Talk:Watchmen/Revision

Watchmen
center|250px Cover art for the 1987 U.S. (left) and UK (right) collected editions of Watchmen, published by DC Comics and Titan Books.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Limited series
Publication date	September 1986–October 1987
No. of issues	Twelve
Main character(s)	Nite-Owl Dr. Manhattan Rorschach Silk Spectre Ozymandias Comedian
Creative team
Written by	Alan Moore
Artist(s)	Dave Gibbons
Colorist(s)	John Higgins

Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. The series was published by DC Comics during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently published in collected form. Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternative history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The series begins with an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the mysterious murder of one of a group of (past- and present-) superheroes. This seemingly-straightforward investigation swiftly takes a back seat to an unravelling of dozens of interlinked plots, events and secrets which threaten to destroy - or save - the entire world. Watchmen depicts superheroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings. Watchmen's deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film.

Watchmen has received critical acclaim both in the comics and mainstream press, and is generally held to be a model of how comics can be deep and intellectual. After a number of attempts to adapt the series into a feature film, director Zack Snyder's Watchmen is scheduled for release in March 2009.

Background and creation

"I suppose I was just thinking, 'That'd be a good way to start a comic book: have a famous super-hero found dead.' As the mystery unraveled, we would be lead deeper and deeper into the real heart of this super-hero's world, and show a reality that was very different to the general public image of the super-hero."

Alan Moore on the basis for Watchmen

Writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons sought to collaborate on a new project together after working together on several stories for the British comic series 2000 AD in the early 1980s. Moore developed an interest in writing a story about the Mighty Crusaders from MLJ Comics since the characters had not been published for years. Moore planned to begin the story with the 1960s-1970s Charlton version of The Shield being found dead in the harbor, after which a murder mystery, introducing other characters such as Jack Kirby's separate Shield incarnation Private Strong.

In 1985, DC Comics acquired a line of characters from Charlton Comics. Moore crafted a proposal for a murder mystery fieaturing the Charlton characters titled Who Killed the Peacemaker. That year, Moore and Gibbons submitted the unsolicited proposal to DC managing editor Dick Giordano. Giordano was receptive to Moore and Gibbons's proposal, but the editor opposed the idea of permitting the Charlton characters to be used for the story. Moore said, "DC realized their expensive characters would end up either dead or dysfunctional." Instead, Giordano convinced Moore to rework his pitch to feature original characters. Moore had initially believed that making up the characters would not provide emotional resonance for the readers, but later changed his mind. He said, "Eventually, I realized that if I wrote the substitute characters well enough, so that they seemed familiar in certain ways, certain aspects of them brought back a kind of generic super-hero resonance or familiarity to the reader, then it might work."

Moore and Gibbons began working on a 12-issue miniseries based upon their revamped proposal under editor Len Wein. Both Wein and Giordano (who acted as an overseer to the project) stood back and "got our of their way"; Giordano remarked later, "Who copyedits Alan Moore, for God's sake?" Moore wanted to create "a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density". Moore and Gibbons originally conceived of a story that would take "familiar old-fashioned superheroes into a completely new realm." Moore began work on the series very early on, hoping to avoid publication delays such as those faced by the DC miniseries Camelot 3000. The writer came up with character names and descriptions, but left the specifics of how they looked to Gibbons. Gibbons did not sit down and design the characters deliberately, but rather "did it at odd times... spen[ding] maybe two or three weeks just doing sketches." Gibbons brought colorist John Higgins onto the project because he liked his "unusual" style; Higgins lived near the artist, which allowed the two to "discuss [the art] and have some kind of human contact rather than just sending it across the ocean."

When writing the script for the first issue, Moore said he realized "I only had enough plot for six issues. We were contracted for 12!" His solution was to alternate issues that dealt with the overall plot of the series with origin issues for the characters. Moore wrote very detailed scripts for Gibbons to work from. Gibbons recalled that "[t]he script for the first issue of Watchmen was, I think, 101 pages of typescript - single-spaced - with no gaps between the individual panel descriptions or, indeed, even between the pages." Upon receiving the scripts, the artist had to number each page "in case I drop them on the floor, because it would take me two days to put them back in the right order", and used a highlighter pen to single out lettering and shot descriptions; he remarked, "It takes quite a bit of organizing before you can actually put pen to paper." During the process, Gibbons had a great deal of autonomy in developing the visual look of Watchmen, and frequently inserted background details that Moore admitted he did not notice until later.

Speaking in early November 1986, Moore admitted that there were likely to be delays, confessing that he was then still writing issue nine at that moment. Dave Gibbons mentioned that a major factor in the delays was the "piecemeal way" in which he received Moore's scripts. Gibbons, speaking in April 1987 said that the two of them had "since about issue #4," undertaken their work "just several pages at a time. I'll get three pages of script from Alan and draw it and then toward the end, call him up and say, 'Feed me!' And he'll send another two or three pages or maybe one page or sometimes six pages." Near the end of the project, Moore realized that the story bore similiarity to "The Architects of Fear," an episode of the Outer Limits television series. In acknowledgement of this, He and Gibbons worked a reference to the episode into the series' last issue.

Story

Watchmen is set in an alternate reality which closely mirrors the contemporary world of the 1980s. The primary point of divergence is the presence of superheroes. Their existence in this iteration of America is shown to have dramatically affected and altered the outcomes of real-world events such as the Vietnam War, and the presidency of Richard Nixon. In keeping with the realism of the series, although the cast of Watchmen are commonly called "superheroes," the only character in the principal cast who possesses obvious superhuman powers is Dr. Manhattan.

In Watchmen, the United States and the Soviet Union have been edging toward a nuclear showdown since the 1959 nuclear accident that transformed scientist Jon Osterman into Dr. Manhattan. Due to Dr. Manhattan's near-godlike powers and allegiance to the American government, the U.S. has enjoyed a distinct strategic advantage, allowing it to defeat the Soviet Union in a series of proxy wars, including victory in Vietnam. These successes, and the successful cover-up in this reality of the the Watergate scandal, encouraged a repeal of the 22nd Amendment, removing Presidential term limits. Richard Nixon thus remains President of America in 1985, on his unprecedented fifth term of office. This imbalance of power is shown to have accelerated the nuclear arms race and dramatically increased global tension.

Plot summary

In October 1985, New York City police are investigating the murder of Edward Blake. With the police having no leads, costumed vigilante Rorschach decides to probe further. Discovering Blake to be the face behind the Comedian, a costumed hero employed by the United States government, Rorschach believes he has discovered a plot to eliminate costumed adventurers and sets about warning four of his retired comrades.

Laurie Juspeczyk, the second Silk Spectre, has been involved in a relationship with the super-powered and emotionally detached Doctor Manhattan. Jaded with the relationship, Juspeczyk seeks solace in the arms of former Nite Owl adventurer Dan Dreiberg—whose post-heroic indeciveness has led him to feel mentally and physically impotent. All three are informed by Rorschach of the alleged plot, as is Adrian Veidt, once the hero Ozymandias and now the world's richest man.

Doctor Manhattan, lynch-pin of American defence strategy, is accused on national television of being a carcinogenic threat to friends and colleagues. When the US Government takes the accusations seriously, Manhattan instead exiles himself to Mars. In doing so he throws humanity into political turmoil, with the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan to capitalize on perceived American weakness.

Rorschach's paranoid beliefs appear vindicated when Adrian Veidt narrowly survives an assassination attempt, and Rorschach himself is framed for murder and arrested. Dreiberg (Nite Owl) and Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) don their costumes as they grow closer together. With Dreiberg starting to believe some aspects of Rorschach's conspiracy theory, the pair take it upon themselves to free him from prison. Doctor Manhattan, after analyzing his own personal history, places the fate of his involvement with human affairs in Laurie's hands. He teleports her to Mars to make the case for emotional investment. During the course of the argument, Juspeczyk is forced to face come to terms with unsavory elements of her own past, the discovery of which re-engages Manhattan's interest in humanity.

On Earth, Nite Owl and Rorschach continue to uncover the conspiracy surrounding the death of the Comedian. They discover evidence that their former comrade Adrian Veidt may be behind the plan. Confronting Veidt at his Antarctic retreat, the pair discover the far-reaching implications of the multiple mysteries. Veidt explains his underlying plan is to stave off impending nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union and save humanity by faking an alien invasion in New York City. Finding his logic callous and abhorrent, Dreiberg and Rorschach attempt to stop him but discover that Veidt has already enacted his plan.

When Manhattan and Laurie arrive back to Earth, they are confronted by mass destruction and wide scale death in New York City. With Manhattan's abilities limited by tachyons emanating from the Antarctic, the pair teleport there. They discover Veidt's involvement and confront him. Veidt explains his logic and actions to Manhattan, leading almost all present agree that concealing the truth from the public was in the best interests of the world. Rorschach refuses to compromise, and leaves intent on revealing the truth. As he is making his way back, he is confronted by Manhattan. Rorschach tells Mahattan to kill him, and he is vaporized by the super-powered being. Dreiberg and Juspeczyk go into hiding under new identities, while Veidt asks Manhattan if he did the right thing. Manhattan tells Veidt "Nothing ever changes" before leaving Earth.

Characters

Main article: List of characters in Watchmen

Alan Moore embarked to create four or five "radically opposing ways" to perceive the world and to give readers of Watchmen the privilege of determining which one was most morally comprehensible. Moore did not believe in the notion of "[cramming] regurgitated morals" down the readers' throats and instead sought to show heroes in an ambivalent light. Moore said, "What we wanted to do was show all of these people, warts and all. Show that even the worst of them had something going for them, and even the best of them had their flaws."

• Rorschach: A vigilante who wears a white mask that contains constantly shifting ink blots, he continues to fight crime in spite of his outlaw status. Moore said he was trying to "come up with this quintessential Steve Ditko character - someone who's got a funny name, whose surname begins with a 'K,' who's got an oddly designed mask". Moore based Rorschach on Ditko's creation Mr. A; Ditko's Charlton character the The Question also served as a template for creating Rorschach. Comics historian Bradford W. Wright described the character's worldview a "a set of black-and-white values that take many shapes but never mix into shades of gray, similar to the ink ink blot tests of his namesake". Rorschach sees existence as random and, according to Wright, this viewpoint leaves the character "free to 'scrawl [his] own design' on a 'morally blank world'". Moore said he did not foresee the death of Rorschach until the fourth issue when he realized that Rorschach's refusal to compromise would need to lead to the character's death.
• Doctor Manhattan: A superhero with genuine powers who is contracted by the United States government. Scientist Jon Osterman gained superpowers when he was caught in a nuclear explosion in 1959. Alan Moore originally proposed the preexisting character Captain Atom as a nuclear superhero who would be surrounded by the shadow of nuclear threat. The writer had considered the origins of nuclear superheroes in comic book history before Dr. Manhattan's creation. In opposition to the past superheroes that lacked scientific exploration of their origins, Moore sought to delve into the nuclear physics and quantum physics in constructing the character of Dr. Manhattan. The writer believed that a character living in a quantum universe would not perceive time with a linear perspective, which would influence the character's perception of human affairs. Moore also wanted to avoid creating an emotionless character like Spock from Star Trek, so he sought for Dr. Manhattan to retain "human habits" and to grow away from them and humanity in general.
• Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl II: A retired vigilante superhero who utilizes owl-themed gadgets. Nite Owl was based on the Ted Kord version of the Blue Beetle, and Moore also incorporated an original version of the Nite Owl into Watchmen, similarly to how Ted Kord had a predecessor. Richard Reynolds noted in Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology that Nite Owl modus operandi has more in common with the DC Comics character Batman.
• Laurie Juspeczyk / Silk Spectre II: The daughter of the first Silk Spectre, with whom she has a strained relationship. Silk Spectre was not based on a particular Charlton character; rather, Moore felt he needed a female hero in the cast and drew inspiration from heroines such as Black Canary and Phantom Lady.
• Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias: A retired superhero who runs his own enterprise. Ozymandias was directly based on Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, whom Moore had admired in using full brain capacity as well as possessing full and mental control.
• Edward Blake / The Comedian: Already deceased when the story begins, his murder is what sets the plot in motion. The charater appears throughout the story in flashbacks and aspects of his personality are revealed by other charcters. The Comedian was based on Peacemaker, with elements of the Marvel Comics spy character Nick Fury added. Moore and Gibbons saw the Comedian as "a kind of Gordon Liddy character, only a much bigger, tougher guy". Richard Reynolds described the Comedian as "ruthless, cynical, and nihilistic, and yet capable of deeper insights than the others into the role of the costumed hero". Along with Dr. Manhattan, he is the only goverment-sacntioned superhero after the Keene Act banning superheroes is passed. Although he attempted to rape the first Silk Spectre in 1940, he is revealed to be Laurie's true father in issue eight.

Publication and reception

When Moore and Gibbons turned in the first issue of Watchmen to DC, their peers were stunned. Gibbons recalled, "What really clinched it [...] was [writer/artist] Howard Chaykin, who doesn't give praise lightly, and who came up and said, 'Dave what you've done on Watchmen is fuckin' A.'" Speaking in 1986, Moore stated that "DC backed us all the way... and have been really supportive about even the most graphic excesses." To promote the series, DC Comics released a limited-edition badge ("button") display card set, featuring characters and images from the series. 10,000 sets of the four badges, including a replica of the blood-stained smiley face badge worn by The Comedian in the story, were released and sold. Moore stated in 1985 that if the maxiseries was well-received, he and Gibbons would possibly create a 12-issue prequel series called Minutemen featuring the 1940s superhero group from the story."

Watchmen was published in single-issue form over the course of 1986 and 1987. The miniseries was a commercial success, and its sales helped DC Comics briefly overtake its competitor Marvel Comics in the comic book direct market. The series' publishing schedule ran into delays because it was scheduled with three issues completed instead of the six Len Wein believed were necessary. Further delays were caused when later issues each took more than a month to complete. Bhob Stewart of the The Comics Journal noted in Spring 1987 that issue #12, which DC solicited for April 1987, "looks like it won't debut until July or August".

Watchmen received critical praise, both inside and outside of the comics industry. Time, which noted that the series was "by common assent the best of breed [sic]" of the new wave of comics published at the time, praised Watchmen as "a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi, political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats into a dysutopian mystery story." Watchmen has also received several awards spanning different categories and genres including: Kirby Awards for Best Finite Series, Best New Series, Best Writer, and Best Writer/Artist, Eisner Awards for Best Finite Series, Best Graphic Album, Best Writer, and Best Writer/Artist, and a Hugo Award in the Other Forms.

In his review of the Absolute Edition of the collection, Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times wrote that the dark legacy of Watchmen, "one that Moore almost certainly never intended, whose DNA is encoded in the increasingly black inks and bleak storylines that have become the essential elements of the contemporary superhero comic book," is "a domain he has largely ceded to writers and artists who share his fascination with brutality but not his interest in its consequences, his eagerness to tear down old boundaries but not his drive to find new ones." In 1999, The Comics Journal ranked Watchmen at number 91 on its list of the Top 100 English-Language Comics of the 20th Century. Watchmen was the only graphic novel to appear on Time's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present". Time critic Lev Grossman described the story was "a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium." In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed it at number 13 on its list of the best 50 novels printed in the last 25 years, describing it as "The greatest superhero story ever told and proof that comics are capable of smart, emotionally resonant narratives worthy of the label literature.

Disagreements about the ownership of the story ultimately led Alan Moore to sever ties with DC Comics. Not wanting to work under a work for hire arrangment, Moore and Gibbons had a reversion clause in their contract for Watchmen. Speaking at the 1985 San Diego Comicon, Moore said "The way it works, if I understand it, is that DC owns it for the time they're publishing it, and then it reverts to Dave and me, so we can make all the money from the Slurpee cups." For Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons received eight percent of the series' earnings. Moore explained in 1986 that his understanding was that when "DC have not used the characters for a year, they're ours." Both Moore and Gibbons said DC paid them "a substantial amount of money" to retain the rights. Moore added, "So basically they're not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn't want to do anything with them, then after a year we've got them and we can do what we want with them, which I'm perfectly happy with." Moore says he left DC in 1989 due to the language in his contracts for Watchmen and his V for Vendetta series with artist David Lloyd. Moore felt the reversion clauses were ultimately meaningless, because DC did not intend to let the publications go out of print. He told The New York Times in 2006, "I said, 'Fair enough,' [...] 'You have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again.'" In 2000, Moore publically distanced himself from DC's plans for a fifteenth anniversary Watchmen hardcover release as well as a proposed line of action figures. While DC wanted to mend its relationship with the writer, Moore felt the company was not treating him fairly in regards to his America's Best Comics imprint (launched under the Wildstorm comic imprint, which was bought by DC in 1998; Moore was promised no direct interference by DC as part of the arrangement). Moore added, "As far as I'm concerned, the 15th anniversary of Watchmen is purely a 15th Anniversary of when DC managed to take the Watchmen property from me and Dave [Gibbons]."

Structure and composition

Watchmen was designed to showcase the uniqueness of the comics medium, highlighting its many particular strengths. In a 986 interview, Moore said, "What I'd like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating", and stressed differences between comics and film. Talking specifically about the many layers, Moore said that Watchmen was designed to be read "four or five times," with some links and allusions only becoming apparent to the reader after several readings.

Structurally, certain aspect of Watchmen deviated from the norm in comic books at the time. The cover of each issue serves as the first panel to the story. Gibbons said, "The cover of the Watchmen is in the real world and looks quite real, but it's starting to turn into a comic book, a portal to another dimension." The covers were designed as close-up that focused on a single detail with no human elements present. Instead of panels of various sizes, the creators divided each page into a nine-panel grid. Bhob Stewart of The Comics Journal mentioned to Gibbons in 1987, that the "page layouts also echo EC [in addition to the art itself, which Stewart felt particularly echoed that of John Severin]." Gibbons agreed that the echoing of the EC-style layouts "was a very deliberate thing," although altered enough to give the series a unique look Colorist John Higgins used a template that was "moodier" and favored secondary colors. Moore stated that he had also "always loved John's coloring, but always associated him with being an airbrush colorist," which Moore was not fond of. Higgins subsequently decided to color Watchmen in "European-style flat color," and, noted Moore, paid particular attention to lighting and subtle color changes, "which is much more emotional and much more atmospheric than very straight plastic color all the way through."

The end of each issue (save for issue 12) contains supplemental prose pieces written by Moore. Among the contents are book chapters, letters, reports, and articles written by various characters. DC had trouble selling ad space in issues of Watchmen, which left an extra eight to nine pages per issue. DC planned to insert house ads and a longer letters column to fill the space, but editor Len Wein felt this would unfair to anyone who wrote in during the last four issues of the series. He decided to use the extra pages to fill out the series' backstory. Moore said, "By the time we got around to issue #3, #4, and so on, we thought that the book looked nice without a letters page. It looks less like a comic book, so we stuck with it."

Grid structure

The visual look of Watchmen was deliberately constructed, Gibbons saying in 2000 that "I knew from the beginning that I wanted every page of Watchmen to be very clearly a page of Watchmen, and not some other comic book." < Artists on Art, p. 77> He made a concerted effort to draw the characters in a manner different than that commonly seen in comics, saying "If I drew superheroes the way people always drew superheroes, there'd be nothing to distinguish Watchmen, ...from all the other superhero comics." <Artists on Art, p. 77> "I also tried to draw Watchmen with a particular weight of line, using a hard, stiff pen that didn't have much modulation in terms of thick and thin... which, I hoped, would differentiate it from the usual lush, fluid kind of comic book line." < Artists on Art, p. 80>

Geoff Klock considers the look of the characters to be crucial to the vision and revisionary nature of the whole: "Gibbons's characters... all have a distinct sadness, and his frumpy charcters stand in stark contrast to... ["'cool'" characters]. Moore's realism does not empower... but empties out the power of previous superhero narratives to ensure the primacy of Watchmen in the tradition [of superhero comics]." <Klock, p. 65>

A key element to the visual look of the story was the fairly-strict panels-per-page layout, which Gibbons described in the following way: "I think I just liked the feeling of authority that the nine-panel grid gave you as an artist. It's like watching something on television or at the movies, this idea of a proscenium arch, where you have a single, fixed viewpoint in front of which things move." < Artists on Art, p. 80>

Having formulated this approach, Gibbons suggested it to the author, who " thought it worked well, because I had used very complicated drawings and yet still managed to tell a straight-forward story." < Artists on Art, p. 80> Moore latched onto this idea, using it to particularly control the ultimate denouement and the pacing, since, Gibbons noted, " he found he had a level of control over the storytelling he hadn't had previously. There was this element of the pacing and visual impact that he could now predict and use to dramatic effect." < Artists on Art, p. 82>

The restrictive layout also inspired artistic innovation in the creators: "It became a great challenge with Watchmen to vary the compositing within essentially the same space. Basic art theory states that within a given area there are certain points that the eye is attracted to, hot-spots if you like, and that's where you tend to place what it is you really want people to look at. One way of mapping these hot-spots is the rule of thirds, which in itself is a nine-panel grid." < Artists on Art, p. 92>

Tales of the Black Freighter

In the story, Tales of the Black Freighter is a comic book read by a teenage boy while he sits beside a newsstand, whose proprietor contemplates the latest headlines and discusses them with his customers. This juxtaposition of text and images from the story within a story and its framing sequence uses the former to act as a parallel commentary to the latter—which is the plot of Watchmen itself. Specifically, Moore has said that the story of The Black Freighter ends up describing "the story of Adrian Veidt" (who admits, in his final scene, to having a recurring nightmare resembling a prominent image from The Black Freighter). In addition, the comic can also be seen to relate "'to Rorschach and his capture; it relates to the self-marooning of Dr. Manhattan on Mars; it can be used as a counterpoint to all these different parts of the story."

A pirate comic book was conceived because Moore and Gibbons thought that since the inhabitants of the Watchmen universe experience superheroes in real life, "they probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics." Gibbons suggested a pirate theme, and Moore agreed in part because he is "a big Brecht fan": the Black Freighter alludes to the song "Seeräuberjenny" ("Pirate Jenny") from Brecht (and Kurt Weill)'s Threepenny Opera. Moore theorized that with super-heroes existing, and existing as "objects of fear, loathing, and scorn, the main super-heroes quickly fell out of popularity in comic books, as we suggest. Mainly, genres like horror, science fiction, and piracy, particularly piracy, became prominent--with EC riding the crest of the wave." Moore felt that "the imagery of the whole pirate genre is so rich and dark that it provided a perfect counterpoint to the contemporary world of Watchmen."

The real-life artist Joe Orlando is credited in Watchmen as a major contributor to Tales of the Black Freighter, (drawing the back-up "Blackbeard" pages in Watchmen #5) because Moore felt that, in the Watchmen universe, "if pirates were popular, if EC was popular, then it did sound conceivable that Julie Schwartz might have tried to lure Joe Orlando over to do a pirate book for DC, and Tales of the Black Freighter might very well have been the book."

Symbols and allusions

Moore named William S. Burroughs as one of his "main influences" during the conception of Watchmen and admired Burroughs' use of "repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning" in Burroughs' only comic strip, The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, which appeared in the British underground magazine Cyclops. Not every intertextual link was planned by Moore, who remarked that "there's stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read," while other "things... turned up in there by accident." However, he stresses that

“ "what we were trying to do was to create something which has a structure that is multi-faceted enough and has enough layers to it so that each subsequent issue redefines bits of the ones that have come before. So that you can check back to when you saw it earlier, see the little bits that are going on, find out more. So that it does reward multiple readings. So that it has got a greater density." ”

In addition to the specific tropes and icons that are scattered throughout Watchmen in various forms, there are also a number of specific allusions and references to various historical events, literary and popular cultural items. Moore credits many of these to his artistic collaborator, saying in 1987 that "[t]he insane amount of detail that Dave is putting into these panels is bordering upon the Wally Wood/Bill Elder crammed-panel details that you got in Mad."

Smiley face

The iconic, blood-stained, smiley face, swiftly adopted as the semi-official logo for Watchmen, is present on the cover of all the diverse reprintings of the maxiseries (bar the first printing, (above), where it is only one small cover element). It is also a perpetually recurrent image in the story in many forms. Asked in 1988 about the Smiley face, Moore pointed his and Gibbons' usage to the symbol's origins in "behavioural psychology tests." He recalled that the tests

“ "tried to find the simplest abstraction that would make a baby smile. Eventually they got it down to a circle, two dots and a little arc. In some ways that's a symbol of complete innocence. Putting a blood splash over the eye changes its meaning… it made a pretty good image for a first issue cover." ”

Hollis Mason carves a Jack O'Lantern into a smiley face, and his hair falls across his own face echoing the image just prior to his death. In Tales of the Black Freighter, the hero wounds a shark in its eye, and the Owlship is struck by fruit during the riots, which acts as the blood to the Owlship's "face." Although most evocations of the central image were purposefully created, others were coincidental. In 1988, Moore mentioned in particular the coincidence of

“ "the little plugs on the spark hydrants, if you turn them upside down, you discover a little smiley face. Watchmen was a stream of weird shit and coincidence from beginning to end. Bizarre things kept hitting us in the face and they were perfect for us. Like looking through NASA photos of Mars and finding a smiley face up there." ”

Symmetry

Talking in September, 1986, Moore remarked that "[t]he story's just gone on getting more and more complex." Gibbons noted that "the issue that's just out, #5, is about symmetry." Titled "Fearful Symmetry," Chapter five is even drawn so the first page mirrors the last (in terms of frame disposition), with the following pages mirroring each other before the centre-spread is (broadly) symmetrical in layout. Gibbons also cites a "spooky coincidence," involved in the artwork for issue #5, when he sought an image for "a scene... where the two detectives we feature are called to this apartment," and happened upon a book called The Album Cover Album looking for an album by the Grateful Dead. He was surprised to discover "an album called Aoxomoxoa, which is a symmetrical word," (also an ambigram and palindrome), with noted Moore "a Rick Griffin cover as well, which is absolutely symmetrical," and subsequently can be seen in poster form during issue #5. Gibbons also noted that the album also highlighted Watchmen imagery including a skull and crossbones. The skull and crossbones was used primarily as a pirate motif in the Tales of the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic, but due to the self-imposed symmetrical requirements of issue #5, Moore & Gibbons created a stylised skull & crossbones logo for the 'Rumrunners' bar, to allow for symmetrical continuity.

Themes

Wright desribed Watchmen as "Moore's obituary for the concept of heroes in general and superheroes in particular". Putting the story in a contemporary sociological context, Wright wrote that the characters of Watchmen were Moore's "admonition to those who trusted in 'heroes' and leaders to guard the world's fate". He added that to place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to "the Reagans, Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world who supposed to 'rescue' us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process". Moore specifically stated in 1986 that he was writing Watchmen to be "not anti-Americanism, [but] anti-Reaganism," specifically believing that "at the moment a certain part of Reagan's America isn't scared. They think they're invulnerable." While Moore wanted to write about "power politics" and the "worrying" times he lived in, he stated the reason that the story was set in an alternate reality was because he was worried that readers would "switch off" if he attacked a leader they admired. Moore stated in 1986 that he "was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy."

"Watchmen"

Moore noted in September 1986 that he and Gibbons "didn't know where the quote came from until I had a phone call from Harlan Ellison, who phoned up just to tell me because he'd seen us expressing our ignorance in [comics magazine] Amazing Heroes, and wanted to put us out of our misery... it was said originally by the satirist Juvenal, and it was the quote that got him slung out of Rome and placed in exile. It's a dangerous political quote." In Watchmen, Moore shows a "grittier" side to the conceived notion of the superhero.

According to E Strobel, the title refers not only to the group of superheroes depicted, but also to the media, government officials, and ultimately the author and reader. Strobel proposes the idea that the title is "a call to action on the part of Moore ... [and the] underlying message from Moore to his readers is that as citizens, they should also be watching the watchmen of their world".

Realism

Although the tone of Watchmen is broadly realistic, the setting is an alternate version of America in 1985, which Moore noted gave the creators "a little bit more leeway, particularly with the art, because it is a parallel world." This allowed Gibbons to change "some bits about the American landscape, like electric cars, slightly different buildings, everyone's wearing double-breasted suits, there's little spark hydrants for recharging your cars instead of fire hydrants," which said Moore, "perhaps gives the American readership a chance in some ways to see their own culture as an outsider world." Gibbons noted that this was

“ "a really liberating thing... because I don't have to get a load of reference books out and get bogged down in reference. I can give it the feeling of America without having to draw a certain model of car, or a certain building or a certain place. I draw the Chrysler building, the sort of art deco thing, and by putting that in it just gives it that tie into reality to make it convincing. ”

Gibbons felt that "Alan is more concerned with the social implications of [the presence of super-heroes] and I've gotten involed in the technical implications. You've got electric cars and airships because of the technological breakthrough."

Asked in 1986 about trying to rationalize 'super-heroic realism' "without the fascist overtones," Moore stated that Watchmen was deliberately different to the 'realistic' take of Squadron Supreme and Dark Knight Returns, eschewing the storyline of "the super-heroes tak[ing] over," in favor of showing how the characters are "not in control of their world." Instead

“ "Our intention was to show how super-heroes could deform the world just by being there, not that they'd have to take it over, just their presence there would make the difference." ”

The sheen of realism is underscored by the attention to detail that is threaded throughout the story. Moore and Gibbons endeavored to create a logically and structurally sound microcosm, which was noted from the beginning. Writing in 1987, Bhob Stewart noted that Dr. Manhattan's cuff-links in issue #3 float alongside him as he dresses, vanish alongside him, and even follow him as he teleports to the television studio. Moore is particularly proud of the moment when the Silk Spectre is given an oxygen bubble by Manhattan when the two of them are on Mars, and, attempting to smoke, "tries twice to light the cigarette [but] the lighter won't work because there's no oxygen." Moore says that these quietly realistic asides, which are typically "not referred to in the dialogue at all," are included "to give it a depth of reality... [although] it's incredibly difficult to work all that detail in."

Editions

Originally published as twelve individual comics issues (cover-dated between September 1986 and October 1987), the series was subsequently collected and reprinted in one trade paperback collection (often referred to as a 'graphic novel') (ISBN 0-930289-23-4). A special limited edition, slipcased hardcover volume was produced by Graphitti Designs in 1987, containing 48 pages of bonus material, including the original proposal and concept art.

In 2005, DC released Absolute Watchmen (ISBN 1-4012-0713-8), an oversized, slipcased hardcover edition of Watchmen in DC's 'Absolute Edition' series, to celebrate its upcoming 20th anniversary. The larger-than-regular slipcased volume made widely available the bonus material from the Graphitti edition, and featured restored and recolored art by John Higgins at Wildstorm FX, under the direction of Dave Gibbons. A regular hardcover edition (ISBN 1-401219-26-8) is to be released November 4, 2008, and will be the first 'normal' hardcover edition, following the Graphitti and Absolute slipcased tomes and a 1987 Book Club edition. Recently, the first issue has been released on iTunes, though instead of a static image contained inside a panel, it is a fully animated episode with voiceovers.

Film adaptation

Main article: Watchmen (film)

Over the years, directors including Terry Gilliam, Darren Arronofsky, and screenwriter David Hayter have been attached to the a proposed film version of Watchmen. Warner Bros. Studios announced in June 2006 that Zack Snyder would direct a film adaptation of Watchmen, which is set for release on March 9, 2009.

Moore has refused to have his name attached to any film adaptations of his work. Moore has stated he has no interest in seeing Snyder's adaptation; he told Entertainment Weekly in 2008, "There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't". While Moore believes that David Hayter's screenplay was "as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen," he asserted he did not intend to see the film if it were made. However, Gibbons feels Snyder can make a good film and is supporting him.

After the trailer to the film premired in July 2008, DC Comics president Paul Levitz said due to the subsequent demand for copies of Watchmen, the company has printed more 900,000 copies of the trade collection, with the total annual print run expected to be over one million copies.

Miscellaneous

Alan Moore was influenced by American novelist William S. Burroughs in writing Watchmen. Moore drew from Burroughs's ideas of repeated symbolism that became familiar with meaning, describing the method of repetition to be like a musical score, being played throughout the work.

Moore drew the recurring symbol of the smiley face from psychological tests of behaviorism, explaining that the tests had presented the face as "a symbol of complete innocence". With the addition of a blood splash over the eye, Moore altered the face's meaning to become simultaneously radical and simple enough for the Watchmen first issue's cover to avoid human detail.

Moore credits Gibbons with coming up with many of the signature symbols in Watchmen, including the iconic smiley face, which was "derived from behavioral psychology tests. They tried to find the simplest abstraction that would make a baby smile." Contrary to popular opinion, Gibbons contends that Rorschach's subtle body language and not his Rorschach test-inspired mask are the real indications of his mood.

Moore particularly praised Higgins, saying

“ "Something that's really good about John as a colorist concerns issue #6. It's the Rorschach story, and it's really depressing... The cover is a Rorschach blot, a card from the psychology tests just lying on a table, a pretty simple cover. John colored the cover and colored it really warm and cheerful, and it looks really nice. And Dave was saying, 'Look, this is a bit of a bleak issue. Why have you colored it warm and cheerful?' And [John] said, 'Well, that's my plan. It starts off really warm and cheerful, so you color them that way, and on page five we make it a bit darker, and on page seven darker still, and it's like the lights are going down the entire issue, so when you get to the end it's really dark and really bleak.' Emotionally, John is using the colors to really take the readers down, which is really clever. That's the kind of thinking that we're trying to do with the art and the story, and it's really nice that John is trying to put the same thing through with the coloring." ”

Synchronicity and happenchance played a large part in how the series came together and evolved. Moore mentioned the most famous back in November 1986, telling Bhob Stewart that "[t]here are all sorts of things; the latest is something that nobody's ever going to believe: Dave has found a photograph of Mars in a book, a photograph of a crater with a smaller crater inside that's partially eroded and a couple of boulders - photographed from the air. The caption under the photograph is: 'A Martian smiley face.'" Moore also mentioned that "[t]he whole thing with Watchmen has just been loads of these little bits of synchronicity popping up all over the place." Another Moore mentioned specifically was the synchronous links between Watchmen and Alexander the Great - some deliberate, some coincidental:

"We found a lot of these things started to generate themselves as if by magic. We needed a name for the lock company, because I decided that if we were going to show Rorschach bursting in doors, it would be a nice naturalistic touch to show the people getting the doors repaired later... I needed a name for the lock company, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have the Gordian Knot Lock Company?' So we played around with that [and with the company's slogan: 'They'll never undo this sucker!']. When we were doing Dr. Manhattan on Mars, I asked Dave for a particular sort of crater. I said I wanted one of those nice flat featureless, monotonous Martian craters, with just this little blue man walking across it, kicking up loads of pink dust. Dave found a picture almost exactly as I described in my panel descriptions. The caption under the picture said, 'This is the so-and-so crater near the Nodus Gordii Mountains on Mars.' [Nodus Gordii is Latin for 'Gordian Knot.'] Which was an astonishing coincidence."

The dichotomy between the familiar and the unfamiliar, caused because of the alternate-historical setting of the series, Moore has said, "perhaps gives the American readership a chance in some ways to see their own culture as an outsider world."

The quote is given in its entirety at the end of the chapter, and aptly summarizes the events that have just occurred. In some cases, the quote was chosen without Moore having definite knowledge of its source. His friend and protégé Neil Gaiman recalls phone calls from Moore requesting help with locating sources of quotes and recommendations for relevant quotes - Gaiman found Moore quotes from Job and Eleanor Farjeon for issues #7 and #8, and suggested the source that saw "Ozymandias quoting Rameses in Watchmen [issue #12, p. 20]."

(Re)Visionary

Geoff Klock eschewed the commonly-associated term "deconstruction" in favour of describing Watchmen as a "revisionary superohero narrative." He, as do most comics historians, considers Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns to be "the first instances... of [a] new kind of comic book... a first phase of development, the transition of the superhero from fantasy to literature." Klock writes

""The statement ['Who watches the Watchmen?'] contains a kind of a priori destabilization of the assumptions that make superhero comics work: that heroes can simply look after a population without complications." <Klock, p.62>

He elaborates by noting that "Alan Moore's realism... performs a kenosis towards comic book history... [which] does not ennoble and empower his characters... Rather, it sends a wave of disruption back through superhero history... devalue[ing] one of the basic superhero conventions by placing his masked crime fighters in a realistic world..."<p.63> First and foremost, "Moore's exploration of the [often sexual] motives for costumed crimefighting sheds a disturbing light on past superhero stories, and forces the reader to reevaluate - to revision - every superhero in terms of Moore's kenosis - his emptying out of the tradition." <Klock, p. 65>

Dave Gibbons agrees that the series was more about comics than one itself, saying in 1987 that "in a way, Watchmen is a comic about comics. I think that to confront the issues of comics in a comic world was quite an exciting thing to do." Thirteen years later, he mused that Watchmen "was a kind of an investigation into superheroes," an " opportunity to investigate all kinds of narrative possibilities. There are certain things you can do in comics that you can't do elsewhere." < Artists on Art, p. 94>

Jeff McLaughlin writes "Watchmen deconstructs the [idea of the] hero by developing its heroes." Dave Gibbons notes that, "[a]s it progressed, Watchmen became much more about the telling than the tale itself. The main thrust of the story essentially hinges on what is called a macguffin, a gimmick... So really the plot itself is of no great consequence... it just really isn't the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, that's where the real creativity came in. For me, personally, the real realisation was that Watchmen was not a superhero story. I'd been thinking of it as such, but really it was a science fiction story, a slice of life from an alternate world." < Artists on Art, p. 82>

The deconstructive nature of Watchmen, is, Klock notes, played out on the page also as, "[l]ike Alan Moore's kenosis, [Veidt] must destroy, then reconstruct, in order to build 'a unity which would survive him.'" < Klock, p. 75>

((PeterSanderson talks about it examining the genre))

Intertextuality/metafiction/etc.

"Watchmen's scene juxtaposition is crucial. Again and again two seemingly unrelated scenes are juxtaposed, and the dialogue from one is a running commentary on the other." < Klock, p.67>

RANDOM QUOTES (lit. Crit)

GIBBONS: "Our intention with Watchmen was to tell a story that was engrossing and convincing in the way that a lot of other comics weren't." < Artists on Art, p. 77>

MARK SALISBURY: "It's arguably a career best for both Moore and Gibbons, and the subtleties in script and artwork still dazzle. The story, such as it is, is almost incidental. There are so many layers and subtexts and an audacious, pre-Tarantino, use of multiple, overlapping, unchronological story threads, that each page merits intense study." <Artists on Art, p. 83>

"Throughout Watchmen it can be seen that meaning is elsewhere, deferred, and very unaware of its relevancy. Within the text this takes the form of spatial juxtaposition, but this method also illustrates Watchmen's place among the texts that inform it, and which it informs... This structure of deferred action, as it is known in psychoanalysis, powerfully informs the reader's understanding of Watchmen." < Klock, p.66>

"To a large degree, Watchmen is an attempt to provide the dead a proper burial, making sure its predecessors find their proper place in the text of tradition, and ensuring that Watchmen incurs, despite its obvious poetic inheritance, no unpaid symbolic debt that the dead will return to collect." < Klock, p.66>

ART QUOTE

"[A] lot of the storytelling in Watchmen is actually Harvey Kurtzman storytelling; the idea of having a bank of pictures with a fixed viewpoint in each one and elements moving within in, and, conversely, moving a figure through a changing landscape. The nine-panel grid layout comes largely from the EC Comics of the forties and fifties, and from those early Amazing Spider-Man issues that Steve Ditko drew. Both had a kind of hypnotic power, mainly because they were done on that very structured nine-panel grid."< Artists on Art, p. 77-80>

CHARACTERS

THE COMEDIAN

Vital information "I remember when I came to design the Comedian, who was supposed to be this deeply ominous character, Alan had originally envisaged him kind of military-style, dressed primarily in khaki. I tried it that way and he ended up looking a bit drab, so instead we went for black leather and I gave him the shoulder pad with a bit of the stars and stripes on it. Once we'd added the rapist's mask he looked ominous all right, but now I thought, 'He doesn't look like a comedian at all', and so, on a whim, I drew a smiley face badge, just to lighten the overall design. It didn't have any particular significance to me, but Alan saw it and was inspired. We had to kill the Comedian, we both knew that, but first we had to imply that he'd been killed. We decided to show the smiley badge in a gutter full of blood. and then a splash of blood on the badge itself. And when we thought about it some more, that smiley face became a symbol for the whole series. It's the simplest cartoon image; a configuration of lines even a baby would respond to and smile. Then you add the realistic blood drop on it, and it's like we've taken this cartoon and made it real."< Artists on Art, p. 80>

"The Comedian, in one of Moore's more powerful tropes, is a kind of Captain America if Captain America had gone to Vietnam." < Klock, p.66>

VEIDT

"Adrian Veidt's (Ozymandias's) optimism, confidence, and Antarctic headquarters invoke Superman and his Fortress of Solitude. His wealth, intelligence, birthday (1939), and perfected human physical prowess recall Batman. His role in his corporation suggests Bruce Wayne and Wayne Corp." < Klock, p.65-66>

DAN

"Dan Dreiberg, visually suggests an impotent, middle-aged Clark Kent."< Klock, p. 66>

RORSCHACH

"Rorschach's reactionary, violent, obsessive-loner personality and refusal to compromise suggests the same Batman picked up on by Frank Miller, or Marvel Comics' Wolverine, or the Punisher." < Klock, p.66>

JON

"Dr. Manhattan... aloof, almost alien, and never aging, suggests Superman. The reference to 'Wally Weaver... Dr. Manhattan's buddy' reminds the reader of 'Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Pal', and indeed, in the graphic for the military complex in which Dr. Manhattan lives is imbedded the Superman shield." < Klock, p.66>

TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER

"Another idea that came out of nowhere was the pirate comic. When I was trying to flesh out the world that Alan had largely created; you know, what clothes would they wear, what sort of food would they eat, what would the technology be like, one of the things that really made me stop and wonder was, what sort of comics would they read? I reasoned, well, they wouldn't be reading superhero comics, so what's as exciting as superheroes? Cowboys? Pirates? Yeah, pirates! They have these bloodcurdling exploits and they wear bright costumes, it was perfect. And that was as far as I went with it, but then Alan decided we'd actually have a kid reading a pirate comic and that grew still further to encompass all the subtext and allegorical stuff that featured in Tales of the Black Freighter, as it was called." < Artists on Art, p. 80-82>

"As a warning for heroes, the plot of 'Tales of the Black Freighter,' clearly juxtaposes itself against the plot of Watchmen as a whole - a man, attempting to save his family and home from destruction, becomes, in his obsession, the very instrument for the force he was trying to stop." < Klock, p.69>

"In 'Tales of the Black Freighter,' the dead become an emblem of Watchmen's submerged past that informs, supports, and threatens Moore's narrative."< Klock, p.69>

"The craft [the raft from 'Tales of the Black Freighter'] is a disturbing and powerful emblem of Watchmen, sailing on the gas-filled - literally 'inspired' - dead history of old comic book literature (inspired, from the Latin inspirare, 'to fill with wind'). After dreaming upon their bodies, Watchmen (and our narrator, as an emblem of the revisionist) finds a way to utilize, to hijack, their inspiration, rather than toss another body, its own, on the heap - and cobbles together their ruins, stopping to appreciate unique moments of beauty or question old markings. The utilization of tradition and influence is not an idle game of tongue-in-cheek allusions but is actually necessary for the narrative's survival... If our 'revisionary' narrator or revisionary antihero of 'Tales of the Black Freighter' is not supported by a number of 'inspired,' gas-bloated bodies, his craft - the revisionary narrative - will sink." < Klock, p. 69-70>

SYNCHRONICITY

"[W]e very much had the sense that rather us doing Watchmen, it was being done through us. For instance, there are details that only became apparent afterwards. There's a thing I drew maybe twenty times; the little plug in the power hydrants in the street, and it wasn't until the very last issue that it was pointed out to me this thing with the two plug holes was also a smiley face." < Artists on Art, p. 82>

SCRIPT

Gibbons, speaking in April 1987 said that the two of them had "since about issue #4," undertaken their work "just several pages at a time. I'll get three pages of script from Alan and draw it and then toward the end, call him up and say, 'Feed me!' And he'll send another two or three pages or maybe one page or sometimes six pages." In 2000, he noted "This is in the days before fax machines, so the script was physically sent down to me in a taxi, a couple of pages at a time." < Artists on Art, p. 94>

"Alan's work always has a three-dimensional aspect to it, and I like to think that from an artistic point of view I also visualise scenes in a very three-dimensional way." < Artists on Art, p. 82-83>

"Alan wrote Watchmen and I drew it, but there's a big area in the middle where we overlapped. In other words, he's a writer with a very strong visual sense and I'm an artist with a very strong narrative sense."< Artists on Art, p. 94>

"There was only one instance I can remember where I actually had to ask Alan to cut the words down, which is the scene in issue #11 where Rorschach and Nite Owl are in Veidt's Antarctic fortress, and Veidt is explaining what he's done as he fights them. When i came to draw it, it just seemed physically unlikely that so many words could be spoken while things were happening so quickly. I mentioned this to Alan and he could see my point, so he skilfully made them say the same thing but in about half as many words." < Artists on Art, p. 94>

SYMMETRY

[Fearful Symmetry] "was written and drawn almost a page at a time, so that we could mess around with it a bit to make sure the mirror structure worked exactly. ." < Artists on Art, p. 94>

THE TPB

"Along with Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen can be credited with exposing comics, and specifically graphic novel collections, to a much wider, more mainstream audience. First published in 1986 as a twelve-issue maxi-series, Watchmen - with its adult sensibilities, intelligent script and finely detailed artwork - opened doors into the general book trade that had previously been tightly closed." < Artists on Art, p. 83>

(Along with "Dark Knight...") "the two titles were repackaged from their original bit-part form into square-bound books, and then marketed as 'graphic novels'... [which] meant that publishers could sell adult comics to a wider public by giving them another name: specifically, by associating them with novels, and disassociating them from comics. They hoped that, even though the actual stories were about superheroes, people would buy them on the grounds that they represented a 'new wave' of literature."<Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, p. 165>

"As a result of the publicity given to the [graphic novel] form in 1987, graphic novels were taken up in high-street bookshops and public libraries, where special shelves were devoted to them. At the same time, the many reviews in the literary sections of newspapers meant that the names of Alan Moore and Frank Miller became widely recognized... the time was ripe for regular comics publishers to capitalize on the situation. Now just about every new comics series was commissioned on the basis that it would eventually be collected into a graphic novel, while at the same time there was a rush to repackage runs of four, six or eight comics into album form..."<C,C and GN, pp. 165-167>

N.B. COMICS COMIX AND GRAPHIC NOVELS MAKES IT CLEAR – AS SHOULD WIKIPEDIA – THAT THIS IS NOT WHAT A "GRAPHIC NOVEL" IS. From CCGN: "Although these books were routinely marketed as graphic novels, there were also more accurately known as 'trade paperbacks'." <CCGN, p. 175> THIS IS A VITALLY IMPORTANT POINT TO MAKE. SOMEHOW

THE LAST WORD ON THE SUBJECT OF WATCHMEN

"People were left with the idea that it was a grim and gritty kind of thing, but if you read the Nite owl chapter for example, it's all about the joy and the romance of being a hero and having this costume with these cool gadgets and getting the girl. To me the series was a wonderful celebration of superheroes as much as anything else." < Artists on Art, p. 96>

References

• Eury, Michael; Giordano, Dick. Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time. TwoMorrows Publishing, 2003. ISBN 1893905276
• Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1992. ISBN 0-7134-6560-3
• Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Johns Hopkins, 2001. ISBN 0-8018-7450-5