As a first time reader of Watchmen as well as the whole graphic novel genre, the experience that I had was similar to a child reading their first book without pictures. In other words, I kept paying more attention to what was being said on the page instead of what was drawn on the page. I thought Moore had a great example of a postmodern apocalypse because of its use of a deity and judgment especially using the description of one by Rosen.

According to Rosen, a deity in a postmodern apocalypse questions what it’s like to be god, but in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan seems to contemplate his existence. For example, he let The Comedian kill a woman in Vietnam and when he exiled himself to Mars, he asked himself who was it that caused him to become what he is. In fact, Dr. Manhattan stated that he is not a god and that he doesn’t think there is one, yet he believes in predetermined fate. When he was on Mars, he asked himself if he’s really able to create the world around him or if everything is predestined. He also said to The Silk Spectre that everyone including him is a puppet, but he can see the strings reaffirming his belief that everything is predestined. In fact predestination is something that affects Dr. Manhattan later in the novel.

In terms of judgment, Dr. Manhattan’s decision to leave Earth because of a possible uncertainty of what is right and wrong also resonates with Rosen’s description of a postmodern apocalypse. The first time he left Earth, he was confused whether or not he was harming the individuals around him. The second time he did so could have been because he was losing faith in humanity. Although he was able to regain some sense of faith in humanity thanks to The Silk Spectre, the action of Veidt probably caused him behave similar to a way of how a shepherd decides to leave it’s heard of sheep in search for a new one. He knows that he can leave humanity as there will be some form of peace, but he can also stay to maintain the peace as well. Although he states that he wants to create humans elsewhere, it’s uncertain if Dr. Manhattan will want to go through with it to risk another incident with another possibility of a Cold War or remain hidden on Earth perhaps waiting to stop Rorschach’s journal.

On another note, I noticed that a newspaper in one of the pages that spoke about the doomsday clock as well as a theater sign that served as a reference to the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which is a movie that reminded me with the “extraterrestrial invasion” that Veidt created for New York.

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.

I feel as though reading the first chapters and/or introduction to books, both fiction and non-fiction, seldom fails to create a sense  of then-and-now, but this seemed especially true while reading Frank Kermode and Elizabeth Rosen. Continue reading →