I gotta write more… ;)

As I said in my review, I’m still not sure I liked it. *shrug*

Thank you. Remind me to like you more than I already do. :)

Ed, Die in a fire. *kicks shin*:)

I too, will buy the novel. Just to read it.

Maybe neither. ;)

It’s a bleak conception, but I don’t know if it’s a completely hopeless one. The Comedian is a horrible, horrible person, but even he has a human credential (something that suggests he isn’t as abyssmally awful as one would like to think) in the forms of two characters (one major, one minor).

As characters, the Watchmen represent extremes: The Comedian isn’t a total representative of the human race, but he is a representative for aspects of it, just as Doctor Manhattan represents another dimension, and Rorschach another. Nobody’s really like any of those people, but of course everybody is, and that’s the point. One reason the Watchmen fail–and I don’t think that’s a spoiler, to be honest–is that they are unbalanced caricatures of human dimensions.

Part of what’s interesting about the whole story is that there’s nothing, for want of a better word, convenient. The story (and titular team of heroes) has a conscience: but he’s a murderous psychotic whose sense of order is so absolute it’s unworkable. There’s a warm and human character, but he’s basically impotent (in one scene, literally so). There’s a voice of reason, but it’s so dispassionate and divorced from human experience that it ends up forming a polar opposite to the aforementioned conscience. I don’t think Moore did this to discredit any of these things–it’s not an accident that Watchmen’s psychotic, reactionary voice of justice also happens to be a fan favorite and one of the story’s most affecting characters (his final scene in the comic and in the movie, in which he effectively surrenders without compromising, is surprisingly moving). I think, rather, that Moore is trying to get us to think about these things, and not take them for granted or write off the costs they bear the way we’re inclined to. And that’s why things like Time Magazine’s inclusion of Watchmen as one of the best books of the century isn’t quite as ludicrous as it seems at first thought: Moore brought the concerns of serious literature to the funny books, and the movie (being so slavishly devoted to the book) is a near-direct port of those concerns.

Anyway, I do hope you’ll give the book a shot sometime.