Week Thirteen - Alan Moore's Watchmen

This is one of those tragic cases in which I watched a movie before reading the original source material. It's always an interesting journey because you know essentially what is to come, but you're looking for details that may have been omitted or that may have simply enriched the story overall. Story aside, reading a comic is obviously not like watching a film and I found that I enjoyed reading this story much more than I did watching the film. I liked how the color choices were so indicative of its time (1980s). The bright neon colors or yellow, pink and teal are so closely associated with the 80s for me that I found myself to placed in that era as an audience member, even though the story transcends many decades. I also enjoyed the unique use of flashbacks or 'visions' to what had occurred previously. The panels were often spliced in between present time, but I never felt like I was lost while reading. This method of explaining the characters' history I felt was much more effective than attempting to explain everything up front, while waiting to advance the story. The history seemed to evolve very organically and was very effective as a story withholding device which kept me as the reader wanting to know more.

My first exposure to Watchmen was the film and I found it to be too visually clean for the world they were trying to portray. I felt the comic was much more convincing in it's grit and underbelly, despite it's wild use of vibrant color. The heroes themselves were so unconventional, flawed and tacky that I took aversion to them at first, but as I read I came to accept them more, especially after placing myself in the 1980s mindset of what was 'cool'. From that angle these characters were actually quite perfect. I also really enjoyed how the ends of the volumes were so text heavy and drew back to more of what a novel is. I feel like I got just as much enjoyment and visual stimulation (albeit imaginary) from those excerpts as I did from the illustrated portion. All around I found the writing to be exceptionally well done. The author seemed to really understand the multidimensional characters he was writing for and that made the story so much more believable.