Archive for March 24th, 2009

I found myself alone in a bookstore tonight after my dad bailed on me, which is totally cool since I completely forgot about him last week. After grabbing a couple of books to peruse I decided to flip through Watchmen. I hadn’t read it yet nor had I seen the movie, but there was enough good buzz around it that I figured I’d give it a chance. 3.5 hours later, I finished it. After all the hype surrounding it, it had to be fabulous, right? Meh. I’ve read better.

* ducks from all the Watchmen fanboi’s *

Right off the bat I was wondering which came first, Watchmen or The Incredibles. They both had a similar kind of premise, the whole forced-into-retirement angst of superheros. As expected, Watchmen was much grittier. No kids cartoon, this. My immediate disappointment was with the artwork. It was allright, about what I would expect from DC comics (bias alert: I’ve always been a Marvel fan). But nothing mindblowing. My previous experience with graphic novels have been with manga; my favorites so far have been the Ghost in the Shell books by Masamune Shirow. The art in Watchmen didn’t stack up to those. I figured that the characters and writing would make up for it. They did, to some extent, but not enough to lift my overall impressions of the novel.

To me, the characters seemed fairly two-dimensional. You’ve got the psycho vigilante (Rorschach) who wouldn’t be that out of place in a Virtue sqad in Iran or Saudi Arabia, the way he obsesses over people fornicating. There’s the hot butt-kicking babe (Silk Spectre), rebelling against her mother, the previous generation’s hot butt-kicking babe. I felt bad at first for the Comedian, but after all the flashbacks, I wasn’t real sad that he bit it on the first page, the misogynistic, sociopathic fucker (blowing away your pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend because she pissed you off by calling you on your asshole-ishness doesn’t exactly endear you to me). Dr. Manhattan was somewhat interesting, but struck way too many chords of Superman and, to some extent, Michael Smith in Heinlein‘s Stranger in a Strange Land, the way he was all detached and almost mystical (in a pseudo-scientific kind of way). Night Owl just seemed like a weenie. At least the second Night Owl got some pants and had some cool gadgets, but that Owlship just looked like a flying turd. With eyes. Ozymandeus was a complete caricature so it didn’t surprise me in the least when he started monologuing his twisted plan to the heros who had come to stop him.

The ending. *** SPOILER ALERT*** Hmmmm. It was definitely not a happily-ever-after kind of ending. Somehow the wholesale slaughter of half of New York psychically by an asploding giant space squid that wasn’t really from space but was end result of a genetically engineered psychic’s brain, in order to stop war and bring peace and love to all humanity just didn’t do it for me. By then I was just wanting the end to come so I could put it down. It just didn’t have the emotional impact that other massive destruction of millions of people did, like in Battlestar Galactica, for instance. And Night Owl’s costume at that point just looked stupid. There was a hollowness to the whole ending that just grated on me. Perhaps that was the author’s intent, perhaps there was some deeper level that just skimmed right over my head; I dunno.

It wasn’t a bad novel. There were many moving parts to the story and deeper levels of meaning revealed through some of the inter-story stories. Overall, it was just meh. I’m not going to put this one up there in my list of top-whatever books to read. I was really hoping that this book was going to be some kind of epic masterpiece who’s characters and dialog would be ingrained in the pop-culture geek center of my cerebrum, but, alas, it was not to be. I’ll probably still go to see the movie. I think, for once, I might like the movie better than the book.