Well, I finally read Watchmen, the graphic novel in which Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons so expertly deconstructed a genre overripe for deconstruction — the superhero comic. I’ve been hearing about this book for twenty years. I resisted because I just don’t care about superheroes. I always knew superheroes were silly, but I never realized they were evil. Gosh.
SPOILER ALERT: I really can’t talk about the point of the book without discussing the ending. If you don’t care about spoilers, or superheroes, read on.
The execution of the story is excellent. Despite the hurricane of words, characters, timelines, and narrative, it’s all laid out on the page in a way that never leaves you lost or confused. The characters (and I’m not going to list all six hundred zillion of them) really act like full grown men who feel embarrassed that they never lost their love of playing cowboys and Indians. And the women who go along for the ride. Both major and minor characters are adults capable of screwing, flirting, raping, and longing hopelessly for unattainable love.
But.
The story is ridiculous.
One murdered superhero leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. One of their own has been manipulating events unseen so he can convince the world they are being invaded by aliens so as to avert a supposedly immediate nuclear war. So what if he has to kill half the people in New York to do it? That’s better than Armageddon, right? Right? What’s worse is every one in the world, everyone, falls for it. Argh.
And yet, that ridiculous story is the point: superheroes are evil and stupid. The book includes the introduction to a self-improvement manual that shows you how you get suckered in by a promise to teach you not only how to perfect your mind and body, but what to do in order to serve the “greater good.” Yeah, right. Superheroes are a similar bright and shining lie. Many of the characters are seriously screwed up by trying to be superheroes, or sought such powers because they were already screwed up. And the book is so deep inside their viewpoint, it’s hard to see the truths they are wilfully blind to.
The truth is larded in materials that comment on the story, like an editorial in a magazine comparing masked crimefighters to the KKK — and approving of both. It’s there in a scene near the end, just when ordinary people are pulling together to deal with someone’s pain — and they all get wiped out by a “superhero”.
And he gets away with it. In fact, none of them answer for their long rapsheets of murder, rape, and torture. The few who don’t commit such acts are complicit. So it’s really not surprising that they agree to cover up for the most efficient mass murderer in history. It’s only slightly shocking that the one who speaks against it is executed. It’s all like the pirate comic, in which a man is surrounded by death, murders innocents, and is last seen heading eagerly into the heart of evil. And so are the “heroes.” Even in the epilogue, when all the world seems full of chirping birds and dancing butterflies, they still can’t see that’s where they too are heading.
Wow. What a pity this book didn’t kill off the genre. Maybe we need a comic about scrappy normal humans fighting for their freedom against a totalitarian regime run by superheroes.
Writing Every Day 
So, basically, what you’re saying here, Pam, is that the book pretty much sums up how humans with power act now, have always acted, and likely will always act (noble utopian naive Star Trek-ish visions of the future notwithstanding).
Evil, stupid, convinced of their own superiority…and getting away with it.
Did I miss anything?
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you, that I am posting the first comment on this.
Exactly. And being superheroes, they’re even more evil, etc.
So with all the adoration the book gets, why do its fans still adore superheroes?
At the risk of denigrating a huge swathe of comic fandom, does this say more about a lack of perception than anything else? Some slavish pavlovian reflex, perhaps? Put it in front of me, and if it has superheroes, I’ll read it, uncritically?
I’ve gotta say, I’ve never really thought about it before, but that really sounds like a lot of comic geeks I know (self included at different points in time). It’s eerily like some of the early fans of Watchmen that I knew (…I only got around to reading it two or three years after it wrapped).
And/Or, could it also be that many people just latched onto it because they were told it was so good? Yeah…like there’s a phenomena that would be novel…
Maybe it was a diabolical plot to see if superhero fans really were that clue-impaired.