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Ashley Stokes

Dr. William Mountz

HNRS 298

13 December 2022

The Complexity of Simplicity:

The Brilliance of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen

Comic books and superheroes have been widely regarded as childish and simplistic since

the creation of the genre. Despite this, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons was listed in

the New York Times top 100 novels list. Riddled with foreshadowing, mystery, and

philosophical dilemmas, Watchmen has numerous elements of a great novel; however, the

archetypal superhero characters and graphic form make Watchmen rather unique on the New

York Times list. In an interview with the Comics Britannica series, Moore states that his premise

for the book was to take common superhero tropes and place them in the real world ("Alan

Moore talks - 02 - Watchmen" 00:00:45). At its very core, Watchmen, is a superhero comic book

that utilizes classic elements such as nostalgia, identity, and responsibility of heroes that are

fundamental to the genre. While it is the most critically acclaimed of the superhero stories,

Watchmen is not a masterpiece in spite of being a comic book, but rather it is able to explain and

(quite literally) illustrate the complexity of the Cold War and political ideologies to the masses

better because of the simple premise and visual style.

History is meant to be learned from, and to do this one must be able to recognize patterns

and apply them to the present day. However, the nature of most history books can leave the

reader with the impression that the ideologies, prejudices, and cruelty of the past could never

occur now as we are so far separated from the time period. The use of nuclear weapons and the
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Cold War were the result of convoluted logic and overly powerful politicians, but it is difficult to

imagine what each of us would have done in these situations. Would we have dropped atomic

bombs on Japan to end a war or stockpiled nuclear weapons to protect the country from foreign

threats? It is hard to place oneself in a political leader’s shoes, but superheroes since their

creation have been made to be relatable to readers. Children put on Superman capes and run

around their neighborhoods pretending to save the day. A common ice-breaker question is,

“What would you do with superpowers?” or “What superpower would you want?” Moore and

Gibbons let readers place themselves into a corrupt world with few “right” choices and present

arguments for how to save the world.

Ozymandias is the primary villain of Watchmen with a utilitarianism belief system that

leads him to brutally kill millions of people for world peace. In the realm of classic superhero

villains, Ozymandias is not unique in his mass execution method of achieving harmony. Notably,

Thanos from Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame kills the population in his attempt at peace. The

major difference between the two is Ozymandias actually saves more people then he hurts

whereas Thanos kills as many people as those who survive. Even from a utilitarian argument,

Thanos did evil; but Ozymandias did good (Strand 69). Watchmen shows us that even a properly

done utilitarian viewpoint is evil. In actual history we rarely see examples of “well done”

political systems. Russia’s communism, Germany’s facism, or Iran’s theocracy aren’t perfect

representations of those ideologies, thus people are able to argue that, when done properly, these

systems would actually work very well. In order to disprove political systems it is almost

necessary to work in the theoretical, in the fictional.

Not only are readers able to better determine how they feel about utilitarianism, but they

are also able to judge the morality of reactions to it. Five of the other masked adventurers have
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the opportunity to react to Ozymandias’ actions: the Comedian, Dan Dreiberg, Laurie Juspeczyk,

Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach. The Comedian, known for being brutal, cruel, and abusive, does

not tell anyone about what he discovers; but he is deemed enough of a threat to Ozymandias’

plot that he is murdered. Dan and Laurie are by far the most reasonable of the heroes throughout

the novel, but they also choose to tell no one who was responsible for the deaths of millions of

people; instead they hide away as civilians. Dr. Manhattan, with supreme knowledge of time and

reality, goes as far as killing Rorchach to prevent the spilling of the truth. The only one of the

so-called superheroes who actually wants to spread the truth and carry out justice is the

sociopath. The reasonable, intelligent people choose to keep the world in the dark to avoid panic.

Why did American citizens not know what was actually happening in Vietnam during the

Vietnam War? Because “reasonable and intelligent” people chose to keep the people in the dark

to avoid panic. Realistically, telling the general populace about what Ozymandias did would

have killed more people; but that doesn’t make keeping the public in the dark right. The

exaggerated superhero characters are easier to make moral judgments about as we don’t have

factors such as political affiliation, patriotism, or lack of knowledge. This does not equate to the

fictional dilemma being less complex or difficult to face; thus when readers are able to decide

their position in the no-stakes environment, they can then apply those judgments in the real

world.

Watchmen benefits from not only being a story about superheroes, but also from being in

the graphic novel form. In an interview with HARDtalk, Moore explains his “books themselves

were actually written to show off what the comics medium could do” (“Alan Moore HARDtalk

interview” 00:15:01). The full panel pages of the Ozymandias’ monster’s destruction of New

York City are chock full of detail, such as newspapers with the heading “War?” (Moore and
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Gibbons 383-388). It is easy to see how complex and intricate these pages are; however, it is not

only the artistically-elaborate panels that leave the reader with much to deliberate. At the end of

Jon and Laurie’s conversation on Mars, the panels slowly zoom out until the last panel is a rather

simple picture of a few stars (Moore and Gibbons 308). These panels were probably among the

most simple ones for Gibbons to draw, but they give the reader time to process what they have

just read. Jon and Lauie had a pivotal conversation about Jon’s existentialism and Laurie’s

realization of who her father is; this is not a conversation that Moore and Gibbons wanted us to

blow through (Moore and Gibbons 294-308). In most books this effect is created by the ending

of a chapter or the use of ellipses, but the effect is less pronounced with these methods.

There are, of course, limitations of the graphic novel genre, the primary being the limited

amount of text per page. Comics can describe complex feelings and big picture ideas, but they

are not meant to be a replacement to the factually-dense textbook. While Watchmen allows

readers to understand why the Cold War happened, this is not a novel that tells us what actually

occurred. Textbooks, memoirs, and social commentaries are required for understanding the facts

and figures of history (though this does not exclude overlap of genres such as Maus and

Persepolis, which are graphic novel memoirs). Furthermore, fictional works such as Watchmen

cannot fully explain the events of history because the events of the novel aren’t real. To a degree,

readers can match up the fictional events to real occurrences; but critics such as Jamie A. Hughes

argue, “that earlier superheroes were constructed by their authors to exist within a hermetic

sphere, isolated from religion, politics, culture wars, or other sectarian squabbles” (Chaney 266).

Graphic novels serve a different purpose from other books, just like film differs from books.

Watchmen stretched the graphic novel genre to its very ends and utilized everything the

medium had to offer. Moore and Gibbons built on simple foundations and made a complex,
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thought-provoking masterpiece that stands out in the field of superhero comics. This is not to say

there are no other brilliant works that have come out of the field of comics. There is a reason that

the Marvel Cinematic Universe is so popular and that the story of Batman has been retold in so

many forms (live-actions movies, cartoons, comics, television shows). The Crimebusters in

Watchmen did not invent the idea of a complex team of masked adventurers. Indeed perhaps the

biggest limitation of comic books is that they are consistently underestimated. When superheroes

first began rising into the mainstream, we got the 1960s Batman series and the Superman movies

of the late 1970s and early 1980s which are iconically cheesy and overexaggerated. So many

people took these spoof-esque versions of comic books to be the entire genre. Just like in other

genres there are cheesy and silly books; but there are also deep, powerful, and complex books.

Watchmen was based on the principles of the previously-established comic book genre, but

Moore and Gibbons actually took the characters seriously.

Watchmen allows readers to become more concrete in their opinions on decisions made

by political leaders, how they would want to react to the darker sides of history, and gives them

moments to pause, think, and observe. While Watchmen is indeed a very complex book in the

ideas it presents, the way the story is told is familiar and nostalgic with recognizable superhero

tropes facing identity crisis and the perusal of truth. Moore and Gibbons used the distinct comic

book elements that have been viewed as simple and immature and made a story about a complex

topic that doesn’t have a right answer or a happy ending. They used the visual art to allow

multiple storylines to be overlaid upon each other. Moore discussed in his interview with

HARDtalk that he does not especially enjoy adaptations of media into another form (such as film

adaptations of books) (“Alan Moore HARDtalk interview” 00:17:10). Watchmen could only ever

have been a comic book; the ideas, characters, and impression left on the reader cannot be fully
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replicated in another genre. The simple comic book superhero style was necessary for the full

complexity of Watchmen.
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Works Cited

“Alan Moore HARDtalk interview.” YouTube, uploaded by rickdickboy, 20 Apr. 2012,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuBFd1rlWWA&t=909s.

"Alan Moore talks - 02 - Watchmen." YouTube, uploaded by AlanMooreVids, 15 Oct. 2007,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKebCtCTbCA&t=85s.

Babic, Annessa Ann. Comics as History, Comics as Literature : Roles of the Comic Book in

Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.

EBSCOhost,

https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat08449a&AN=mssu.b436170

2&site=eds-live.

Chaney, Michael A.. Graphic Subjects : Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels.

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. EBSCOhost,

https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e862xna&AN=354960&site=ed

s-live.

Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 2019.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

Strand, Kristoffer. Hero or Villain: A Comparative Study of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s

Watchmen (1987), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), and Anthony and Joe

Russo’s Avengers: Endgame (2019). Jan. 2022. EBSCOhost,

https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsnor&AN=edsnor.11250.300

3168&site=eds-live.