– Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins
The one piece of Alan Moore's writing that I actually ended up liking quite a bit. ... though, I certainly did try with his others. I first found it on New Year's Eve back in 02009 and binged it straight into the small hours of the new year.
To summarize, Watchmen is a satirical reinterpretation of the same superhero comics which the Watchmen publisher usually plies their trade. Rather than the usual depictions of superheroes as these semi-mythic or heroic figures, Watchmen represents its superheroes (and even their corresponding supervillans) as semi-neurotic, flawed people, who are still suffering through life despite their supposed superpowers. The themes and plot of the story entirely extend from this premise.
I was surprisingly amenable to reading Watchmen despite having never liked the superhero genre before, either in comic or animated form. I had seen plenty, yes, but I always accepted superhero stories as things other people liked more than I did. Something about it just never clicked. Perhaps that's a reason the only two superhero comics I ever did take a liking to, this one and The Sandman, were the ones who chose to operate from entirely different first principles.
I thought at the time I was being independently-minded to seek out this old-for-the-time book, but I may have been mistaken. There was a small renaissance regarding Watchmen in the eventual leadup to the film version. In my final year of high school, I even had the “pleasure” of knowing a slightly younger fellow who had a—woefully misinformed!—admiration for the character of Rorschach. ... something which I've heard from multiple sources is a sadly more common affair than even Moore himself would've wished. Perhaps it is a small mercy that I remember at the time not quite understanding exactly what Rorschach was even supposed to be. That probably spared me no small amount of pain.
