680 WATCHMEN
In terms of the story, Moore broke with the conventions of the superhero story from
the outset, displacing the action/adventure genre for a murder mystery structure, slowly
unveiling clues to the identity of the villain, if such a thing could be said to exist in the
morally complex and compromised world that Moore presents. Beginning with the mur-
der of Edward Blake, a masked vigilante and government operative also known as Th e
Comedian, the story follows the unhinged vigilante Rorschach (aka Walter Kovacs) as
he investigates his hunch that there is a “mask killer” targeting superheroes. Th is investi-
gation brings him into contact with his retired former team-mates, Dan Dreiberg (Nite
Owl), Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre), Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan), and Adrian
Veidt (Ozymandias). Th rough fl ashback and supplementary material it is revealed that
in this alternate world costumed heroes (without genuine super powers) known as Th e
Minutemen appeared during World War II but disbanded following the war. A genuine
super-being is created in an accident in a nuclear research facility in the 1950s, later
taking the name Dr. Manhattan. In the 1960s an attempt to resurrect Th e Minutemen
falters and soon after superheroes are outlawed. Dr. Manhattan becomes a tool of U.S.
government policy, and is used as a weapon in Vietnam, leading to a U.S. victory and to
the re-election of President Richard Nixon for multiple terms running into the 1980s,
while other superheroes either retire or become vigilantes or outcasts. As Rorschach’s
investigation begins to cast light on a larger conspiracy, tensions between the Soviet
Union and America escalate, moving towards an apocalyptic showdown between the
superpowers. Will the superheroes avert disaster, and who is behind a mysterious plan
to save the world from itself?
Th e extensive fl ashback structure and the interpolation of a pirate comic as a com-
mentary on the story adds to the complexity of the narrative, which gains power through
its literary treatment of time and memory, its recurrent symbolism and the ingenuity
with which Moore weaves together all the disparate elements with exacting precision,
which is matched by Gibbons’s artwork. All of these elements invoke the image of the
universe, and the fi ctional universe created by Moore, as a mechanism, a watch being
disassembled and reassembled by a watch-maker. Th emes of determinism, fate and
free will move from the cosmic scale down to the sub-atomic, through the intermediate
stage of everyday human aff airs. Dr. Manhattan adopts a relativist view, seeing no dif-
ference between past, present, and future, or between life and death. While Moore and
Gibbons can at times seem preoccupied by the formal experimentation of the text, at its
heart the story is a morality tale disguised as a superhero story, disguised as a murder
mystery. Ultimately the story reveals that the smallest moments matter, and that events
reverberate through time and memory with devastating consequences.
Th e story is also interesting as a meta-textual commentary on the superhero genre
itself. Th e alternative history mapped out by Moore corresponds very closely to the
history of American comics, from wartime popularity to a post-war lull where other
genres, especially horror , crime and science fi ction prospered, to the resurgence in the
popularity of superheroes in the 1960s, and the darker comics of the 1970s and 1980s,
typifi ed by Neal Adams’s version of Batman and Marvel Comics’ Th e Punisher.
