Having never read a comic book before, and not being a big fan of cartoons in any medium, I approached Watchmen with trepidation. However, I quickly realized that Watchmen was far different from what I expected. It was beautiful, and exquisitely written. The intricacy of interwoven storylines and the pictures full of hidden meaning made Watchmen exhausting but exciting to read. Not being a particularly visually artistic person, I had come to the novel underestimating the power of illustrations. Indeed, the word “illustration” does them an injustice, because of the many moments where the image was clearly carefully chosen, placed and rendered in order to tell the story.  I enjoyed Watchmen far more than I expected to, and admire Moore’s amazing literary talent.

After buying Watchmen used for $6.66, I realized that the apocalyptic themes in the novel must be fairly clear. Rosen lays out many of the parallels to the Book of Revelation in the narrative; however, her discussion of Watchmen focuses on the deity imbued characters:  Rorschach, Veidt, and Jon. I enjoyed Rosen’s discussion of these three, and generally agreed with her comparisons of Rorschach to the apocalyptic God of retribution and Veidt to the apocalyptic Christ (22, 27). Rorschach is even God-like in his death. Rorschach’s word, his diary, lives on, just as the word of God lives on in the Bible. Just as God’s apocalyptic plan lives on through the Book of Revelation, the truth of Watchmen’s apocalypse lives on in Rorschach’s diary. Rosen’s statement that “Veidt’s plan to build a new world is bound to fail since he acts of his own volition rather than by God’s” is now especially true if we substitute “Rorschach” for “God” (21). Rorschach was a fascinating and frustrating character, for despite his narrow-minded dualistic mindset, there was a part of me “that cheer[ed] him on because his mission [wa]s to destroy evil” (25).

This was not true for Veidt. Perhaps part of this was the lack of a sympathetic back-story that Moore gives both Rorschach and Jon, for as Rosen points out, Rorschach and Veidt both have “willingly and knowingly taken on the responsibility of the “dirty work” that must be done” (30).

Jon was the character for whom I felt the most sympathy. I sympathized with the enormous burden that his perception of time placed on him (so beautifully explained by Chapter 6), and clung to his humanity along with him. A frame in which Jon holds Laurie’s bra and stares at it is captioned with a statement by Laurie to Dan: “The way he looks at things, like he can’t remember what they are and doesn’t particularly care…” (3:9). As the reader, I wanted him to care, and perhaps Jon did as well. But though neither Jon nor I had realized or accepted it yet, he had long ago lost that humanity which allowed him to know why he cared or how to. Perhaps I should have, for from Jon’s very first scene his blue speech bubbles set him apart.

Yet instead, I clung to his humanity through his scene with Laurie on Mars – surely someone capable of human emotion (love, anger) still possessed humanity. Rather than seeing his change of heart about saving earth for what it was: that “he can only judge their value in terms of their uniqueness in the universe” I saw this as an optimistic sign of his humanity (32). John is refuting the idea in the traditional apocalyptic story “that crises are part of a deliberate and purposeful underlying design,” with morally neutral chaos theory (Rosen, xix) .

Jon (like the swamp thing) goes through an “apocalypse of his former self” (Rosen, 9). Jon “must feel his way into the deity role, shedding clothes, then illusions about his shared humanity, and finally his emotional attachment to the world” (37). The reader takes this journey with him, and it is only at the very end, with Veidt’s engineered apocalypse that Jon’s personal apocalypse is realized and completed.

If Rorschach is God and Veigt is Christ, then it might follow that Jon is the Holy Spirit. Rosen never directly draws this connection, but the imbuing of a human with godly powers, as when one is filled with the Holy Spirit, could be seen as analogous to the change that Jon goes through. Indeed, an encounter with the Holy Spirit is what prompts evangelical Christians to become “born-again,” a personal apocalypse perhaps similar to the one Jon goes through, especially in so much as it affects their perception of time. The difference, as Rosen points out, is that Jon can see, understand, and even be persuaded by alternate perceptions.