From the very beginning, the pages of Alan Moore’s Watchmen are saturated with apocalyptic imagery. Rorschach wanders through a world where the end seems imminent. The streets are littered with trash and lined with strip clubs and bars; there are roving bands of punks and hooligans and a criminal lurking in every alleyway; the world seems to edge closer to anarchy and devolution every day. It is interesting to realize how the connection between so called “moral depravity’ and the end of the world is hardwired in our brains. While I could recognize that what Rorschach saw as signs of moral dissolution were often the results of changing moral and political order, it also wasn’t difficult to understand the rationalization for his vigilante justice. Therefore, it was even more startling to realize during the story of Jon’s transformation, that the world of Watchmen is much more technologically advanced than the 80’s of our world. Jon’s ability to influence the world at the subatomic level has allowed scientists to harness his knowledge and powers to make great leaps forward. I have internalized the message that progress equals a better world, and I struggle, like the characters in Watchmen, to cope with a world where progress pushes us towards the apocalypse. That is one of the aspects of Watchmen that I enjoyed the most, how Moore forces you to reevaluate your preconceived ideas of morality and progress, and as Rosen explores, of superheroes and deities.

While reading Watchmen, I couldn’t help but remember Glorious Appearing, especially during Jon’s creation story, when Dr. Milton Glass warns us that the concept that “God exists and he’s American” should fill us with “a feeling of intense and crushing religious terror.” I find the intersection of religion and politics, particularly the marriage of Christian morality with conservative ideology, terrifying. It is the reason why I find Glorious Appearing, which is a vehicle for fundamentalist belief, so irritating, particularly the characters’, and, in turn, the novel’s assurance that Christ is coming, and that he is only coming to save a select few. In Watchmen, Jon, though he is the character that comes the closest to approaching divinity, becomes a tool of the American government and is used to assert their dominance in world politics. Furthermore, during the argument between Laurie and Jon, when she tries to convince him to save the world, it becomes clear that a remote omniscient and omnipresent higher being that is removed from humanity would be unable to sympathize with our troubles. He would not be able to and would not care to distinguish between those who deserve to be saved and those who must be cast down into the lake of fire. The only reason that Jon can be convinced to save the world is because he is a manmade God trying to hold on to the remnants of his humanity.

Furthermore, Moore stresses, through his deconstruction of the conventions of the superhero genre, that it is impossible to cleanly divide the world along lines of good and evil. None of the heroes in Watchmen, from the masked avengers to the new breed of superheroes, are intrinsically good; whatever good they accomplished was always accompanied by an almost equal amount of harm. As Rosen states, in her essay “Sentient Vegetable Claims End is Near!,” Moore forces people to recognize the contradictions inherent in their conception of a god; he reminds them that there is a “thin line between retributive justice and vigilante justice…that the price for [peace] may be higher than you are willing to pay…that power might be co-opted for political ends” (33). Moore’s gods – Rorschach, Veidt, and Jon – are invariably fallible because they are human and the creation of humans. It forces us to question whether that is true of all gods. If God is fallible, then religion is fallible, and if religion is fallible, then so is the entire moral, social, and political order that rests on the back of that religion.