Watchmen ★★★☆☆

Watchmen (Click Here To Buy)

★★★☆☆

Watchmen written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons is a graphic novel about a group of superheroes trying to track down who killed one of their own.

I checked this book out from the library. This is the first physical book I’ve checked out from the library since COVID started and damn is it good to be back :)

In the Watchmen universe, very similar to our own but with a few alternate endings, superheroes surfaced in the 1940s starting with Hooded Justice, gained popularity, but were banned in 1977 at which point they almost all went into hiding or retired. In 1985 (present day), a man named Edward Blake is murdered. Turns out he was a superhero called the comedian and now Rorschach, who refused to retire, believes someone is going around killing the old crew. The plot thickens when Dr. Manhattan, the only super being of the bunch, banishes himself to Mars believing he is causing people to get cancer. Silk Spectre has to convince him to come back while Night Owl and Rorcharch track down the person behind it all…before it’s too late.

For the record, I want to say the illustrations in this book were worth 5 stars. I just wasn’t fond of the characters and the decisions they made. Also, The Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic book a kid is reading throughout the story, felt completely unnecessary. Finally, the ending and didn’t do it for me. Rorschach was my favorite character and I most enjoyed Chapter VI: The Abyss Gazes Also, which depicted his backstory and his interview with the psychiatrist Dr. Malcom Long while in prison.

If you didn’t love Watchmen, but want to read a graphic novel or something similar, I recommend Marbles by Ellen Forney, Wonder Woman The Golden Age Volume 1 by William Moulton Marston, The Secret Life of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, and Ghost World by Daniel Clowes.

I’m pretty unexperienced in the world of graphic novels, I’d like to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther, what do you recommend?

Happy reading -

Ms.Bjork