Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of reading Watchmen was that it was a comic book, and the particular way in which one enters into a fictional universe that the comic book allows.  Especially considering how heavy the text was on apocalyptic imagery, it allowed an entry into a world which felt fully realized, and in that way, all the more frightening.  Had the novel been text alone, the plot itself is strong enough that it could easily have been captivating as a traditional text novel (if that is the term).  But the visual element truly made the experience for me.  More than anything, reading Watchmen immediately post-Glorious Appearing was a lesson in not judging a text by form alone, as the graphic novel in this comparison is words apart from the traditional novel in character development, complex unfolding of plot, and use of symbols and themes.

On the text itself, I enjoyed the entering the historical world of Watchmen, as it seemed a time not entirely unlike that of now, yet pushed just enough further afield to be apocalyptic.  Watchmen is a world of riots and strikes, of war in Afghanistan and superpowers gone astray.  Authority has little place, and when government does step in, it is often only for the worse.  There is a certain feeling of nostalgic apathy which runs through the text, which I found resonant in considering our historical moment.  The characters of Watchmen often lapse into a nostalgia for the days of the Minutemen, or for the times in their own lives as masked figures in which they were relevant, in control, wanted and needed.  In a nation facing systemic unemployment approaching one-fourth of the population by some counts, where the days of superpower feel fully eclipsed by an era of austerity and debt, but, crucially, where a course of action seems confused at best, that nostalgic apathy—the desire for conditions of a past time, but the unknowing frustration and lack of will in terms of getting there—feels resonant, particularly in the unheeded warnings of the later-to-be revealed Rorschach, holding “end is nigh” signs as the violence flows around him, and the superheroes of days past retreat.

Perhaps no chapter particularly captures that feeling of a desire for times past coupled with an inadequacy to realize it than that of Chapter IV, the creation of Doctor Manhattan and his retreat to Mars.  Manhattan is a rather god-like figure for this text—superpowerful in a way in which the other masked figures are really just that, masks alone—and is omnipotent and omnipresent.  But to what extent does he use these powers, and is he benevolent, and indeed interested, in involving himself in matters of the world?  I enjoyed that chapter so much—though early in the unfolding of the novel—because it was the moment where the apocalyptic feeling of the novel was not only truly resonant, but felt so detached from anything religious.  It was an apocalypse where god retreated, to step back and let the end occur, fully cognizant of the temporal nature of that around him, yet unwilling to intervene.  This was not the god of Daniel or John of Patmos, a god who is certainly not benevolent but rather actively vengeful, but this god was something far more frightening—disinterested, disaffected, and unwilling to try anymore.  An apathetic clockmaker, done with the problems of a world taking its last gasps, its best days long past.