This did, and still does, take me right out of the book. I could never suspend disbelief enough to accept the thought that the govenrment would sanction a team of non-powered humans much less the notion of a 16 year old girl with no powers fighting crime. It weakned the book for me substantially.
Why? They’re outside-the-law vigilantes. Of course they’d be condemned by the authorities.
It doesn’t. The only sanctioned “heroes” are Dr. Manhattan, who has superpowers and then some, and The Comedian, who is really just an operative who’s not in the CIA.
ETA: If by sanction you mean punish, I don’t see why that’s outlandish at all, given the resentment that builds up against the group.
Wasn’t at least one of the (attempted) groups condoned by the government? Otherwise why would Dr. Manhattan have shown up?
My issue was always with the lack of powers. For me, I couldn’t suspend disbelief. No matter how bad arse Roarshack may have been a bullet to the back and that was that. Heck, a twisted ankle and that was that.
Sanction has two meanings, so I guess I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest.
You could say the same about Batman, Captain America, The Punisher, Spider-Man, Iron Man (out of costume), etc, etc. Sounds like you just don’t like comic books. That’s not Alan Moore’s fault.
Or (to agree and expand on your post) any police officer or CIA or FBI agent. It isn’t even a comic book thing. Yeah, real people can get hurt doing dangerous things and a lot of the time they don’t. Sometimes they do.
I’m not a big Graphic Novel/Comic reader- exceptions being Gaiman’s Sandman and Miller’s Sin City. The first, because I appreciate the masterful storytelling and the impresssive scope of the series, the latter because I find the visuals compelling.
I loved Watchmen. The story was complex, interesting and innovative (when taken in context), and I love the palette, the depth of detail in the drawings and the things like the comic within a comic that could only be done in this format.
Even as a girl, a non superhero comic reader, and child of the 80s rather than a Boomer, which seems to be about as far from the target demographic as you can get, I still would place it in my list of must-read books.
So you don’t care for any comic books or comic movies? After all, Batman and Daredevil suffer from the same problems as the heroes in Watchmen, i.e. one man with no unnatural advantages, bouncing around in spandex fighting insane criminals who are likely to be carrying guns.
How about the vast majority of action flicks? James Bond? Jason Bourne?
The costumed heroes in Watchmen are human, for the world of comic books.
Bit late to the party here (as usual), but it didn’t do much for me, either. While I recognized how it might’ve been groundbreaking at the time, the panels were tiny, the art was very Mary Worth/Apt. 3G, and the whole thing was just a little bit too “soap opera” for me. Also, I found the pirate story rather annoying, even as I admired how it tied in to the main plot. Rather trite objections, I know, but I just didn’t dig it.
Despite all that, I’m still totally pumped about the movie. The comic may’ve looked Apt. 3G, but the movie definitely doesn’t look Days of our Lives–maybe that’s enough to make the difference for me. 
I’m somebody who was never much of a comic book reader, even as a kid, and I’ve read very few graphic novels. As of a couple of year ago, the only one I’d ever read was Maus (for a college class). I picked up Watchmen because it was recommended so highly on this board, and because I was intrigued that it had been listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 All-Time Greatest Novels (the only GN to make the list).
I was hugely impressed by it, and I have to say to a couple of people here like Hampshire, I think you might need to give it another chance. It’s much more complex, provocative and subtle than it appears upon a casual reading. The “regular guys as superheroes” is just text, not subtext.
Rorshach, alone, is one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever seen, and definitely the greatest comic book character. I’m still not sure I’ve really got a handle on him. Good or evil? Insane or ultra-sane. Utterly corrupt or utterly incorruptable? He’s repulsive and brutal and unsympathetic, yet so indomitable and honest and badass as to be almost inspring anyway. I guess it’s not an accident that he’s called Rorshach. He’s also got the best line in the entire book, and I’ve read Jackie Earle Haley’s reading of that line is getting cheers in the screenings.
Anyway, I’m somebody who’s not generally a comic book geek, and I have been entranced by the book ever time I’ve read it. There is definitely more to it than meets the eye on one reading.
Does the fact that similar fates did happen to some of the other heroes (Dollar Bill, Silhouette, possibly Hooded Justice) change your perception at all?
Not really, no.
Ozymandais, Comedian, and Rorschach are ‘horrible, awful guys’, and Hooded Justice is kind of sketchy, but the rest aren’t bad people.
Each is some combination of self destructive, broken, selfish, mentally ill, and not terribly bright…but they’re not bad people.
… and Nite Owl II (Dan) is a dork. He has dorky owl-themed gadgets, and a dorky costume that looks like a sweatsuit with a cape. The movie is making him look entirely too bad-ass.
I agree that many of you are missing the point Alan Moore was trying to make. He wasn’t trying to show comic heroes as real people, but rather trying to explore how they would affect the real word, or at least a world as close to the real one as he could make allow comic heroes. Basically he was trying to minimize the unreal aspects and then see where it took him. I think he went out of his way to show the changes in reality he made and how they were necessary.
These are the changes to the real word I saw:
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It was possible for normal humans to train to a level that made them significantly more capable than the common crooks they would run into. There was a scene with Nite Owl II an Silk Spectre II in alley when a whole street gang tried to mug them. The were able to easily take them all down. All the heroes (except Dr. Manhattan) are like this to one degree or another.
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Due to a social crisis, a law was passed making masked vigilantes legal. This is the status que during the period of the first team, through Vietnam, and up until the riots in the 70s. They were allowed to operate openly in society, although I remember there was some pressure to come out from behind the mask for Hooded Justice when rumors of his other activities came up.
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One super powered human was created, but no others were allowed.
If you accept those changes to reality, then everything else follows. Given those conditions, who would be a hero? How would society react and change? That is what Alan Moore was exploring, not can a guy without powers be a hero.
Jonathan
Batman and Iron Man aren’t regular guys. Yes, they lack superpowers, but it’s more than that. They’re both bazillionaires. (And both seem to possess a ridiculous amount of invulernability for being “regular”.)
And it’s not so much “what if regular people became superheroes” but the idea is “what would superheroes be like in the real world?” In regular comic books, everyone is strangely accepting of masked vigilantes running around with their super powers stopping crime. Try to make it realistic, and you get Watchmen - people don’t like it, see them as amoral, anarchistic figures, and rebel against them. Think of every bad thing you’ve felt or heard about cops and multiply that by a hundred, and you get what superheroes would probably be seen as in the real world.
There’s also the interesting subtexts of how superheroes would affect the balance of political power. In the regular comics, superheroes stay out of the fray (unless it’s about made-up countries like Latveria or Wakanda or Rumekistan). But do you really think things like terrorism and 9/11 would still have happened if we had all those superheroes running around (as it did in the Marvel universe)? Watchmen does a good job of showing how superheroes would affect the balance of power - keep Nixon in power, helping the U.S. win in Vietnam, pushing the Soviet Union back on its heels while Dr. Manhattan exists, etc.
Actually no to both of your comments.
Big comic book fan and fairly well versed on the subject.
Iron Man and Spiderman have a super suit and super powers respecitvely. Spiderman can walk into a bar and demolish everyone in it because of said powers. I’ve never been a fan of Batman or the Punisher because of this most basic of flaws (though I do like the detective aspect of Batman).
So no, your generalization doesn’t work.
Spider-Man could kick everybody’s ass and then one guy who was hiding in a corner puts a .45 to his brainsteam and he’s toast. Same with Tony Stark, even if he’s in the Iron Man suit and just takes his helmet off. Same with Bruce Banner when he’s not in Hulk form. Or Billy Batson. Not liking a character because the can’t take a bullet is the height of absurdity. You must hate everything Mark Twain ever wrote. After all, plenty of people had guns on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn never once died of gutshot.
It certainly helped and it was an aspect I agreed with. As I’ve posted on other similarly-themed threads, I’ve always had an issue with the non-powered caped hero. I just couldn’t suspend disbelief. I can for an alien from krypton or a kid bitten by a radioactive spider but a 16 year old girl who did some gymnastics fighting crime…sorry, I just couldn’t do it.
Roarshack not being stabbed in the back or just shot, I can’t do it. The government allowing Manhattan to join such a group is silly. Look at it this way, if you ever see fans dress up like their characters then you’ll see how silly it looks (as an aside, Millar did a nice rip on this with his Defenders in his Ultimates run).
And lastly, the ending basically introduces super powers other than Manhattan by having a physchc empower the creature and requiring a goodly number of humans to have latent physchic powers which results in their deaths.
YMMV but it took me out of the book.
Nope. Pick up pretty much any Spiderman comic ever published. Literally. He has a “spider sense” that allows him to dodge it. Happens all the time. Seriously.
Yep which is why his indentity is, or was secret.
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Bruce doesn’t walk into bars picking fights or fight crime as Bruce.
Secret identity and all that and it’s even been made a recuring plot point.
Neither fought crime in the manner Roarshack or the Silk Spetre did. Tom and Huck never walked into a bar a scared the crap out of everyone in it. And they never took on an entire gang of hoodlums and beat them up.
Indeed, Moore even pokes fun of this I think in the way Dollar Bill was killed.