‘Yeah, I know I have done some quite horrible comics, and certainly some with very adult themes, but that’s not all I’ve done.’

Alan Moore speaking at N. I. C. E. (2012)

Much has been written about Watchmen, including the definitive account of the development of the series, the book Watching the Watchmen (Titan Books, 2008), by its artist and co-creator, Dave Gibbons. For good and ill, Watchmen came to define the changes in the comic market in the mid- to late eighties. It propelled Alan Moore from star to demi-god within the comics field and attracted unprecedented attention outside it. It was showered with honours, including many that no other comic has received before or since. It attracted extensive attention from academia, where it’s since been the subject of conferences and has generated books with titles like Watchmen and Philosophy, and Watchmen as Literature. It was reviewed and continues to be discussed in the mainstream media. It has been a consistent bestseller since publication. Watchmen is, simply, as the trailer for the 2009 movie version puts it, ‘The Most Celebrated Graphic Novel of All Time’.

Thanks in large part to Watchmen, the word ‘serious’ appears a lot when Alan Moore is discussed. Moore, we’re told, creates stories where superheroes are ‘taken seriously’, and forces even those sceptical of comics to take the medium ‘seriously’. He is a ‘serious writer’ who deals with ‘serious issues’. Comics fans, ever sensitive to charges that the superhero genre is childish, are eager to stress how ‘adult’ and ‘sophisticated’ Watchmen is. Academics’ textbooks on Moore invariably start with an introduction explaining that yes, Watchmen and From Hell are comic books, but despite this they are worthy of ‘serious study’.

The result of taking Moore’s work so seriously is that even when he writes a comic called The Killing Joke that ends with the Joker, a man dressed as a clown, telling a joke in a funfair before collapsing in fits of laughter … his most avid fans and his most highly trained critics fail to allow for anything but high seriousness. Likewise, Watchmen starts and ends with a bright yellow smiling face. Dave Gibbons explained the bad guy’s plan in these terms: ‘in the end, what Veidt did was a joke, a hoax, a bloodsplattered joke, which is what the smiley badge is’. By treating Watchmen as a work of great solemnity, this scholarly attention, the subsequent imitators, and the movie version have almost universally missed the point:

Alan Moore was joking.

The publishing industry is keen to pigeonhole works into genres. Moore has sharply critiqued this tendency, initially during an interview in Mustard magazine, and his words have been turned into an inspirational greetings card by one American company – ‘My experience of life is that it’s not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science fiction cowboy detective novel’ – although that version omits the punchline: ‘You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.’ Yet academics, publishers, critics and comics fans all like sharp categories, and under their taxonomy, Watchmen is a superhero story that treats the genre seriously. It is an exercise in articulating comics history, a deconstruction of existing superhero story conventions, a warning against applying ‘comic book’ views of good and evil to the real world, as well as a masterclass in the use of, and subversion of, techniques of comics storytelling.

That’s plenty for people to get their teeth into, but still it sells the story short. Watchmen is also a science fiction story. It’s a detective story, a conspiracy thriller, a political satire, a historical family saga. It has elements of romance stories and war stories. It contains a comic-within-a-comic, a pirate adventure. It is packed with all manner of jokes: sight gags, running jokes, ironies, satire, parody, pastiches, characters telling each other jokes or making witty remarks, both intentional and obvious only to the reader. The book is soaked in verbal and visual puns. It is also unarguably, very dark in places.

It’s worth noting that Watchmen is not literally a dark book. In the movie version, the colour palette is muted – blacks, greys, dark greens, browns and blues, and even people who are very familiar with the comic probably think the movie is faithful to the source material. But the pages of the comic, even when they depict scenes set at night, are made up of vivid greens, reds, blues, oranges and yellows. It’s more reminiscent of the garish Batman TV series (1966–8) than Christopher Nolan’s more recent Batman movies. Often, there is a narrative reason for such gaudiness – for example, Moloch’s apartment is intermittently lit by the neon sign from the nightclub next door – but just as often the colours used make no pretence at naturalism. As Watching the Watchmen makes clear, colourist John Higgins worked hard, and closely with Gibbons, on the colour scheme for the book. It’s fair to say the printing techniques that comics used in the mid-eighties were limited: however, when Higgins took advantage of advances in technology to redo the colouring for the 2005 Absolute Watchmen edition, he retained the overall palette, even if he made many small alterations. Compare that with the 2008 re-release of The Killing Joke, where artist Brian Bolland dramatically reworked the colouring, making it far more subdued than the original release. The candy colours in Watchmen are an artistic choice.

The creators themselves nevertheless called Watchmen ‘grim’. Before it was released, Dave Gibbons described it as ‘gritty, grim, rugged and realistic, the title all you superhero fans have been waiting for’. Moore has described the series as a ‘dark take on superheroes’, and in 2002 he bemoaned the way many other superhero stories aped it: ‘Get over Watchmen, get over the 1980s. It doesn’t have to be depressing miserable grimness from now until the end of time. It was only a bloody comic. It wasn’t a jail sentence.’ Moore almost instantly regretted Watchmen’s effect on the superhero genre. But when he surveyed mainstream comics in 1992, five years after Watchmen was published, he made an important distinction between his grim and gritty series and those that had followed: ‘Now everywhere I turn there’re these psychotic vigilantes dealing out death mercilessly! You know? With none of the irony that I hoped I brought to my characters. And I felt a bit depressed in that it seemed I had unknowingly ushered in a new dark age of comic books … there is now this sort of nihilism in comics. Which is all right if you’re a smart, cynical adult: you can chuckle at the violent behaviour. But if you’re a nine or ten year old, I wonder what sort of values that opens up?’ Watchmen was intended for an adult audience – one that would recognise ‘irony’ and ‘chuckle at the violent behaviour’.

The whole of Watchmen is soaked in a brand of black comedy that’s distinctly recognisable from Moore’s more overtly humorous work … if you’ve seen that other work. Moore had written plenty of funny comics before Watchmen, but it’s understandable why 90 per cent of its audience would be unaware of that. His work for the American market ran seamlessly from the horror series Swamp Thing to Watchmen, The Killing Joke, then on to the completion of both V for Vendetta and Marvelman. Most of his fans had not seen the counterbalance, the strips for Sounds, Maxwell the Magic Cat and The Bojeffries Saga. Some of his work from 2000AD – including his Future Shocks and his best-known comedy series, DR & Quinch – was reprinted for the American market but it appeared in a scattershot way, and Moore’s name never appeared on a cover. In the eighties, he wrote plenty of short strips for smaller American comics companies, and these were often humorous – but they were seen by a fraction of the 100,000 readers buying Swamp Thing, Miracleman or Watchmen, and were easy to dismiss as a serious artist letting off steam.

The book Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel strays from the beaten track of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, and has an admirably extensive analysis of what it calls ‘Moore’s lesser-known output, such as Halo Jones, Skizz, and Big Numbers’. But it barely touches his comedy writing. It only namechecks Maxwell the Magic Cat, and doesn’t find room to even mention The Stars My Degradation, DR & Quinch or The Bojeffries Saga. When the book explores Moore’s America’s Best Comics line, it dismisses the five comedy series in Tomorrow Stories: ‘The mannerist quality of many of these episodes gives the impression that Moore considered them a sort of formal exercise to be dutifully performed while he concentrated his efforts on fewer important elements in works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea. The latter are part of ABC too, but despite sharing their frequently playful atmosphere with the other serialisations, they are the sites for Moore seriously to explore themes like identity and magic.’ The supposition that Moore churned out Jack B Quick, First American or Cobweb due to some sense of obligation is not supported by what he says in interviews: ‘They’re so intense, and doing Jack B Quick, to follow that example, was really difficult because to write Jack B Quick you have to sort of get your mind into this completely irrational state. You have to take scientific ideas to absurd lengths. You have to be able to think in a certain way to do those stories. I couldn’t do them all the time, and I certainly can’t see myself being able to do ones that are more than six to eight pages long.’ The strips that Moore drew as well as wrote, mostly early in his career, were almost without exception comedies. The very early underground work, which merged into the work for Sounds, is made up of savage parodies. When Moore introduced the ‘Ex-Men’ into The Stars My Degradation, he – or rather Curt Vile – explained, ‘I suppose what I was trying to do in my own pathetic and puny way was to sting people into re-evaluating the X-Men rather than just coasting along out of loyalty to the creative team or the characters … In fact I suppose you could say that my entire limited concept of satire revolves around kicking a man when he’s down. I don’t have to be nice. I’m handsome.’

Moore’s early stories do tend to have very bleak endings. St Pancras Panda ends with a fictionalised version of Moore shooting himself in the head, as does his one-off strip Kultural Krime Komix. The Stars My Degradation ends with the accidental obliteration of the universe. Roscoe Moscow goes insane, Three Eyes McGurk and Ten Little Liggers end with the detonation of nuclear warheads. When Moore wrote for the younger 2000AD audience, his contributions were mostly twist-ending stories of the EC Comics or Roald Dahl variety – concisely portraying a world of just desserts, where the protagonist always found himself condemned to some terrible, and usually terminal, fate. Moore has accounted for his return to end-of-the-world themes by saying ‘it’s the equivalent of the sick but understandable jokes that kind of spring up like a rash when there’s any public disaster’. Around the time he was writing Watchmen, Moore added that he was worried his audience wasn’t getting the joke: ‘I started to question the ethics of doing humour based upon nuclear weapons because I wasn’t sure that my audience was understanding it with the heavy irony that was intended and, in fact, sometimes I wasn’t even sure that I was understanding it with the heavy irony that it really needed.’

Maxwell the Magic Cat appeared innocuous enough, and the Northants Post was a provincial local newspaper, not exactly an underground zine in the Crumb tradition. Yet although Maxwell was a little cat, he was also cruel and arrogant, happy to chomp up talking mice and birds.

There may moreover be a more nationalistic cultural difference in play. British comics tend to be black comedies with anti-heroes as their main characters. A male British comics reader has traditionally been weaned on the Beano, moved on to adventure comics like Battle or 2000AD, and then perhaps on to underground comix and fanzines. British comics all share a taste for mayhem and violence, usually gleefully directed against authority figures, suitably tailored for their audience. The most enduring current ‘serious’ British character, 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, is a broad satire on heavy-handed policing. Co-creator of the character Alan Grant was shocked when American convention-goers kept telling him they wished the real police were more like Judge Dredd. The British creators of comics were far more suspicious of ‘supermen’ using violence to lay down their version of justice, prone to see fascist overtones rather than a heroic ideal. As a former editor of 2000AD put it, ‘American comics tend to be much more bright and optimistic. Naïve, even. The British sense of humour is much darker, more ironic. Morally ambiguous. American readers don’t seem to be big on moral ambiguity, they seem to prefer things to be simple and clear-cut. They don’t seem to realise that Dredd isn’t always meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes it’s serious, sure, but sometimes it’s out-and-out parody. Sometimes Dredd’s the hero, sometimes the villain, sometimes he’s barely a supporting character.’

The study Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd takes the 1995 guidelines for merchandising of the (British) comic and the (American) movie version of Judge Dredd and concludes ‘they have almost nothing in common’. The movie guidelines describe Judge Dredd as ‘a futuristic action thriller about how the toughest, most upright and respected of all the Judges saves Mega-City One from destruction’. Those for the comic are ‘written in a self-reflexive half-mocking style … the implication is that Dredd merchandising should carry some of the comic’s mocking attitude’, and includes a line that’s equally applicable to Rorschach, the mentally disturbed vigilante in Watchmen: ‘Though he is capable of a very black sense of humour, we can never be sure if he thinks his remarks are funny.’

Alan Moore had parodied comics set in a grim and gritty New York before he ever wrote one. In The Daredevils #2, Moore offered the four-page strip Grit! (art: Mike Collins, February 1983). This depicts the hero Dourdevil in a bombastic world not so far from Miller’s, one of casual violence and people with rather inconsistent or sketchy motives. As one character notes:

By the time Moore was writing Watchmen, he and Miller had met and become friends. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was published the same year as Watchmen (Dark Knight ran February–June 1986, Watchmen started in May). It had a similar theme, with a middle-aged Batman coming out of retirement into a far more brutal world than was usually depicted in comics. Soon after Watchmen, Moore’s own ‘dark’ take on Batman, The Killing Joke, was released. Articles about ‘serious comics’ invariably roped Miller and Moore together, linking Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

There are parallels between the two. Moore would write the introduction to the collected The Dark Knight Returns, Miller would contribute to Moore’s anthology AARGH!, and Dave Gibbons’ next major project after Watchmen was as artist on Give Me Liberty, scripted by Miller. Like Moore, in the nineties Miller would write and draw creator-owned comics for an adult audience, such as Sin City and 300. Unlike Moore, though, he happily returned to DC in the early 2000s to produce a sequel to The Dark Knight Returns (The Dark Knight Strikes Again) and work on other Batman projects (All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, and Holy Terror – the last, a Batman v Muslim terrorist book, was dropped by DC and ended up as a non-Batman title at Legendary Comics). And perhaps the major difference is that Miller has embraced the movie versions of his comics, co-directing, producing and even making cameo appearances in them. It’s also fair to say that his work, while ambitious, has a far narrower range than Moore’s, and tends to be violent, masculine and hard-boiled.

While Miller cites Spillane and Chandler as influences, when Moore and Gibbons began putting together Watchmen, they were guided in large part by comedic treatments of the superhero genre. Once again, Moore returned to ‘Superduperman’: ‘We were thinking that probably the best superhero stuff was the Mad parodies of it – that superheroes never looked better than when Wally Wood was parodying them. So we decided to sort of take some of those elements from the Mad parodies – you know, we were having massive amounts of background detail but it wasn’t sight gags: it was sight dramatics, if you like.’

What Moore called ‘sight dramatics’ fill the pages of Watchmen. There are countless examples. One of the more whimsical consequences of a world with real-life superheroes, one close to Moore’s heart, is that there would be no demand for superhero comics. Instead, the market in the world of Watchmen is dominated by pirate adventures. We see excerpts from The Tales of the Black Freighter, and one of the text features lovingly explains the parallel history of this comics industry. Eagle-eyed readers can also see a pirate-themed comics shop, Treasure Island, in the background of the New York street scenes.

The most iconic image of the Watchmen series is that with which it begins: a smiley face with a splash of blood on it, in the position where five to midnight would be on a clock face. The original badge (and blood) belonged to the murdered superhero, the Comedian, but it is wiped clean in the first issue and tossed into the Comedian’s grave in the second. The image continues to echo throughout the story, everywhere from photographs to pareidolia. What in the fictional world is ‘coincidence’ or ‘accident’ is, of course, very carefully placed there by Moore and Gibbons.

The title has a number of meanings and resonances throughout the book. One of the many clocks and watches and countdowns that appear in the story is the Doomsday Clock – ‘like most things in Watchmen, it was a kind of pun that had got two or three different meanings’ – and it appears on the back cover of every issue, ticking closer to the apocalypse – or at least the end of the series. ‘Watchmen’ is also a reference to a quote from Juvenal, one that’s daubed as graffiti across New York, ‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’ – if you have guards, you need to have some way to keep those guards in line, all the more so if they have superpowers and secret identities.

One thing ‘Watchmen’ is not is the name of a team within the story – our heroes never all worked together, let alone called themselves ‘the Watchmen’ (during the Comedian’s lifetime, as far as we know, they were all in the same room only once). However, their predecessors were the Minutemen – a moniker that alludes variously to a mobile militia in the War of Independence, a number of right-wing volunteer groups, including a militant anti-Communist group in the sixties, and (after Watchmen was published) a vocal group of civilians who patrol the border with Mexico. No doubt Moore was also aware of punk band the Minutemen, and it goes without saying that in a book about the threat of nuclear war, the name is a conscious reference to the ICBMs that had been in service since the sixties (Moore possibly even knew that one of his favourite authors, Thomas Pynchon, worked as a technical writer on the Minuteman project) … and so on.

Every name in the comic is a telling, multiple pun – Sally Jupiter’s retirement home is Nepenthe Gardens, a reference from Greek myth, via Poe, via a limerick by Aleister Crowley. There’s a nightclub called the Rumrunner, a restaurant called the Gunga Diner. And character names like Rorschach, Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias are a little more allusive than standard superhero names like Ant Man and Power Girl. One essay on Watchmen dedicates three pages to the significance of the seven-name list of Adrian Veidt’s favourite musicians.

Another comedy was also an influence on Watchmen: Robert Mayer’s 1977 novel Super-Folks. On his website, Mayer notes:

The novel was supposed to be funny. Reviewers said it was. It was a spoof on all those heroes. But something unexpected was happening out in the universe – well, in America and Great Britain. Adolescent boys were growing up who wanted to write comic books. They read Super-Folks – and they thought, aha, look at all the nasty things you can do with superheroes. They plunged the men in tights into twilight, made a lot of money doing it, and the entire genre was changed forever … Among the spawn, many critics say, were much of Alan Moore’s work, including the ‘classic’ Watchmen. To my knowledge Mr Moore has never publicly acknowledged a debt to Super-Folks.

In fact Moore had done so: ‘Super-Folks was a big influence on Marvelman. By the time I did the last Superman stories [in 1986, at the time he was also writing Watchmen] I’d forgotten the Mayer book, although I may have had it subconsciously in my mind.’ However, readers who track down Super-Folks expecting a ‘serious’ treatment of superheroes, a bleak novel that Moore has shamelessly ripped off, discover it’s more like a prose version of ‘Superduperman’ or National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings, an exuberant romp full of seventies pop culture references. There are similarities – both Super-Folks and Watchmen feature beaten-down, middle-aged former superheroes and a conspiracy theory – but it’s nothing like Watchmen in terms of tone, technique or intended audience. Nevertheless, Super-Folks became something of a collector’s item following Watchmen’s success and, in one of life’s little ironies, when the book was reprinted in 2003, Dave Gibbons drew the cover.

Mayer does, however, point the way to a criticism that’s consistently been levelled at Watchmen: that, as Carter Scholz’s review of the graphic novel put it, ‘the superhero genre was never made to take the strain he [Moore] puts on it … he has taken an untenable concept absolutely as far as it can go’. Critics who raise objections to Watchmen’s ‘serious tone’ seem to think Moore was oblivious to the idea that superheroes are inherently childish and open to ridicule. This, though, is a misapprehension. When Moore embarked upon the project he did so in the belief that a relatively expensive, direct-sales-only comic had no appeal except for existing comics fans, and deliberately played to that fanbase. But in the introduction to the original hardback edition of Watchmen, he noted that, once the series started receiving wider attention, what ‘started life as merely a more cynical and baroque take upon the Justice League of America and their ilk suddenly found itself standing in the public marketplace of mainstream fiction, dressed in only a cloak and a pair of brightly coloured tights’.

But by 1986, as we’ve seen, comics readers were getting older, and with that came demands for more sophisticated storytelling. Those readers now expected to see stories that tackled social themes, had soap opera-style character development and displayed a keen awareness of comics history and tradition. Readers accepted the ‘brightly coloured tights’ as genre convention, just as fans of detective stories accept the murderer blurting out a confession as soon as he’s identified. But Watchmen acquired a second audience: a more mainstream one of adults familiar with superheroes mainly from television and movies, and who had last read a comic in childhood. Much to the despair (or disdain) of comics aficionados, such people’s view of superheroes was still dominated by the colourful Adam West Batman TV series and Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman (1976–9), which had been in much the same vein. Try as they might, even the Christopher Reeve Superman movies couldn’t avoid camp – indeed Superman III (1983) and Superman IV (1987) all but surrendered to it. It was therefore ironic that – thanks to Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke and the 1989 Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, which took cues from Moore and Frank Miller’s work – the public perception of what made a good Batman story would soon swing hard the other way. Ten years after Watchmen, Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies would be rejected by audiences as being too camp and not gritty enough.

The superhero conventions Watchmen (and The Dark Knight Returns) aimed at were therefore those of the Batman TV series, not anything from comics produced in the early eighties. The story opens with a superhero climbing up a skyscraper on a grappling line, like Batman and Robin, while the Batman-like Nite Owl’s costume parodies Adam West’s TV costume merely by copying it. The heyday of the superheroes in Watchmen, moreover, had been in the swinging sixties. It’s also significant which notes Watchmen doesn’t play – the lack of ‘Ka-pow!’, ‘Splat!’-type sound effects and ‘Meanwhile, in stately Wayne Manor’ style captions.

And Watchmen addresses the most familiar absurdity of the genre head on. The Comedian and Silk Spectre wear fairly standard superhero outfits. Nite Owl does indeed wear his underpants on the outside, while Dr Manhattan fights the Vietnam War in only his underpants – he later disposes even of those, preferring to be naked. In some later attempts to tell more grown-up superhero stories (including the movie version of Watchmen), ‘brightly coloured tights’ give way to more practical solutions like leather and moulded body armour; others, like the television series Smallville and Heroes, would give their superheroes ordinary clothes. Yet, rather than thinking Superman would become plausible if only he wore a jacket, Moore and Gibbons turned the ‘real world logic’ on its head and asked who would pull on a cape and tights: ‘It wouldn’t always be a terribly healthy person. Some people would be doing it purely for the sexual excitement of dressing up, others for the excitement of beating somebody up. Some are doing it for political reasons, many are doing it for altruistic motives, but there would certainly be a percentage who would have rather odd psychological afflictions in their make-up … There’s just something about anybody who would dress up in a mask and costume that’s not quite normal.’

Any adult – every vaguely thoughtful small child – understands that you don’t fight crime by putting on a leotard, and this inevitably short-circuits any attempt to treat superheroes ‘realistically’. Moore and Gibbons understood this. The New York Times may have hailed the series for its ‘staggeringly complex psychological profiles’ but this is not a claim that survives contact with the book. As Grant Morrison noted, it deals in stock action-narrative types:

Dazzled by its technical excellence, Watchmen’s readership was willing to overlook a cast of surprisingly conventional Hollywood stereotypes: the inhibited guy who had to get his mojo back; the boffin losing touch with his humanity; the overbearing showbiz mom who drove her daughter to excel while hiding from her the secret of her dubious parentage; the prison psychiatrist so drawn into the dark inner life of his patient that his own life cracked under the weight. The Watchmen characters were drawn from a repertoire of central casting cyphers.

The characters are a series of different punchlines to the same joke. Nite Owl, the equivalent of Batman, is flabby and impotent; the analogues of Captain America and Superman killed civilians in Vietnam; Silk Spectre, the generic superheroine, has gone from being jailbait to being on the government payroll as an escort; Ozymandias has used his great genius to market action figures of himself. These are not keen psychological insights. Watchmen is not an attempt to rehabilitate the concept of the superhero, it’s an effort to test it to destruction. However dirty the city where the superheroes live, however much graffiti it has, however much you psychoanalyse superheroes, however many ‘real world’ problems you saddle them with, the answer to ‘how can you depict superheroes realistically?’ that Watchmen inevitably comes to, from many different perspectives and directions, is ‘you can’t’. As Moore would later say of The Killing Joke, ‘Batman and the Joker are not real characters and they do not resemble anyone you’d ever meet.’

The humour nevertheless runs more deeply than just the observation that superheroes are silly, or a narrative suffused with a mass of incidental details, visual and literary puns. The bigger picture is also underpinned by black comedy and vicious ironies. One way to understand this is to examine the ‘joke’ Dreiberg tells to Laurie Jupiter at the end of the first issue. The former Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are reminiscing about Captain Carnage, a minor villain they had both encountered who gained sexual pleasure from being beaten up (there are hints that Dreiberg became Nite Owl at least partly for similar reasons). Captain Carnage’s career came to an abrupt end when ‘he pulled it on Rorschach and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft’. Laurie and Dreiberg start laughing:

LAURIE:	Oh God, I’m sorry, that isn’t funny. Ha ha ha ha ha!
DREIBERG:	Ha ha ha! No, I guess it’s not.

Is it funny? Yes, from certain perspectives; no, from others. As an event it would be a tragedy, as an anecdote it’s amusing.

Or take another example: in Chapter VI of Watchmen, Rorschach kills two dogs with a meat cleaver, then throws their corpses at a paedophile, Grice, who had murdered a young victim and fed her to those dogs. The vigilante then handcuffs the killer, douses him in kerosene and sets fire to him, sticking around to watch him die. From what possible perspective is that funny?

That scene is one of those in which the differences between the comic and the movie adaptation are instructive. The Watchmen movie is consistently more violent than the comic, and never more so than in this sequence: on the silver screen we see Rorschach split Grice’s head in half with a meat cleaver, then keep hacking – nine times, in total. The comic implies violence, but cuts away before we see any and the vivid colouring adds to the lurid unreality. Moore has said of his relationship to comedy, ‘I don’t think I’m one of those crying-on-the-inside clowns so much as sort of sniggering on the inside tragedian. My favourite comedies are ones that have an edge of tragedy. My favourite tragedies are the ones where you almost find yourself laughing. It’s too awful, and you’re taken to that edge.’ Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to have one bright red dead bloodstained dog thrown at you is a misfortune, but to have two thrown at you borders on absurdity.

Traditionally, darker narratives have used comic relief that takes the form of an interlude between serious scenes. Moore rarely does that, instead tipping throwaway puns, ironies or absurdities into the darkest material in the story, making it even more unsettling. There’s more than a touch of the Grand Guignol to much of his work, a theatrical exuberance that leads to fully fledged musical numbers in stories like The Killing Joke and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910. A good demonstration of this is ‘This Vicious Cabaret’, which kicks off V for Vendetta Book Two, first published in Warrior #12 (August 1983). Formally, it’s a summary of the story so far, presented as a song, sung by V who sits at a piano, inviting us to the show. The musical notes are printed below the panels (the song was recorded at the time by David J from Bauhaus and released as a single). It ends with a flourish, and a nasty twist:

There’s thrills and chills and girls galore

There’s sing-songs and surprises.

There’s something here for everyone,

Reserve your seat today!

There’s mischiefs and malarkies

But no queers, or yids, or darkies.

Within this bastards’ carnival,

This vicious cabaret!

The effect is almost one of lifting the audience a tiny way before a final plunge. Again, there’s the ‘ironic counterpoint’ between the pictures of a man singing a jolly song and the nasty words. As with Watchmen (and The Killing Joke), whatever is happening, whatever horrors the words are telling us about, we’re confronted with the image of a fixed grin.

Critics who’ve accused Watchmen of an adolescent preoccupation with nihilism and violence focus on Rorschach and assume Moore is endorsing Rorschach’s view of the world, setting him up as a hero to be emulated, or even using him simply as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. With that reading, Moore’s view is that Grice’s fate represents a just punishment for a cruel man.

Thinking Rorschach is the main character is an understandable mistake. The story opens with Rorschach’s narration, while the first issue follows his lonely investigation of the Comedian’s murder. And it’s through Rorschach we first meet the other superheroes, as he goes to each of them in turn and warns them to be on their guard. Rorschach sets the scene and the tone. But Moore has said, ‘I don’t think there is a centre of the book. I mean, part of what Watchmen is about is that all of the characters have got very, very distinctive views of the world, but they’re all completely different.’ Subsequent issues are told from the points of view of other characters with contrasting perspectives; as Moore has also said, ‘I don’t think Dr Manhattan is dark; I don’t think that Nite Owl is dark.’ Even reading the first chapter of Watchmen, before we’ve seen chapters told from other viewpoints, it ought to be clear Rorschach is not ‘right’, or representative of the norm. It quickly becomes clear he is, as Moore put it at the time, ‘a psychotic vigilante, driven by strange fascistic notions, who’s not particularly fussy about whom he kills’. It might be possible to imagine that Watchmen’s opening line, presented as an entry in Rorschach’s journal – ‘Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face’ – is Alan Moore presenting his own view of New York, through Rorschach. An avid fan might recall Moore’s write-up of his visit to the real New York City, and – if that fan felt Moore was invariably ‘serious’ – conclude that he had a particular vision of the place: ‘making sure I don’t get eaten by subway cannibals or end up sleeping on the grating … the [hotel] room is big enough to induce agoraphobia … there is a little plate informing me I should keep the door double-locked at all times and always look through the peephole before answering it, in case it’s a bag lady with a meat cleaver and a shopping bag full of index fingers … I pass the night without hearing a single murder … manage to walk all the way to the DC offices without getting shot or sexually assaulted’. Although that fan should also have spotted there are clear echoes of Grit!, Moore’s spoof of grim and gritty comics (see right).

It might equally be possible to read a subsequent line, also from Rorschach’s Journal and the first page of Watchmen, at face value: ‘They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay.’ A few pages later, when a policeman describes Rorschach as ‘crazier than a snake’s armpit and wanted on two counts Murder One’, we might distrust this authority figure and imagine that a corrupt regime has framed our hero for crimes he didn’t commit. (As it happens, Rorschach is eventually framed for a murder he didn’t commit, even though he admits to the two mentioned here.) For similar reasons, we might distrust Laurie’s summary of him, ‘I just don’t like Rorschach. He’s sick. Sick inside his mind. I don’t like the way he smells or that horrible monotone voice or anything. The sooner the police put him away, the better.’ But by the end of the issue, when Rorschach asks himself ‘Why are so few of us left active, healthy and without personality disorders?’, there’s unmistakably a gulf between what we readers can see and how Rorschach is interpreting it.

A key exchange in the first issue is this:

RORSCHACH: Maybe someone’s picking off costumed heroes.

DREIBERG: Um. Don’t you think that’s maybe a little paranoid?

RORSCHACH: That’s what they’re saying about me now? That I’m paranoid?

Rorschach’s last line is, of course, a straightforwardly set up and paid-off joke, but not one that the character himself is in on. Elsewhere, tellingly, Rorschach has trouble recognising irony or when someone is trying to be funny. His belief that he is the only sane man in a crazy world is, of course, what every crazed loner thinks. By the end of the first issue, at the very latest, every reader should understand Rorschach is over-the-top, ‘too awful’ – at that edge Moore identified between tragedy and comedy.

There’s a broader point being made. Moore based Rorschach’s writing style on the notes left by the serial killer ‘Son of Sam’, whose second note, from May 1977, is practically a description of the first page of Watchmen:

Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.

Towards the end of Watchmen, when the editor of the newspaper New Frontiersman hears the first line of Rorschach’s journal, he declares, ‘Jesus, who’s it from? Son of Sam? Sling it on the crank file.’ The joke is that the real-world equivalent of the only superhero in Watchmen who hasn’t compromised his principles is a notorious serial killer.

There are further ambiguities about Rorschach’s character. His insistence that, like his mask, the world is sharply divided between black and white is clearly a symptom of mental illness. But the idea that the world – or at least its superhuman population – can be neatly divided up between ‘superheroes’ and ‘supervillains’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, underpins the whole of the genre. In those terms Ozymandias’ plan, as he says himself, is reminiscent of a Republic Serial villain, whereas Rorschach, in overcoming all obstacles to investigate and confront Ozymandias in his base, is the hero.

At heart, Ozymandias’ plan to destroy New York to shock Russia and America into co-operating is an entry-level moral dilemma: ‘Is killing X number of people justified if it saves more than X number of people?’ The familiarity of the question does not mean there’s one morally absolute answer. It is also, of course, a dilemma familiar from the history of atomic weapons. In Chapter VI, we learn that a young Walter Kovacs (who would become Rorschach) had written, ‘I like President Truman, the way dad would of wanted me to. He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn’t of, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed. I think it was a good thing to drop the atom bomb on Japan.’ Yet Rorschach is the only one of the heroes who defies Ozymandias. He sees this mass killing as unjustified. Is this because of some form of patriotism? Millions of Americans die, America comes to co-operate with Soviet Russia – does Rorschach truly believe ‘better dead than Red’? Or, as has been speculated, is it a gender issue? Does Rorschach think Truman and war are masculine, whereas Ozymandias is liberal and effeminate? Moore gives us plenty of material to work with, including a whole chapter dedicated to an in-story psychiatric analysis of the character, but leaves us to interpret what we’re told.

This holds true throughout Watchmen. The character who stands for ‘the American Way’ is the Comedian – a man we see attempting rape, shooting a pregnant woman, and who almost certainly assassinated JFK. Dr Manhattan is the only character with ‘superpowers’, and is compared with both Superman and God in the story … but while they are by definition moral paragons, Dr Manhattan is utterly amoral, capable of saying ‘a live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?’ When he walks among the ruins of New York in the last chapter, his deterministic, materialistic view of the universe means he’s unable to make a meaningful distinction between the corpses and the rubble. Moore’s point is that none of these people are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it all depends on your perspective; not even the creators of Watchmen can make such rulings.

So can Alan Moore’s own opinion be disentangled from the narrative?

There’s a deep irony evident in Watchmen, one that we see in Moore’s other work, and so we might identify this as approaching a cohesive Alan Moore worldview. The critic John Loyd identifies the sequence where Rorschach kills Grice as containing one of the keys to such a worldview, which he terms the ‘Big Joke’. As Rorschach recounts the story to his psychiatrist, he concludes that the human condition is that we are ‘Born from oblivion; bear children hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague, metaphysical forces.’ The ‘Big Joke’ is that although various characters insist that the world is ‘rudderless’, in fact it isn’t. Watchmen the comic is the opposite of ‘rudderless’; it was almost certainly the most carefully designed comic ever created, with extraordinary attention to detail. In the first script, Moore takes fifty-six lines to describe the opening panel, the close-up of a smiley badge lying in a gutter. Throughout, Gibbons finds room to add even more intricacies than appear in the scripts. And as the series progressed, the writer and artist became ever more confident and the end result grew ever more complex. Issue 5 is structured as an elaborate palindrome, with an almost perfectly symmetrical sequence of events. So does this mean Dr Manhattan is right? He has the ability to remember the future as well as the past, so he sees nothing but pattern. But this isn’t liberating, it means he is constrained within a clockwork mechanism of cause and effect, condemned to see every one of the connections that bind the world, to be locked into a fixed course of action, to merely be the only puppet with the ability to ‘see the strings’. Dr Manhattan and Rorschach can’t both be right – at least not comfortably – but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter: either way is equally bleak and nihilistic.

Watchmen presents a world where the driving force of destiny is a dark irony. It is, as more than one character observes, all one big joke.

COMEDIAN:	Listen … once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the Comedian’s the only thing that makes sense.
DR MANHATTAN:	The charred villages, the boys with necklaces of human ears … these are part of the joke.
COMEDIAN:	Hey … I never said it was a good joke! I’m just playing along with the gag …

There are similar sentiments at work in The Killing Joke:

JOKER:	It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for … it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?
BATMAN:	Because I’ve heard it before … and it wasn’t funny the first time.

And it’s there even in a light-hearted example Moore gives in a 1986 essay about the craft of comics writing, when he illustrates character by having a stamp-collecting policeman describe his formative moment as follows: ‘I was just standing there, looking at my stamp album and the priceless collection that it had taken me years to build, when all of a sudden I realised that since I had foolishly pasted all of them directly into the album using an industrial-strength adhesive, they were completely worthless. I understood then that the universe was just a cruel joke upon mankind, and that life was pointless. I became completely cynical about human existence and saw the essential stupidity of all effort and human striving. At this point I decided to join the police force.’

It’s possible to see this consistent, extremely pessimistic worldview across a lot of Moore’s work from the eighties. The world is a fragile place, on the brink of economic, social and environmental collapse. The ‘man on the street’ is wilfully oblivious to politics, but it doesn’t matter because the apocalypse is imminent and it’s only a question of how society is going to collapse under the weight of intractable social problems. The proximate cause is the right wing – Norsefire in V for Vendetta, Nixon and his cabal in Watchmen – using the logic of the Vietnam War: that it’s necessary to bomb the village to save it. The liberal left might mean well, but do more harm than good. In V for Vendetta, CND get their way, the UK disarms unilaterally and a nuclear war promptly starts. In Watchmen, the ‘liberal’ Ozymandias kills millions. V for Vendetta, Watchmen and Marvelman all end with the collapse of the old order. In the end, everything we’ve strived for is pointless, and it’s all going to be swept away.

So is this also Moore’s view of our world (or, more precisely, was it his view around the time he was writing Watchmen)? This is how he saw things in 1988:

The big chill is coming down for sure. All that bad science fiction and all those paranoid hippy prophecies about the way the country was going … as it turns out they were true! Outside my door the other day was one of those ‘Dark Riders of Mordor’ policemen, those with the visor and the cloak, the horse wears a visor too. One of these horses was shouldering a couple of kids up against the garage door. Just football fans on the way down to the match. We ran outside to get a photo of it and one of those vans with the rotating video cameras came by. The police stated in the paper: ‘We are looking forward to this match so we can try out our new crowd control methods.’ It was obvious looking at it that it wasn’t designed just to handle football fans. You don’t put that much money into stopping trouble erupting at games between Northampton and Sunderland! Sure enough, two weeks later at the Clause 28 rally the police had them out again. They turned up and arrested girls for kissing and for holding placards, saying they were offensive weapons.

The eighties saw Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party win successive landslide General Election victories, doing so on a platform of an economic policy based on closing down or selling off great sections of manufacturing industry, taking power from local councils and centralising it in Westminster, breaking the trade unions, selling off council housing and opposing at every turn the ‘permissive sixties’. Every feature of the British political landscape of the eighties appalled Moore, although – erudite and opinionated as he was – he was reticent about what could be done: ‘Please understand that I’m not yet so drug-addled or enthused by my own intellect as to suggest that we’re going to reach a solution, or anything like a solution. All I want to do is present the questions as I see them in as interesting a light as possible.’

More recently, Moore’s view has remained similar, but has mellowed: ‘The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it’s like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we’d got this insane right-wing Boadicea running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work … I wouldn’t say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it’s probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the eighties. This is a different century.’ When he describes the world, he does so in terms that Ozymandias might have in Watchmen: ‘We’re an inventive bunch and when things sort of get as dire as they are at the moment, it comes down to a basic thing whether we will come out of it with some way round this or we won’t … impending death hanging over us does tend to focus the mind wonderfully, so it might be that some of these problems incite their own solutions. That’s what I’m hoping.’ And while he still can’t see the broader solution for civilisation, there’s a recognition of some resolution at the human scale:

For all of us, life is a matter of trying to come to terms with the universe and I think that in its most benign sense, apocalypse is the moment of revelation, where we realise that all of our attempts to make sense of the universe are hopelessly off the mark and in the ruins of our theories we kind of get a glimpse, we have what drunks call a ‘moment of lucidity’ of the things that are really important … revelations can come in sorts of ways in everybody’s life.

So is Watchmen a comedy? Well, its jokes tend towards the dark, the cruel and even the sick, but there are plenty of jokes in there. Comedies have happy endings, and Watchmen … might. The world is not destroyed, and it no longer seems inevitable that it will be. Dreiberg and Laurie, the most ‘ordinary’ characters in the story, have put aside the emotional baggage from their past and started thinking about their future together. Is Watchmen cheerful and life-affirming, then? No, not for the most part, but neither is it written in a monotone, endlessly dark and dreary. While it is ‘by the writer of V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke’, to fully understand Watchmen, it’s important to understand that it’s just as much ‘by the writer of DR & Quinch and “March of the Sinister Ducks”’.