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.