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Alan Moore, whenever he is creating characters is brilliant. His explanation of which can be torn apart by a freshman physics major. Moore's conclusion, which I have been told he wrote under the stress of D.C. Like any great writer, Moore's characters have more life and depth to them than some flesh and blood people you'll meet in everyday life. But I believe that in the way he kills of his most interesting character in the most anticlimactic fashion, misread what a world and American response to a massive and horrifying loss of life, and elevates his least developed character to the position of the most important character of the conclusion to be unsatisfying. His ability to create a world for them to live and interact with is equally outstanding. It's what he does best. More frustrating was Mr.
I was, however, annoyed with Dr. Manhattan's description of his understanding of time. demanding that he just finish. I recommend this book, nevertheless, as I think for all its faults, the Watchmen is perhaps at its best the most intelligent graphic novel I have read and at its worse it is no worse than much else that can be found in any comic book.
The story line and the artwork in this book is someone who is interested in comics needs to check out. This graphic novel was very good and was let down in my opinion by the movie.
There is an ominous presence looming overhead throughout the book. And I was not disappointed. This is the first comic book/graphic novel that I have ever read. What really made this present was the foreshadowing, used to describe the flaws of a hopeless society through hatred, war, and fighting in the streets. The storytelling of Alan Moore and artwork of Dave Gibbons make for an amazing piece of art. I am very much a "visual" learner and the added visual stimulation, as opposed to the traditional written story-telling, helped me enjoy it all the more.This is a complex, inter-woven story covering the many different lives, perspectives, and relationships of the Crimebusters, a group of costumed do-gooders who are in search of a mask-killer. Then there are also moments of promise for the world, when small characters go out of their way to do the right thing by just caring for others around them. By the end of the book, we see that people are forced to come together as a result of a tragedy (think post-9/11).If you loved the movie, you will love the book even more.
Maybe its because comic books are written (and largely read) by misfits like myself who see the world from the margins, being ourselves only marginal. They're petty, mean-spirited, greedy, opportunistic, and, in one instance, they even smell bad. One wonders what the world of "literature" is coming to when you've got to turn to comic books to read something truly edgy, intellectually challenging, and creatively uncompromising. I swear I'm going to put my scarf and gloves on in about ten minutes.
This is a substantial piece of work that gave me several days of real pleasure--well worth the $19.99 I paid for it.I think I'm going to go outside and warm up. I'm going to buy some soup. You'd think we were living back in the days of Dickens. Well, whatever the reason, "The Watchmen" is simply a terrific book, a summation, in some ways, of the last half of the 20th century in which concepts such as heroism, patriotism, good and evil, the sanctity and meaning of human life were tossed into the blender and turned into a viscous, stinking goo.Moore does a kind of post-modern critical analysis of the comic-ethos even as he's writing a comic-book. But not-so-oddly enough, they are trying to do good in their own often wrong-headed way.That, too, is what makes them so real.They are more like the old Olympian gods of Greek mythology in that sense, bickering and scheming, as caught up with their own in-fighting as they are with the human world they are supposedly overseeing.All that aside, Moore's storytelling technique is impressively innovative, as is the layout of Dave Gibbons' visuals.
His references are broad and his influences eclectic. As publishers fill up every inch of available shelf space hoping to make millions with Dan Brown knock-offs--when Dan Brown himself was never worth reading--and an unchecked infestation of paranormal vampire romances spawned by the long-ago success of Laurell Hamilton, it's left to the geeks who write comic books to actually write stuff worth reading. His superheroes are deeply flawed--sometimes downright criminally insane human beings--but they also embarrasedly aware of the absurdity of running around the city at night in cape and underwear catching bad guys. I'm going to come back here and eat my soup and think about some more things.
--for crissakes it's so cold in my office. This is graphic storytelling at its finest.well, the finest I can remember seeing. And Moore is obviously a really intelligent guy. I see it's 35 degrees out there, which must be about ten degrees warmer than it is inside this building. They aren't anti-heroes in the same fashion that the updated and more morally ambiguous Batman is an anti-hero. I'm going to try to get warm. Just finished reading Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" and it far exceeded my expectations, even the lavish praised heaped upon it by the most intelligent people I know, who've urged me to read it for years.
I'm going to look foward to five o'clock. This is just one example of Moore's genius: "The Watchmen" becomes all the more realistic because the charaters themselves realize how ludicrous it is to truly believe any of it.To say the heroes in "The Watchmen" are more anti-heroes is true, but it doesn't go quite far enough. Moore's "heroes" often lack not only goodness, but grandeur. I'm going to think about things.
Like so many people, I first read Watchmen when it dropped on the unsuspecting public so many years ago. Watchmen is a disturbing look inside all of us, and the novel's message refuses to die, [despite being made into a crappy movie]. At the time, I was more enamored with Miller's "Dark Knight Returns;" however, (with no slight to 'Dark Knight, which is, in itself a classic) I have found that as time passes, the brilliance of Alan Moore's superheroic deconstruction stands alone in the pantheon of graphic novel greatness. The storyline remains, sad to say, vigilant and pertinent - and the characters are classic archetypes that even the most discerning literati must appreciate. I TEACH Watchmen to my 10th grade gifted/talented class every year and they are, without fail, blown away. You will be, too.Why Are All the Good Teachers Crazy.
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