I Don’t Think Watchmen Is the Greatest Comic Ever Anymore

Picture this: It’s the last week of school. Your friend in the last class of the day has brought you the copy of Watchmen they said you could borrow. Because there’s nothing else to do, you start reading the book. You’ve heard about it for years — you know the characters, the general plot, even the twist ending — however, you’re completely engrossed from page one. Before you know it, the bell rings. When you get home, you pop some popcorn, and sit down to finish the comic. Several hours later, you finish, realizing that you never touched your popcorn. Watchmen is now your favorite comic.

This isn’t a universal experience, but I feel like more often than not, this is what happened with many of us when we read Watchmen. The comic pulls you in, even if you know the entire story, and doesn’t let you go until the end. Even in the years before the movie came out and Watchman became a part of the greater pop culture, it was impossible to not be spoiled on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ masterpiece, but that didn’t matter because it truly was that good. Basically every best of all time comic list has Watchmen at the top, and Time magazine named it one of the greatest pieces of literature of the 20th century. For years, I also believed this.

Watchmen became my favorite; I wanted everyone to experience this amazing story. Alan Moore is a wizard in more ways than one and Watchmen has proven to be his greatest spell. However, as the years have gone by, my opinion of Watchmen has changed. I still love Watchmen, I just don’t think that it’s the greatest comic ever anymore.

Watchmen Deserves Praise, but It’s Not the Greatest

1986 was an amazing year for comics, especially superhero comics. The early to mid-’80s had been an amazing time for the medium. It had finally started to grow, partly thanks to writers like Alan Moore. Moore’s time writing Swamp Thing changed everything for the mainstream comic industry. Superhero comics had always had their social commentary, but the stories were still mostly simplistic morality plays. Moore didn’t want to tell those kinds of stories and instead used his Swamp Thing run to talk about the things that made us human — ironic for a comic about a monster — and made no bones about the politics of the book. Swamp Thing sold very well and won all kinds of awards, and other creators decided to do what Moore was doing. All of this led to Watchmen, a book that is singled out as the moment that comics matured.

Watchmen is a brilliant work. Moore and Gibbons used everything they had learned about telling stories in comics to make Watchmen something special. Watchmen isn’t just a great story, it’s a brilliantly told story. In fact, as the years went on, this became the main reason that I stopped considering it the greatest comic of all time. Watchmen depends on the comic medium, both the tropes of superheroes and sequential storytelling, to make its story so amazing. Some of the most brilliant parts of Watchmen come from Moore and Gibbons taking advantage of what could be done with the comic page. The best example of this is the fifth issue, titled “Fearful Symmetry.” The first panel of the issue is a mirror image of the last, and each panel after it mirrors its reverse moving on from there. The double-page spread of Ozymandias in the middle issue shows this beautifully, but tell the truth: did you know this before you read it?

There’s also the nine-panel grid; most of the pages of Watchmen use a nine-panel grid. This allowed Moore and Gibbons to control the flow of time in the storytelling, establishing a beat and rhythm that affected the way the story was told. There are so many little things that Moore and Gibbons do throughout the book that make the story so much better — the flashbacks, the foreshadowing, the way “The Tale of the Black Freighter” was basically the story of Ozymandias in microcosm — that come from the fact that it’s a comic. To understand that, though, you have to be well-versed in comics and how they work. Otherwise, it’s just a twisty mystery story.

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The problems with Watchmen come with the story itself. It’s a great mystery and it has a lot to say about the world of the mid-’80s, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s so dour. Unremitting grim darkness appeals to the young, but as I’ve gotten older, I want more out of my stories and Watchmen doesn’t give it to me. Even in the pantheon of Moore’s works, it’s lost some of its luster because of this. There’s a hopelessness to Watchmen and a lack of warmth that stands out more and more. It’s funny to compare it to many of Moore’s other works, because Moore is very much a humanist; so many of his works are invested with so much feeling, you can feel it flowing off the page. That isn’t Watchmen. Even compared to V for Vendetta, a work about anarchy and fascism, it’s a harsh read. The ending — the kid from The New Frontiersman discovering Rorschach’s diary and endangering the peace of the world — never stops reminding you of the hopelessness of the story. If you like that, that’s fine, but it takes something away from Watchmen.

Another problem with Watchmen is the effect it had on comics and its audience. Comic companies learned the exact wrong lesson from Watchmen. Instead of writers and artists digging deeper into their bags of tricks and finding new ways to tell familiar stories, they basically figured that what made Watchmen so popular was the violence and the “maturity.” Maturity, though, is more than blood and naughty words; Watchmen knew this but the pretenders who have come along in the years after don’t. Instead of trying to follow the example of Watchmen‘s depth, its social commentary, and the way it used the medium, comics just got darker instead of getting more complex more often than not. It changed comics, but not always in a good way.

Missing the point of Watchmen also affected the audience. The best example of this is Rorschach. Rorschach is a terrible character. He’s homophobic, sexist, and terribly violent. His black-and-white worldview is often looked at as “admirable,” but it’s childish and simple. Rorschach is a small, broken man and, while there is a tragic aspect to who he is — which is why we still like the character — it isn’t an excuse. Rorschach and Ozymandias are two sides of the same coin; they’re both absolutists, willing to go much further than anyone else in order to achieve their goals. They’re also the least human characters, the ones whose entire lives are just their quests. Rorschach is not cool, he’s pitiful and repulsive. However, so much of Rorschach goes right over many of the audience’s heads.

Watchmen Deserves Its Plaudits, but There Is So Much More Out There

Watchmen is a masterpiece and that can’t be taken away. There’s a reason Watchmen has remained in print, becoming a part of the bestselling DC Pocket Books line of reprints. However, it’s time to stop thinking of it as the end-all, be-all of superhero comics. Honestly, it’s not even Moore’s best superhero deconstruction (that’s Miracleman). Its legacy is so vast that Alan Moore constantly has to talk about it, reliving the pain of DC keeping the copyright from him. Watchmen is almost singlehandedly responsible for Moore never writing mainstream superhero comics again, killing some of his love for the medium according to a post on Twitter years ago from his daughter Leah. We never got Twilight of the Superheroes, a Moore-written event comic that would have been amazing, because of the kerfuffle surrounding the rights to owning Watchmen.

People often try to give new readers Watchmen because it’s the “best.” However, most of them aren’t even going to understand why it’s the best because they don’t understand how comics work yet, and won’t see what makes it so brilliant. There are a lot of amazing comics out there — All-Star Superman, Kingdom Come, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Avengers: Twilight — that do a lot of the same things Watchmen does with better stories.

Watchmen will always be a huge part of my life and a huge part of the comic industry. We’ll never escape its influence, nor should we. It’s marvelous, and everyone should experience it once. However, if you have to read one Alan Moore work, maybe try something like Swamp Thing or The Nemo Trilogy. If you want mature comics, maybe give Saga or The Wicked + The Divine or Preacher a chance. Watchmen opened the floodgates, and it deserves praise for that, but there’s better out there.

What do you think of Watchmen? Let us know in the comments below!