Trish's Reviews > Watchmen

** spoiler alert ** Aaron's been telling me for a long time that I should read a select few of his favorite comic books. And I haven't been avoiding them. But when I'm looking around the house for something to read, I forget to wander over to the comics section. So finally he just made a stack of books for me, and I started with Watchmen.

And within the first few pages I was testing his patience with questions/comments including:

"Why is Rorshach the hero when he's clearly insane?"
"None of these people are very pleasant."
"Why doesn't Laurie shut up?"
"Seriously. When does Laurie shut up?"
"Are any of these people not crazy?"
"The Comedian is a stupid super-hero name."
"I'm not good at looking at the pictures for information."
"I like the text parts between the chapters."

He told me that if I wasn't enjoying it I should just stop (and he was probably thinking, "If she doesn't like whining, then why doesn't she shut up?"). But I said it wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it--well, I wasn't enjoying it, but I was appreciating it.

And that's my final verdict, I guess. I didn't enjoy it, exactly, because I don't think you're supposed to *enjoy* a story in which at least three-fifths of the characters are certifiably insane or at least significantly imbalanced and in which New York City becomes a body-choked charnel house.

But I did *appreciate* the signficance of the book, I think. I think I understand, at least academically if not viscerally, the sea change this must have represented in the tone and depth of comic books/graphic novels, and what a huge influence and touchstone this book must be.

But in terms of pure individual reaction? Well, it was kind of like when I finally saw The French Connection. There's all this build up about The French Connection and what a great car chase it has and how influential it was and how it marked the birth of a new type of movie anti-hero who inhabited a realistic moral grey zone, blah, blah, blah. And then when you finally see it, you've seen so many subsequent films that were influenced by it that the original seems old hat. Having seen Ronin, I was not blown away by the car chase in The French Connection. So, my reaction to Watchmen was colored by the fact that I have only been exposed to comic books in a post-Watchmen world. I didn't read comics when I was young. Everything I know about comics I've learned from Aaron Matthew Polk, and he's a huge Watchmen fan, so I had already absorbed the Watchmen worldview without ever having read the book.

Of course, it's good to have read it so I have a better chance of participating in or at least following along with comic geek conversations. Now I, too, can speculate on casting should a Watchmen movie ever get the green light, and I, too, can bemoan the eventual script's lack of fidelity to the source material, and I, too, can complain when they screw up the CGI on Doc Manhattan.

There should be some sort of merit badge that the girlfriends of geeks can earn--just like in the Girl Scouts, when you get a badge for selling a certain number of cookies, or the stickers and certificates earned by people who give a lot of blood, or the chips they give recovering alcoholics for a certain period of sobriety. I have earned my one comic book badge. It's like being a puny-colored belt of some kind in karate.

The point is, I appreciated the book, sort of in the same way that I might appreciate a text I was assigned to read for a class. I mean, I get Great Expectations, but I'm not going to read it again. (Who is crazier: Miss Havisham or Rorshach? Discuss.)