Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Omphalos
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Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Post by Omphalos »

I know that I put this up about a year ago, but I have been thinking about trickster gods a lot lately for some reason. I redrafted this after a sleepless night in Seattle recently thinking about Loki and Coyote. I'd love to year your comments on this one. Not sure at all if I am off base here. The new parts are the last several paragraphs, though I tweaked everything.

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I can plainly see that comic books don't get very much respect in literary circles. Not even in SF literary circles, and considering that SF is pretty much the dark horse of the language arts, that kind of confuses me. It just seems that stories told with pictures and speech bubbles get less respect in traditional literary circles simply because they have pictures and bubbles. At least it seems that way, because as far as I can tell, there is nothing at all wrong with many of the stories. Take Sandman, by Neil Gaiman for example. In 1991 one issue of that very popular comic book (#19, A Midsummer Night's Dream) was nominated for and actually won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. The members of the board of the World Fantasy Convention were so shocked that a comic book could win their prestigious award, and so determined to keep this heresy from occurring ever again, that the very next day they changed the rules so that a comic book never again could even be entered into the competition. I cannot imagine a story better suited to depict the real attitudes that publishers, critics and scholars have about comic books/graphic novels. And despite the fact that there are increasing numbers of stories published in this medium every year, I do not see things changing much in the future. But....that will not stop me, of course, from bringing you reports on the ones that I like. Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, is in my opinion one of the very best that this sub-genre has to offer. It is the story of several emotionally damaged superheroes who soldier on after the forced demise of their team despite the fact that for all but two of them, maybe three, nobody needs them anymore...Please click here, or on the book cover above, to be taken to the complete review..
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

-James C. Harwood, Science Fiction Writer, Straight (March 5, 1956 - May 25, 2010)



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