What is so amazing about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen is that for all the power and poignancy of the main story, a proverbial treasure trove of ideas lies just below the surface—little references here and there that open up the meaning of the text even more. Here are four interesting references within the pages of Watchmen.
1 Pale Horse. Throughout the series, there are many mentions of a rock band, Pale Horse, and a concert they are playing in New York City on November 2, 1985. That, of course, is the same date that Adrian Veidt’s “alien invasion” destroys much of New York City, including everyone at the concert. The name “Pale Horse” comes from the Bible, specifically Revelation 6:8, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” So it’s true, “Hell” did indeed follow Pale Horse.
2 Nova Express. Nova Express is a magazine that is critical of costumed adventurers that shows up throughout the series as the counterpart to the archconservative New Frontiersman magazine. It is named after a 1964 novel by William S. Burroughs of the same name. In chapter 11, Veidt makes reference to the “multi-screen” approach of watching a series of different monitors at once to get the full sense of events. He then explains that it was based on William S. Burroughs’s “cut-up” method, where he would take a text and “cut it up” to reassemble it into nonlinear patterns, so you could read the text in any order you like, but only by reading it all would you get the full picture. This is how Burroughs wrote his famed novel Naked Lunch, and it is also how he wrote Nova Express. Alan Moore cited Burroughs as one of his inspirations in writing Watchmen.
3 Watchmaker. Chapter 4 of Watchmen is titled “Watchmaker” and it contains a quote from Albert Einstein where he says, “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I would have become a watchmaker.” However, the title of the chapter does not just mean that, it also refers to the “Watchmaker analogy,” a famous theological argument that posits the following: If you discover a watch, then you know it must have had a watchmaker, right? Someone had to make something so intricate. So if you see a human being, then there must have been a human being maker. This is important in Watchmen because it ties in with Doctor Manhattan’s sense of separation from humanity as he begins to feel like a god among men.
4 Ozymandias. In chapter 11 of Watchmen, the chapter quote is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” It reads, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” What it cuts off is very important. The next line is “Nothing beside remains.” This obviously ties into the notion that Veidt’s plan succeeds in this issue, and most of New York is brutally wiped out.