Who Watches the...Watchmen?

Okay. I know a lot of people have gone over this awesome and Hugo winning novel before I got to it, but damn--I just got to it! I guess I kind of knew (herm...) that Alan Moore kind of did an odd thing or two right regarding your comics mythos, after all, I got motivated to look at what he had envisioned for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, since I thought the movie was okay (and he and many fans apparently hadn't) and am to this day quite enamored of the film "V for Vendetta"--but I understand he was bit cool on the cinematic version...and I can understand, really. The movie had more to do in a way with the post-9/11 situation, allegorically. And that wasn't a guiding factor of the novel--it changes the intent. But it's hard to entirely avoid changing a story, when a new and modified allegory may be needed to meet some present fictive desire (I am one who tends to think our myths and stories are necessary--they fill a gap.) That he made something so powerful that it leant itself to a need is pretty cool. (Should Siegel & Shuster be ticked at people playing with Superman? I write fanfic myself--I get no reward but playing out my ideas and occasionally getting feedback--I suppose Widen wouldn't necessarily like my take on things Highlander. But then again--I don't profit from my borrowings, and a movie company totally does. Moore has a point. And his work clearly does have a tone, and a message.)

So upon reading a lot about the Watchmen movie in the works, I decided I needed to (Oh blast, you've got me, I didn't really *need* to, I just wanted to) take a look the the novel before I saw the movie, for once. To actually appreciate the depth and nuances of the story that might get edited out because that's what kind of tends to happen when movies get made of novels. Oh well.

Damn, it's good.

It's good in a "Get this yourself and maybe two so you can lend it to others and not worry about getting your copy back" kind of way. The story begins with the murder of a hero--who might not in retrospect be entirely heroic. The Comedian, Edward Blake, was a government-sanctioned costumed warrior, and he cerainly may have had enemies, having recently been knocking off Marxists in South America. His old fellow-caped crusader, Rorschach, is on the case, wondering just who might be willing to bump off masked heroes. He goes the rounds of his old associates, from the pre-Keene Act time (the law against costumed vigilantes), trying to warn them of what is happening, and to try and see what they know.

They don't know much. And so the story goes, into the histories of the characters, how they became heroes, and sometimes how they left herodom. The histories themselves suggest a well-thought out mythos, that simply never existed--it's based on other comics, but stands on its own. The heroes are self-motivated and other-motivated, and are, in only one case, truly spectacularly-powered (Doctor Manhattan.) They are ultimately humans dealing with human problems. The villian is ultimately a hero himself, with a good, if amoral intent, and the denoument is chilling, but satisfactory.

It will be strange to see how it would be played out in the cinema. It's a complex story and has characters that may not easily lend themselves to the big screen. But I do believe I will enjoy it, like I enjoyed the Watchmen in novel-form. Quite a lot.