Watchmen

Watchmen has been widely lauded for integrating the comic format with major themes of war and politics. By the time of Watchmen’s publication, Moore had already established himself as a politically charged comic writer, particularly with 1982’s V for Vendetta and its indictment of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s hawkish foreign policy and neoliberal economics. Watchmen shifts focus from Moore and Dave Gibbons’s native UK to the United States, where they believed comics had always had political significance, but largely went unnoticed because those politics fit with popular prejudices and/or elite interests. Once the United States entered the World War II, prominent superheroes like Superman and Captain America were cheerleaders for the war effort, representing war to young readers as a joyous adventure where good would inevitably triumph against evil. After the war, superheroes were drafted for the fight against communism, even as McCarthy-era censorship eyed comics as a primary vessel for subversive messages that might render America’s children delinquent and thereby liable to Soviet subversion. Other comics were more subtle but still decidedly pro-American. Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men acknowledges the reality of prejudice but upholds Charles Xavier’s (Professor X’s) vision of assimilation—what civil rights activists called “respectability politics”—as the ultimate model for social harmony. At its worst, this borders on tokenism, as Xavier’s team includes a single Russian person (with the stereotypical name Peter Rasputin, also known as Colossus) and a single African person (Ororo Munro, also known as Storm) to join a mostly white, American team.

With Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons tackled head-on the idea of superheroes as upholders of the American status quo. They were also writing at a time when fears of nuclear war had resurged under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, an anticommunist whom many feared would take the world to the brink of annihilation. This fear was amplified in pop culture, such as 1983’s film The Day After, which depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war. This “Second Cold War” coincided with stories of byzantine, corrupt plots among Reagan officials to sell weapons to Iranian revolutionaries and use the profits to fuel right-wing insurgencies in Nicaragua. As the final epigraph indicates, the question “who watches the watchmen?” is not only a quotation from the Roman poet Juvenal, but also served as the epigraph for the Tower Commission, the official report on the so-called Iran-Contra scandal.

In Watchmen, The Comedian became the personification of American foreign policy, which in turn indicates what Moore and Gibbons considered to be the borderline-fascistic ethos of people who put on costumes in order to beat up criminals and who only recognize social problems such as “promiscuity,” “drugs,” “Anti-War Demos” and “Black Unrest” (see the map that The Comedian burns on page 53). Watchmen is thus both a superhero story and an indictment of the concept of the superhero: In a world where superheroes have actual power, all they managed to do was turn Vietnam into the 51st US state, kill the journalists who would expose Watergate, and keep Richard Nixon in the White House for at least 20 years.