Response to Watchmen
When I first read Watchmen years ago, I admit that I wasn’t analyzing as much as I should have. I didn’t think to look the hidden things or symbolic meanings in many of the panels or tangents regarding its storytelling and recognizing them now made the narrative much more effective. I still think it was very groundbreaking to place superheroes in “our” world and see them dealt with in a more realistic way. The heroes in Watchmen were not perfect, and many of them have unfavorable traits such as being into violence, homophobic, or would-be rapists. These are not traits associates with heroes nor should they be. Watchmen very much took off the mask of what people at the time assumed and wanted for perfect heroes, and should that at their core, they were people too. They were capable of mistakes and bad traits.
The graphic novel is filled with so many narrative and symbolic choices that I know that I can actually be analyzed as much as any other novel for a high school or college class. It just has that much deep content, and I find that really interesting and even fun to discover- such as the Hiroshima Lovers (as graffiti and mirroring Dan and Laurie in Dan’s dream), the Pale Horse band (obviously being a reference to Revelations), and the smiley face symbol and images that call upon it. Going more into the smiley face badge, it’s intriguing how it’s so simple, yet the iconic red blood splatter on it changes the meaning of what the icon means and how it relates to the narrative.
If I had anything I didn’t like about Watchmen, it would be how unsatisfying and unhappy the ending was, but then again, I believe that that was kind of the point of Watchmen. In a way, it was a commentary on superheroes and challenging certain aspects of how the genre was back then, and denying a happy ending where the bad guy loses and the heroes win seems like one of the obvious things to do. Again, it’s looking at the fictional superhero world of that time and placing it into the real world and seeing how it would do.
The graphic novel is filled with so many narrative and symbolic choices that I know that I can actually be analyzed as much as any other novel for a high school or college class. It just has that much deep content, and I find that really interesting and even fun to discover- such as the Hiroshima Lovers (as graffiti and mirroring Dan and Laurie in Dan’s dream), the Pale Horse band (obviously being a reference to Revelations), and the smiley face symbol and images that call upon it. Going more into the smiley face badge, it’s intriguing how it’s so simple, yet the iconic red blood splatter on it changes the meaning of what the icon means and how it relates to the narrative.
If I had anything I didn’t like about Watchmen, it would be how unsatisfying and unhappy the ending was, but then again, I believe that that was kind of the point of Watchmen. In a way, it was a commentary on superheroes and challenging certain aspects of how the genre was back then, and denying a happy ending where the bad guy loses and the heroes win seems like one of the obvious things to do. Again, it’s looking at the fictional superhero world of that time and placing it into the real world and seeing how it would do.
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