From Wikipedia:
Watchmen features a story within a story in the form of Tales of the Black Freighter, a fictional comic book from which scenes appear in issues three, five, eight, nine, ten, and eleven. The fictional comic’s story, “Marooned”, is read by a black youth in New York City.[23] Moore and Gibbons conceived a pirate comic because they reasoned that since the characters of Watchmen experience superheroes in real life, “they probably wouldn’t be at all interested in superhero comics.”[31] Gibbons suggested a pirate theme, and Moore agreed in part because he is “a big [Berthold] Brecht fan”: the Black Freighter alludes to the song “Seeräuberjenny” (“Pirate Jenny”) from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.[3] Moore theorized that since superheroes existed, and existed as “objects of fear, loathing, and scorn, the main superheroes quickly fell out of popularity in comic books, as we suggest. Mainly, genres like horror, science fiction, and piracy, particularly piracy, became prominent—with EC riding the crest of the wave.”[12] Moore felt that “the imagery of the whole pirate genre is so rich and dark that it provided a perfect counterpoint to the contemporary world of Watchmen”.[12]
The writer expanded upon the premise so that its presentation in the story would add subtext and allegory.[32] The supplemental article detailing the fictional history of Tales of the Black Freighter at the end of issue five credits real-life artist Joe Orlando as a major contributor to the series. Moore chose Orlando because he felt that if pirate stories were popular in the Watchmen universe that DC editor Julius Schwartz might have tried to lure the artist over to the company to draw a pirate comic book. Orlando contributed a drawing designed as if it were a page from the fake title to the supplemental piece.[12]
“Marooned” tells the story of a young mariner’s journey to warn his home town of the coming of the Black Freighter after he survives the destruction of his own ship. According to Richard Reynolds, during the mariner’s journey he is “forced by the urgency of his mission to shed one inhibition after another”, including using the bodies of his dead shipmates as a make-shift raft and mistakenly killing innocent people as he makes his way to town. When he finally returns home, believing it to already be under the occupation of the ship’s crew, he accidentally attacks his own wife in their darkened home. Afterward, he returns to the sea shore, where he finds the Black Freighter; he swims out to sea and climbs aboard the ship.[33] Moore has said that the story of The Black Freighter ends up specifically describing “the story of Adrian Veidt”.[31] Reynolds states that just like Veidt, the protagonist of “Marooned” “hopes to stave off disaster by using the dead bodies of his former comrades as a means of reach his goal”.[34] Moore has said that “Marooned” can also be used as a counterpoint to other parts of the story, such as Rorschach’s capture and Dr. Manhattan’s self-exile on Mars.[31]
Symbols and imagery
The Galle crater from the planet Mars appears in Watchmen as an example of the series’ recurring smiley motif
Moore named William S. Burroughs as one of his main influences during the conception of Watchmen. He admired Burroughs’ use of “repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning” in Burroughs’ only comic strip, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart”, which appeared in the British underground magazine Cyclops. Not every intertextual link in the series was planned by Moore, who remarked that “there’s stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read,” while other “things… turned up in there by accident.”[8]
A blood-stained smiley face is a recurring image in the story, appearing in many forms. In The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen described the symbol as a recurring motif that produces “rhyme and remarkable configurations” by appearing in key segments of Watchmen, notably the first and last pages of the series. Groensteen cites it as one form of the circle shape that appears throughout the story, as a “recurrent geometric motif” and due to its symbolic connotations.[35] Gibbons created a smiley face badge as an element of The Comedian’s costume in order to “lighten” the overall design, later adding a splash of blood to the badge to imply his murder. Gibbons said the creators came to regard the blood-stained smiley face as “a symbol for the whole series”,[28] noting its resemblance to the clock ticking up to midnight.[9] Moore drew inspiration from psychological tests of behaviorism, explaining that the tests had presented the face as “a symbol of complete innocence.” With the addition of a blood splash over the eye, the face’s meaning was altered to become simultaneously radical and simple enough for the first issue’s cover to avoid human detail. Although most evocations of the central image were created on purpose, others were coincidental. Moore mentioned in particular that “the little plugs on the spark hydrants, if you turn them upside down, you discover a little smiley face”.[8]
Other symbols, images and allusion that appeared throughout the series often emerged unexpectedly. Moore mentioned that ”[t]he whole thing with Watchmen has just been loads of these little bits of synchronicity popping up all over the place”.[12] Gibbons noted an unintended theme was contrasting the mundane and the romantic,[15] citing the separate sex scenes between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre on his couch and then high in the sky on Archie.[14] In a book of the craters and boulders of Mars, Gibbons discovered a photograph of the Galle crater, which resembles a happy face, which they worked into an issue. Moore said, “We found a lot of these things started to generate themselves as if by magic”, in particular citing an occasion where they decided to name a lock company the “Gordian Knot Lock Company”.[12]
Themes
The initial premise for the series was to examine what superheroes would be like “in a credible, real world”. As the story became more complex, Moore said Watchmen became about “power and about the idea of the superman manifest within society.”[36] The title of the series refers to the phrase “Who watches the watchmen?”, although Moore said in a 1986 interview with Amazing Heroes he did not know where the phrase originated.[37] After reading the interview, author Harlan Ellison informed Moore that the phrase is a translation of the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, posed by the Roman satirist Juvenal; Moore commented in 1987, “In the context of Watchmen, that fits. ‘They’re watching out for us, who’s watching out for them?’”[3] The writer stated in the introduction to the Graphitti hardcover of Watchmen that while writing the series he was able to purge himself of his nostalgia for superheroes, and instead he found an interest in real human beings.[1]
Bradford Wright described Watchmen as “Moore’s obituary for the concept of heroes in general and superheroes in particular.”[17] Putting the story in a contemporary sociological context, Wright wrote that the characters of Watchmen were Moore’s “admonition to those who trusted in ‘heroes’ and leaders to guard the world’s fate.” He added that to place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to “the Reagans, Thatchers, and other ‘Watchmen’ of the world who supposed to ‘rescue’ us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process”.[38] Moore specifically stated in 1986 that he was writing Watchmen to be “not anti-Americanism, [but] anti-Reaganism,” specifically believing that “at the moment a certain part of Reagan’s America isn’t scared. They think they’re invulnerable.”[3] While Moore wanted to write about “power politics” and the “worrying” times he lived in, he stated the reason that the story was set in an alternate reality was because he was worried that readers would “switch off” if he attacked a leader they admired.[4] Moore stated in 1986 that he “was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy.”[3]
Citing Watchmen as the point where the comic book medium “came of age”, Iain Thomson wrote in his essay “Deconstructing the Hero” that the story accomplished this by “developing its heroes precisely in order to deconstruct the very idea of the hero and so encouraging us to reflect upon its significance from the many different angles of the shards left lying on the ground”.[39] Thomson stated that the heroes in Watchmen almost all share a nihilistic outlook, and that Moore presents this outlook “as the simple, unvarnished truth” to “deconstruct the would-be hero’s ultimate motivation, namely, to provide a secular salvation and so attain a mortal immortality”.[40] He wrote that the story “develops its heroes precisely in order to ask us if we would not in fact be better off without heroes”.[41] Thomson added that the story’s deconstruction of the hero concept “suggests that perhaps the time for heroes has passed”, which he feels distinguishes “this postmodern work” from the deconstructions of the hero in the existentialism movement.[42] Richard Reynolds states that without any supervillains in the story, the superheroes of Watchmen are forced to confront “more intangible social and moral concerns”, adding that this removes the superhero concept from the normal narrative expectations of the genre.[43] Reynolds concludes that the series’ ironic self awareness of the genre “all mark out Watchmen either as the last key superhero text, or the first in a new maturity of the genre”.[44]
Geoff Klock eschewed the term “deconstruction” in favor of describing Watchmen as a “revisionary superhero narrative.” He considers Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns to be “the first instances… of [a] new kind of comic book… a first phase of development, the transition of the superhero from fantasy to literature.”[45] He elaborates by noting that “Alan Moore’s realism… performs a kenosis towards comic book history… [which] does not ennoble and empower his characters… Rather, it sends a wave of disruption back through superhero history… devalue[ing] one of the basic superhero conventions by placing his masked crime fighters in a realistic world…”[46] First and foremost, “Moore’s exploration of the [often sexual] motives for costumed crimefighting sheds a disturbing light on past superhero stories, and forces the reader to reevaluate – to revision – every superhero in terms of Moore’s kenosis – his emptying out of the tradition.”[47] Klock relates the title to the quote by Juvenal to highlight the problem of controlling those who hold power and quoted repeatedly within the work itself.[48] The deconstructive nature of Watchmen is, Klock notes, played out on the page also as, ”[l]ike Alan Moore’s kenosis, [Veidt] must destroy, then reconstruct, in order to build ‘a unity which would survive him.’”[49]
Moore has expressed dismay that ”[T]he gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen… became a genre”. He said in 2003, ”[T]o some degree there has been, in the 15 years since Watchmen, an awful lot of the comics field devoted to these grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don’t have a lot to recommend them.”[50] Gibbons said that while readers “were left with the idea that it was a grim and gritty kind of thing”, he said in his view the series was “a wonderful celebration of superheroes as much as anything else.”[51]
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