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Britain Today
Colin – our superhero
I’ve been reading a novel called Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It’s a graphic novel, in other words, a rather long comic. At the centre of the story are half a dozen people with masks and code names who dress up as superheroes and try to fight crime. To make matters worse, their world is under threat from nuclear war.
With a theme like that, don’t expect much comedy. In fact, a character called the Comedian is murdered before the story even begins. It’s a sign that there won’t be many laughs. To make the tone even darker, we get quotations from a journal written by one of the Comedian’s colleagues: Rorschach, a tough but creepy law-and-order fanatic with a difficult past.
With such a code name, it’s no surprise that his mask looks like the blots that doctors use as a Rorschach test to find out whether you’re a psychopath. Or maybe it’s simply time his masks went in the wash.
Rorschach actually gets these tests during his time in prison, and you begin to think it might be good to keep characters who believe they’re superheroes locked up till they’ve had a bit more therapy.
The only superhero in the story with real superpowers is Dr Manhattan. He’s blue. His speech bubbles are also blue, which is helpful when other characters are speaking, as it can be tricky working out who is saying what. He can travel to Mars and even through time, thanks to a mishap in the lab he used to work in. These new skills make him doubt the value of human beings. It seems that scientific research can be a mixed blessing.
Two of the masked campaigners in this book fall into the Batman category: handsome rich men who use their time, skills and money to develop technology or power. However, we soon learn that a strong, manly superhero in a mask isn’t necessarily good news.
Laurie, the only woman in the group and therefore the love interest, might disagree. She’s torn between two manly colleagues who make her go weak at the knees. This isn’t a pornographic novel, but it was certainly written before sassy and confident women began appearing as superheroes in films like Wonder Woman.
With words in bold in every speech bubble, and non-words like THLUP used as sound effects, the world of Watchmen feels very male. A different book would have solved the world’s problems by giving the heroes a sex change. But this book was written in the 1980s. Since then, more women have taken to reading comics. It was reported in 2015 that they had caught up with the number of male readers.
The book makes some interesting comments about (super)hero worship and the way we run society. Watchmen appears in Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels in the English language since 1923, but I recommend you read the other 99 first.