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Watchmen | 
 enlarge | Authors: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
Publisher: Titan Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £17.99
Buy New: £10.79
You Save: £7.20 (40%)
New (3) Used (4) from £10.79
Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 18
Media: Paperback
Pages: 424
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 6.6 x 0.8
ISBN: 1852860243
Dewey Decimal Number: 741
EAN: 9781852860240
ASIN: 1852860243
Publication Date: October 1, 1987
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1 to 3 weeks
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Has any comic been as lauded as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns but Watchmen remains the critics' favourite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and recently From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to garner praise since.The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterisation is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling, rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it retains its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite
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| Customer Reviews: Read 55 more reviews...
 The greatest graphic novel of all time. July 21, 2008
Published in 1986-87 as a 12-issue mini-series, Watchmen is the most critically-applauded graphic novel of all time. The comic industry's answer to Citizen Kane, this is a complex, literate story that belies its premise and makes maximum use of its medium to deliver a story that couldn't be told any other way (although the forthcoming movie adaption promises to have a damn good try). As well as its impact on comics, Watchmen is one of the defining modern works of science fiction (winning a Hugo Award in 1988), and was rated as one of the one hundred most important novels of the 20th Century by Time Magazine.
The book opens in 1985 with the murder of Edward Blake, a government-sponsored crimefighter who worked under the alias 'The Comedian'. A masked vigilante known as Rorschach investigates. Rorschach, the Comedian and a number of other 'superheroes' fought crime together until the 1977 Keene Act outlawed heroes unless they worked directly for the US government. Most of the heroes retired, but Rorschach turned vigilante. Apart from the Comedian, the only hero left in government employ is Dr. Manhattan. Unlike the other heroes, who are simply well-meaning ordinary people, albeit with superior mental or physical training, Dr. Manhattan is the real deal. In 1959 an experiment with intrinsic field theory went catastrophically wrong, disintegrating Dr. Jon Osterman and transforming him into a being with total mastery over matter.
Rorschach continues to investigate the crime, but tensions are rising between the United States, led by President Nixon (serving a fifth term of office after the mysterious deaths of two Washington Post investigative reporters in 1971), and the Soviet Union. With the nuclear doomsday clock ticking ever closer to zero and other retired crimfighters either being killed or attacked, it falls to a select group of people to try and discover who or what is driving the world towards destruction.
It's a classic set-up, but you might argue not a revolutionary one. The trick is in the details. The world of Watchmen, which is on one hand close to that of the 'real' 1985 and on the other totally different, is meticulously constructed with every logical ramification of the existence of a genuine superhero pursued to its end. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan's scientific genius, the world is largely pollution-free, thanks to cheap electric cars and clean airships that provide international transport. Unfortunately, Manhattan's role as a nuclear deterrent and his assistance in helping the USA win the Vietnam War in just three months has also encouraged American imperialism and belligerence, slowly pushing Russia into a diplomatic corner from where it may feel it has no choice but to lash out. The other 'superheroes' are just ordinary people who like to dress up and fight crime, but largely they come to realise that their efforts are for nothing, since they cannot fight the underlying social and economic conditions that are the breeding ground for petty criminals.
As well as the characters involved in the story itself, the narrative spins backwards in time to investigate the prior generation of heroes and what role they are playing in events, and also encompasses a number of ordinary people on the streets of New York City who are witnesses to events: a newsstand vendor and his most regular customer, a young man obsessed with a pirate comic called Tales of the Black Freighter (which acts as a commentary and reflection on the main narrative, whose author plays a minor role in the story); a criminal psychiatrist driven to despair by his patients; and a homicide detective whose investigation of the Comedian's murder threatens his own career. It's a vast, dizzying web of storytelling with each storyline interconnected with many of the others in surprising and revelatory ways, and a commentary on superheroes and their psychology, capitalism, world politics and the morality of war.
As well as Moore's astonishing script, Dave Gibbons delivers excellent, detail-filled, rich artwork which captures the nuances of the story perfectly. Rereading the book, the reader discovers more details, more clues to the story that they missed on a first reading.
Watchmen (*****) is, twenty years after it was first published, still as astonishing, readable, entertaining and thought-provoking as ever, and still stands at the very apex of its approach to storytelling. The graphic novel is available from DC Comics in the UK and USA. A movie adaption, directed by 300's Zack Snyder, is currently in post-production and will be released in March 2009.
The Eternal Return July 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Watchmen? That old chestnut? For some of you, I might as well gush forth another pool of ink from my bookish veins in sacrifice to Ulysses, Catch-22 or any of the accepted, superdense, whitebread doorstops, but wait. Hear me out. For all the carping and trumpeting in the style rags and Sunday mags over the last twenty years about the inexorable rise of the 'Graphic Novel', to most of the literate public West of Okinawa, they're still 'just comics'. And that's fine. Hollywood will continue to market eviscerated 'adaptations' like so much fanboy glop into the collective maw of the lapping masses with no regard for cohesion, intelligence or taste. And that's fine. Broadsheet critics will swill their jaded palates with vintage Pinot and sniff loudly in the direction of what they ironically consider 'pulp entertainment'. And that's fine. But you and I know different, don't we? So take another look at Watchmen, even if just for old time's sake. And, if you've never read it; if you're new to this whole 'adult comics' thing; you thought you'd left that world behind with The Beano or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: come on in, pull up a chair and we'll begin. It's going to be alright.
Thought provoking June 29, 2008
This is a kind of desconstruction and shot in the arm to the superhero genre. Certainly the best graphic novel I have read and just what you would expect from Alan Moore.
Recommended to anyone really regardless of whether you are comic person or just like to read.
 Arrested development goth teenagers May 2, 2008
2 out of 37 found this review helpful
I'm guessing that "Watchmen" hasn't been read by many women. It's a classic example of arrested development of a male Goth teenager from the Midlands (step forward Alan Moore). How anybody could ever take this crap seriously is beyond me. Get a life people (or probably more pertinently get a shag).
Still brilliant April 2, 2008
A friend told me that this was being made into a movie (in fact had been made and was in post-production with a release date in 2009) and got me thinking it was about time I reread it. After all, the last time I'd read this Rick Astley was in the charts. So I got hold of a copy and plunged back into Moore & Gibson's parallel universe.
I suppose the first thing that struck me was how much I remembered, even though it's 20 years since I read it. I recalled the Black Freighter story, the personal mythology of the masked characters and some of the striking imagery. But there were new insights and discoveries, too.
I began to appreciate the symmetry of the artwork, evident throughout the book but, for me, most striking in Episode 11 which begins and ends with a plain white frame that evokes very powerful emotions. I really appreciated the skill required to draw together the incredibly dense narrative in which a complex series of flashbacks / forwards are incorporated without confusing the plot. The truly cinematic sweep of the artwork that seems paradoxically artless and exquisite at the same time.
A fantastic book, then, that retains its power and imaginative verge. I imagine that the screenwriters have gone one of two ways with it...set it in the 1980s where, as a sort of period drama, things like an arms war between America and Russia seems plausible. Or update it to the new century and incorporate more contemporary world events.
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