen, so I’ll just point out some of the ones that seem more interesting to me.

For example, the "real" reality and the fictional "comic in the comic" (the pirate books), the every day life compared to the world-shattering events, the different approach to science by Ozymandias and Doc Manhattan, the "totalitarism" of Rorschach or Veidt, rape and love, the absolute rationality (Veidt and Dr. Manhattan) against pure instinct (Rorschach and the Comedian), men against supermen.

The writing technique is superb. The cuts are brilliant and the care in the psychology of the main characters, all somehow unpleasant but at the same time so human that we can’t help but sympathise with (yes, the Comedian too) is unparalleled.

Watchmen marks at the same time the beginning and the end of an era, the (re)birth of American comics and the death of the innocence in comics.

And, as Rorschach says to the psychologist, he is not the one who is locked up with us. We are the ones locked up with him.