Einstein's Tongue

Home

Vol. I Issue # 2 Summer 2008

     Watchmen is not just a graphic novel; it is the graphic novel.   It won a Hugo award in 1988, a year after it was first released in novel form, having first appeared in twelve serialized parts.  TIME Magazine included it on their 2005 list of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.  In the past fifteen minutes, it has fluctuated between #289 and #301 in Amazon.com’s  top-selling books statistics.  Why, then, with all of this acclaim, would I choose it as a work deserving of more exposure?  First, I love it and I think anyone who has not read it should give it a try.  Second, it is a unique artwork, making full narrative use of words and images.  I’d be the last to go all Marshall McLuhan on my gentle readers, but among the many levels on which this book may be appreciated, one stands out as unusual.  It is: “Damn, did you see that – what these guys just did to tighten the tale around me with intertwined media!!??”  The main story is enriched with newspaper clippings and diaries pertaining to characters in the main story.  The graphic elements of the novel carry through themes and symbols that enrich and inform the primary and secondary narratives – at least one of which is at least a minor masterpiece in its own right --sometimes conveying unique insights, available only as visual cues.  Third, I have a sad suspicion, reinforced by an article I just read in The New York Times, that the forthcoming Warner Brothers film version is going to do more than the usual amount of book-to-movie harm to this story.  A narrative presentation that has been so necessarily meshed with the media of its presentation must be, necessarily, challenging to translate into another medium.   I hope in a perfunctory, not-waitin’-up-nights way that the film will be artfully crafted with tremendous respect for the full depth of the source narrative.  Meanwhile, please read and look at and just generally experience the book before the movie’s release, currently scheduled for March 2009.
     Set in the 1985 of an alternate timeline, the primary story deals with the dark, complex, and undeniably adult meditations on the morality of power of a group of formerly crime-fighting superheroes who, under the Keene Act of 1977, have been forbidden to engage in “costumed adventuring.”   Social chaos is rising and the Clock to Armageddon is moving closer and closer to midnight, as tensions mount between the United States and the Soviet Union.    The story flashes among their separate childhoods, their shared active years, and their separate years of retirement, all the while enriched with quotations from and allusions to Juvenal’s Satires, Bob Dylan songs, William Blake, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera, and the internal jewel of the book.
     This jewel is The Black Freighter, a comic book about a pirate ship of damned souls preying upon the living that is interspersed into the greater story, as a minor character reads it on the sidewalk beside a news stand.  I wish I could buy a copy of The Black Freighter and read it on the sidewalk beside a news stand, but this wish is neither so strong nor so vague that I approve of the Warner Brothers plan to release a version of Watchmen in theatres that covers only the main story, then to immediately release Tales of The Black Freighter (along with a documentary-style film about the characters’ back stories, entitled “Under the Hood”) direct to DVD.  They plan to release the theatrical version of Watchmen to DVD four months later and, then, to release an “ultimate edition” with some or all of the three films edited together into, as the Times called it, a mega-movie.   That is a lot of time and DVD money to invest to find out how well Warner Brothers handled the shift from successfully-intertwined words and pictures to film. 
     Buy, borrow, or check out the book.  I’ll be glad you did and I’m not what anyone would call a Comic Book Person.