Bookish Tuesday: Watchmen

Widely recognized as the best comic/graphic novel, and even on the list for Time magazine's Top 100 novels, Watchmen made it into my life around my senior year of high school. Although I liked the story, I don't think I really understood what was going on until my second read a couple years later. Ever since then, I've read Watchmen a number of times, and each time brings something new.

So, what makes Watchmen different from other comics? Part of it is the heroes and their flaws. Only one of these heroes is actually superpowered, but even he suffers from his disconnection to the human race and emotions. Alongside him, Rorschach (the main protagonist) is a sociopath, Nite Owl is a fat retiree lost in his past, Silk Spectre is trying to escape her past, the Comedian is dead, and Ozymandias thinks he can bring world peace.

When you add the characters into the wonderfully twisted plot, it turns into an incredibly layered, multi-point of view experience. It is a story that can't really be told in any other medium. With the running side plots that don't seem to fit until everything is drawn together, it's hard enough to get all of it into this twelve issue arc (side note: I don't fault the movie for not having everything within, they did a great job with everything that they were able to fit into the movie and it would have been a jumbled mess if they had tried to get everything in).

The book also brings to light questions about our ideas of justice, truth, sanity, war and hope. Simply put, I think Watchmen should be a choice in the required reading for college freshmen English. It would provide plenty of discussion topics for an entire semester of classes, and could even be tied in to different situations occurring throughout the world.

Read Watchmen. Please. See the movie too, if you need something to push you towards it, but really... read Watchmen.