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Oct 01, 2010

Trish rated it:

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6 comments like (56 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2008

Schmacko rated it:

I can understand why this is considered a holy tome in the field of graphic novels. The plot is complex, it’s unique, and it’s well drawn. Also, it’s got the Holy Grail of every geeky comic book fan's wetdreams – lots of cool gadgets and stuff.

I ain’t knocking that. Imagination abounds, and I am thoroughly impressed. I love that comic books and graphic novels create their entire world – but – BUT then again every piece of art creates it’s own world. And ALL OF THOSE OTHER ARTS M More...

32 comments like (61 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Keely rated it:

Since the movie came out, I've found myself having to explain why Watchmen is important and interesting. Despite being the most revered comic book of all time, it never really entered the mainstream until the film. Now, people are rushing to read it in droves, but approaching Watchmen without an understanding of its history and influences means missing most of what makes it truly special.

The entire work is an exploration of the history and purpose of the superhero genre: how readers More...

4 comments like (37 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2009

Brad rated it:

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9 comments like (47 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Punk rated it:

Graphic Novel. It's 1985. We won the Vietnam War. Nixon is still president. Someone is killing off costumed superheroes, and the world is on the brink of nuclear war. I wasn't expecting to like this book. What, I wondered, did a comic from the late eighties have to offer me, a hip and happening girl in the oughts? You can practically see the dots in the color! I'd checked it out from the library on the advice of friends, and I'd tried to read it once before, but gave up before I got even five pa More...

4 comments like (21 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2010

Ceridwen rated it:

So, that blew my freaking mind. I actually feel sick to my stomach, and unable to come up with an intelligent review. I'm not sure I even want to bother.

Alan Moore hates people, but the alternatives are so much worse.

It's late, and I should be asleep, and Jack and Rexella Van Impe are muted on the tv quoting from the book of Daniel. Which is perfect. Moore owes something to Scorsese in this book, with all the endless intertwining of one event with another. So I type, an More...

18 comments like (35 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2008

Nicole rated it:

I realize that what I'm about to say is as close as you can get to comic book blasphemy, but I think that 1) Alan Moore is the most overrated comic book writer ever and 2) this graphic novel is overblown, pretentious and most unforgivable of all, boring.

To be fair, I'm somewhat of a snob when it comes to my reading habits. First and foremost, I want to be entertained. If the story happens to be deep, thought provoking or groundbreaking as well, that's icing on the cake. And the bo More...

33 comments like (37 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Brendan rated it:

Who’s watching Watchmen? Everybody apparently. This book—or comic book, or graphic novel, or whatever you want to call it—has been picked apart endlessly in the 20 years since it was first published, every frame microscopically studied, its plot, characters, and symbols charted out no less elaborately than Ulysses’. Its fans, like fans of everything else, are intensely protective and argumentative. Reading a book like this now, for the first time, is likely to result less in actual criticism tha More...

0 comments like (15 people liked it)

Apr 16, 2009

Felicia rated it:

Hmm, what to say. I read this AFTER I saw the movie, which was sacrilege according to some fellow geeks on Twitter, but my definition of "Geek" is someone who doesn't do what people PRESSURE them to do :P They love what they love. So anyhoo I read this and I can summarize this way:

The Movie did a great summary of the plot while formulating a story that missed the subtext of the graphic novel entirely.

I enjoyed both, but after reading the graphic novel, it's More...

9 comments like (42 people liked it)

Feb 26, 2009

Cathy rated it:

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2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jun 16, 2009

Mykle rated it:

Once upon a time I lent my first-edition of the Watchmen graphic novel to some friend of mine. I don't remember who. They still have it, I'm pretty sure. If you are that friend, please return my book because I've just seen the movie and now I'm ready to read the book again.

My friends and I were so damn obsessed when this series was first coming out. It was a monthly serial, of course, but the issues kept coming later and later. Fortunately there was so very much detail to obsess More...

13 comments like (12 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

John rated it:

The Watchmen is considered one of the most important comic books in history. The costumes are less spectacular, the origins more bleak, the heroes more despicable and/or self-loathing, the villains almost non-existent, the relationships more strained and the political overtones more blatant than were almost ever seen in mainstream comics before. Its effects were massive: it ushered in a new wave of "cool," where Superman and Spider-Man were lame, and everyone wanted murderous and self- More...

6 comments like (11 people liked it)

May 12, 2007

David rated it:

I just finished reading Watchmen by the very intense Alan Moore of V for Vendetta fame. I've been on a bit of a comic book/graphic novel kick recently after completing a whole host of non-fiction work for use in my Master's thesis. The Watchmen is one of those books that anyone who cares, or cared, about comic books and superheroes should read. Set in an alternate American time line, skewed by the existence of masked vigilantes (read: superheroes), Watchmen explores an America that wins the Viet More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jun 10, 2008

Michael rated it:

I've heard nothing but unflinching hyperbolic praise for this book. I wonder if it's even possible for anything to live up to the kind of hype this has suffered. It's the only graphic novel/comic book to be included on Time Magazine's list of 100 greatest novels since the beginning of Time's publication. That's a lot of pressure - to be the sole symbol and representation and of an entire art form for a popular and wide audience. I mean, this thing needs to be devastatingly good.

F More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 09, 2007

Evil_Dead_Junkie rated it:

I'm rereading Watchmen for the first time in about five years and have thus decided to start a petition to officially change its name to creamy goodness.

Seriously its one of those blessed rereadings where every twenty pages or so I come across a sequence and go "Yeah I remember this this part kicks ass this is my favorite part of the book." and then twenty pages later I repeat the phrase.

People always remember how important the book is. But I think we forget ju More...

13 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Sean rated it:

Watchmen is an overrated book, no question. I'm not exactly knowledgeable on the subject of comics and graphic novels, but as a work of fiction constantly hailed as one of the 'best books of the twentieth century', I'm pretty prepared to call bullshit. A lot of the nihilistic sections are cringe inducing, the plot is pretty messy, and, perhaps most gratingly, Rorshach's excessively bleak 'journal entries' are pretty derivative of Travis Bickle's narration in Taxi Driver. But I didn't read Watchm More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2009

Kelly rated it:

I was told and told and told again that I must read this as my introduction to the graphic novel genre. There were a few dissident voices for Sandman, but they were largely drowned out by the chorus for this piece. (Piece? Book doesn't feel right.)

It did take me a little bit to adjust myself to the storytelling method, but once I got into it, I was absolutely enthralled with it. I really loved about the first 3/4 of the plot- I loved the psychology of it all, and the nuanced, beautif More...

12 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 28, 2009

Shannon rated it:

Set in 1985 in New York, the Cold War is still very much alive, Nixon is settling in for yet another term as President, and masked vigilantes are considerably passé. Since the costumed adventurers of the 30s and 40s called The Minutemen disbanded in the 50s, masked vigilantes became increasingly unpopular right up to the Keene Act of '77 which made it illegal. The only one who persists is Rorschach, and everyone knows he's not exactly mentally stable.

This second generation of retire More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 15, 2009

Greg rated it:

Maybe this is worth four stars. Or maybe even five stars, but only if I had read Watchmen when I was twelve years old. That doesn't mean that I had to be twelve to like it, but that would have been how old I would have been when these first came out. Instead of reading them then I was a pretty loyal Marvel fan at the time, and the little bit of money I had, which all went to buying comic books, was spent on the Marvel universe, with my forays into DC land coming a few years later when I reali More...

19 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2009

Karen rated it:

I haven't read too many comic books (or graphic novels or whatever), and most of the ones I have read I haven't really enjoyed. I think it's because I lack a very basic skill, and I suspect that many literary types who disdain comics have the same problem - I suck at looking at pictures. My eye is drawn to the words and I completely ignore everything else. Well, any six-year-old will tell you that only a total moron would read a comic that way.

Anyway, repeated aggressive encourageme More...

8 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 05, 2009

Kat rated it:

I'm seriously tempted to give spoilers here, as the book was utterly mind-blowing (GAH! Rorschach! GAH!), and there were some serious twists in the book that, while I can't say I didn't see them coming, still really affected me strongly.

This is not a comic book for those who want their superheroes infallible icons of Americana. This is a graphic novel in every sense of the phrase. The violence is graphic, but not gratuitously so. It is there for impact upon the reader, and it wo More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 01, 2009

Miss_otis rated it:

I'm prepared to get pelted with rotten vegetables and bricks and all manner of nasty things, but....Watchmen didn't really do anything for me. In fact, I was so "meh" about it that I had to go do some research in order to see if I could figure out just why, exactly, it's so acclaimed.

I found a very interesting thesis someone had written (if anyone would like to read it, comment and I'll try to find it again), which gave me some nice historical background on the history of More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Oct 29, 2008

Colin rated it:

“Who watches the Watchmen?” is the question from the Roman poet, Juvenal, about who has authority over those in authority. Now, who reads the graphic novel Watchmen by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins is an entirely different and far simpler question. The answer: Comic book nerds.

A graphic novel is a comic, although it has differences in length and complexity of storyline (akin more to a literary novel than an episodic piece) and is often aimed at mat More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 22, 2009

Christopher rated it:

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2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 21, 2008

Francine rated it:

Addendum, 21Aug2008: Against my better judgment, I changed my mind and decided to read it to the end. And what a silly, stupid ending!! If I could give this a 0, I would. It's entirely possible that I missed the point. Maybe on some level, it is brilliant and it is seminal. But I, for one, did not like it; I did not appreciate it. This is time I will never get back.

------

Because the movie is coming out next year, Jim said I had to read this. It was the best graphic More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 16, 2008

Elizabeth rated it:

This is one of those books that I often picked up and looked at, but never read. I'm shallow enough to admit I was turned off by the artwork and lack of recognizable characters. I must say, I am so glad that Watchmen was chosen by one of my book groups, forcing me to get past my first impressions.

Watchmen takes place in alternative universe, where the emergence of costumed adventurers has altered the course of modern history. The superheroes, the majority which are neither super nor More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Seth rated it:

As the movie is coming up (much of the casting has been completed), I figured that I was ripe for a reread. In past readings, I have been less than astonished by the work that made TIME Magazine's 100 Best Novels (1923 to the Present). When I first approached Alan Moore's lauded work, I had just come off an extended (or perhaps overextended) run of immersion in film noir and the books and stories that inspired them, so Moore's existentialist take on heroism didn't strike me as all that fresh. Wa More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 17, 2007

Jerzy rated it:

You can call it a graphic novel, but it's really a comic book about superheroes. And that's good, because that's the only way this story could be told! If you're creating a twisted ironic story about comic-book superheroes dealing with the real world, then you also need to be able to mess around with the conventions of the medium where your subjects arose. A novel or play or whatever just wouldn't work as well.

There are some really powerful sections (especially Rorschach's story and More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 05, 2009

R. rated it:

For Christ's sake. Rorschach on a LUNCHBOX?! I saw a Rorschach lunchbox. That is just surreal.

***

Movie Spoiler: Here is 2:34 of exclusive footage from the upcoming Watchmen movie...instead of the Sold Out Nov. 2 Pale Horse concert, Zach Snyder enlisted a Big Name Talent to usher in, serenade the apocalypse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrwO8b9iq...

I wanna die.... Indeed. Kind of heavyhanded with the symbolism, but I'm sure it's all cinematic foreshadowi More...

9 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 28, 2007

Rindis rated it:

I heard of it when it came out of course. And a copy was loaned to the household a few years ago. My roommates throughly enjoyed it (I think at least one had read it before, it had just been years).

I puttered around with it in spurts and eventually got about halfway through before putting it down due to ennui.

The story doesn't really grab me, and there wasn't a single character I cared about. Right now, I can barely remember anything about it at all. I can't even remember More...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

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