Though I had heard innumerable great things about Watchmen and thus went into the experience with considerably high expectations, it’s surpassed all of them. I’m honestly flabbergasted. I wish I had a little more time to reflect and whatnot, so I’ll just keep this simple.

Looking at Watchmen within the context of our apocalyptic studies so far, I think it handled one of the fundamental challenges of telling a modern apocalyptic story quite well. In Rosen’s introduction to Apocalyptic Transformation, she outlines a fundamental struggle that some authors have, “Because the apocalyptic genre’s roots are religious,” she posits, “secular authors face certain challenges in adapting it in their narratives.” Essentially, how do artists go about telling a fundamentally religious story in a non-religious way, without compromising some necessary elements? Watchmen in my mind, navigates this confusion successfully.

Though the overarching theme of nuclear panic permeates the story (and I think it contains many elements that remind one of nuclearism, the idea Strozier outlined in one of our earlier readings) that is reminiscent of a kind of “godless” kind of apocalypse Kirsch devotes a chapter to in A History of the End of the World, it’s combined with a kind of fanatical religiosity that’s apparent from the first page, especially in the notes of Rorscharch’s journal; he sounds like a modern-day John of Patmos. Take, for instance, an excerpt from the first few pages, “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.” These bitter, violent, society-condemning sentiments feel to me like echoes of the Book of Revelation.

In reality, I believe Watchmen is able to imbue its story with some religiousness (and, in particular, some Revelation-esque qualities) while keeping the story’s secular qualities intact. And that is remarkable, and one of the many reasons I enjoyed Watchmen.