Watchmen by Alan Moore
October 24th, 2008
booksI never really got into comics as a kid. As an adult, I was once near a conversation about graphic novels, and couldn’t help but scoff and deride the material as juvenile. A friend who was involved in the conversation insisted I was wrong, and lent me a copy of Maus. From the first page, I was completely blown away. It’s an amazing work of art, and by the time I finished it, it had become (and still is) one of the best books I’ve ever read, graphic novel or otherwise. Its Pulitzer is well-deserved, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone, especially people who scoff at the irrelevance of graphic novels.
After this eye-opening experience a few years ago, I’ve been biding my time, waiting to give the genre another chance. Maybe I’d only read the chaff, and never gotten into the wheat. I’ve been told by many a graphic novel enthusiast that Watchmen is a classic, one of the best there is; a deconstruction of the entire genre. The same friend that lent me Maus also lent me his copy of Watchmen, and the back of the book itself says “If you’ve never read a graphic novel, then Watchmen is the one to start with”.
So I sat down to read it with high expectations. The artwork is colorful, the framing dramatic, the themes enduring, and the story itself mildly interesting. But it just didn’t grab me like some books do. I found myself bored by the graphic-novel-within-a-novel, which takes up substantial page space but somehow never integrates into the main storyline. Even though I knew about its self-aware intentions, the thin characters and wild violence and abundance of detail just left me limp.
I guess I just don’t like graphic novels; Maus must’ve been the anomaly. I’ll probably give Persepolis a read at some point, but otherwise, I’ll stick to plain old boring words and the occasional Sunday funnies.
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