Alan Moore Watchmen Over the Comic Book Universe

Though considered one of the greatest superhero stories ever told, Alan Moore's "Watchmen" is almost anti-dramatic. Though within the plot told on its pages a city gets destroyed, villains unmasked and heroes come out of retirement one last time, the sort of dramatic events that in normal comic books would have been accompanied by lots of exclamation marks and enough bombast to drown an army, everything that happens in Watchmen takes place in a world that though different from ours, is equally dreary and commonplace.

Many comics have explored the ordinary lives of superheroes, but unlike Spider Man, Daredevil, Batman, Superman or all the rest, the "heroes" of Watchmen are for the most part men and women living in a world that frustrates and suppresses them. Some of the heroes are villains and some try to be heroes, but sorting out which from which is a confusing enterprise.

Is Rorschach, the bigoted vigilante, whose main supporters are a far right John Birch like rag, but who is the only one of the heroes to stand up against the crime of Ozymandias' crimes? Or is it Ozymandias, the compassionate liberal, who kills remorselessly, postures self-aggrandizingly and finally murders millions in the name of world peace?

The answer of course is that there are no heroes or villains, only ordinary men and women trying to be more than they are and dancing on a thin wire. While "Watchmen" features men and women in costumes and tights fighting criminal figures, they are for the most part nothing more than men and women in costume. Aside from Dr. Manhattan, who possesses actual superhuman powers, they are nothing more than flesh and blood. And Dr. Manhattan is a reluctant superhero at best, cynically used by the government to selectively fight some crimes as publicity stunts, even as his powers vastly supercede anything a criminal can throw at him and his interest in such petty human matters is negligible.

The title of "Watchmen" is derived from "Who Watches the Watchers," a question that recurs throughout the story, with no real answer. The answer of course is that no one watches them. The heroes have chosen to step outside the framework of law and normal morality in their own ways. By choosing to abrogate any restraint upon them, they've also discarded any higher obligations, except what they themselves define.

Rorsarch functions as a pure street level vigilante, killing and maiming whom he sees as evil. When he kills child molesters, we might agree with the ends, while questioning the means. He pays no attention to the police or the Keene Act. He remorselessly and relentlessly does what is right, crying "No compromise.Not even in the face of Armageddon."

While both the Rorschach test and his mask, which is a cloth forming into a Rorschach inkblot represent the ambiguity of the external universe, whose selective interpretation by the observer defines human psychology, Rorschach himself lives not by subjective but objective beliefs. Like the mask, his belief system is one of black and white. Often prejudiced and petty, but nevertheless unwavering, Rorschach is a psychological trauma turned into a man. A serial killer in a mask fighting for justice and letting himself become the mask, the man he was forgotten and left behind.

Rorschach is both hero and monster, which is the nature of the vigilante. Like "The Punisher", he is the ultimate working class superhero. Like him, he is honestly a killer. Unlike many costumed superheroes across the comic book universes who beat up a villain who has killed thousands and pack him off to jail, knowing he will be released again, Rorschach follows the logical ends of his premise and kills them. A disturbing character, an absolutist in a grey world, unwilling to be a hypocrite and unwilling to give up, he meets the final fate of the powerless absolutist who tries to stand up for a higher truth and justice without compromising his beliefs. Death.

Ozymandias too had stepped outside all ordinary moral and human bounds, but unlike Rorschach he has not tied himself to any real moral belief system. In Ozymandias' arrogance, his belief system is himself. Like Rorschach, Ozymandias is a vigilante, but a vigilante on a global scale. If Rorschach sees himself as a sort of avenging angel, Ozymandias sees himself as a god. Where Rorschach hunts down and kills criminals whose crimes may be grotesque, but their settings small and petty, Ozymandias crafts and plots on a grand scale. Where Rorschach kills the guilty in the name of protecting the innocent, Ozymandias kills the innocent in the name of protecting the world from a catastrophe that may or may not happen.

Smooth, deceptive and condescending, Ozymandias is a politician unchained from politics, a liberal unchained from the principles of liberalism and a man who believes himself so superior, that he acts in the name of humanity, even as he repeatedly demonstrates that he has no use for human life, morals, values or companionship. Ozymandias' moral system is not fundamentally different than that of Dr. Manhattan, in its detachment from humanity, but it is colored by Ozymandias' own ambition and self-love, which massages it into an act horrific beyond measure.

Doctor Manhattan is the real face of a man given superhuman powers, he ultimately and inevitably must become something more than and other than human. Doctor Manhattan's powers and his changed nature transforms him into an alien. The attempt to call him a hero is only an attempt to recategorize his basic alienness into a human framework. Doctor Manhattan is not a hero. In reality he is something more than man, he is a higher being, an alien with no race of his own, forever lonely and forever alone.

Ozymandias' plot to isolate him further by causing it to appear that those around him are developing cancers, helps push Doctor Manhattan out of earth and away from humanity entirely, and the woman who represents a tenuous link back to the human race.

Being outside humanity entirely, Doctor Manhattan's actions are ultimately governed by a completely alien sensibility. Not a part of any human society, Doctor Manhattan cannot even be considered a vigilante. He watches, but mostly does not interfere, because he does not care. His otherness sets him apart and outside most human concerns. He has become what Ozymandias only aspires to be, godlike.

Nite Owl by contrast is the hero as a man and nothing more than a man. For all his costumes and gadgets, Nite Owl, like Silk Spectre, is completely inadequate to the task of being a hero. Capable of defeating criminals, he and Silk Spectre, cannot confront the larger problems of the world and society as Rorsarch and Ozymandias do, nor can they achieve the detachment of a Dr. Manhattan or the Carpe Diem philosophy of The Comedian. Instead they are ordinary people in a dark world struggling to do the right thing as best as they can. They are what ordinary costumed adventurers would be, without psychosis or severe personality disorders.

The Comedian by contrast is a superhero as the id. Greedy, lustful, vicious and murderous, The Comedian incorporates a disdain for everything into his actions. He fights for causes but believes in none of them. He kills, robs and rapes, including the mother of Silk Spectre and former Silk Spectre, thus fathering her.

Like Ozymandias, he has no real concern for human life, like Dr. Manhattan he is emotionally detached from human affairs no matter how much he is involved in them and like Rorschach, his crimes are mainly petty on a small scale. His perpetual grin is the grin of the Id, the grin of an inexhaustible ego and lust.

Set outside of human norms, the only desire of the id is to feed its own lusts. If Dr. Manhattan serves as a kind of superego and Nite Owl as an ego, The Comedian drowns all norms and restrains in the desires of his appetite.

In the absence of a higher moral authority, men make their own laws. By stepping outside of human boundaries, the heroes all made their own rules as they went along. Without anyone to watch the watchmen, what followed were an assortment of crimes, eventually ending in the mass death of millions. Like the countries approaching armageddon, they had become powers to themselves and their final collisions were tragically inevitable.