David Meadows
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Registered: 09-2003
Posts: 442
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 Watchmen
I needed a book to read on the train to London last week and it occurred to me that I hadn't read Alan Moore's Watchmen for a good few years. It's a three-hour trip to London. Watchmen is a 12-issue series. I can read one comic in 15-20 minutes. Should be just about right, I thought.
As the train pulled out of Newcastle, I opened the book.
As it pulled into Durham (that's at least 10 minutes), I was still looking at page 1.
It's a perfectly contructed comic-book page.
Honestly, everything on that page is pure genius. The interplay of text and pictures, the flow of the pictures, the two levels of textual meaning... everything about it is totally awesome. And that's just the first page.
By the time I got to London, I had just finished the second issue. Ok, each issue is four pages longer than a standard comic, and there is a text essay at the end of each one (that's integral to fully understanding the story being told), but still...
Watchmen is a work of genius. It's not just a clever story (of a style that had never really been done before in comics), it's clever story telling.
Alan Moore said he wrote it deliberately to exploit the storytelling ideas that were possible with (and unique to) the comic medium. As a novel, Watchmen would just have been a good story. As a movie, it would just have been a good story.
As a comic, it's a work of genius. Greater than anything I've read in any medium.
Last edited by David Meadows, 4/8/2008, 21:49
--- Review: Deep Purple London, 30/7/2008 |
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4/8/2008, 21:47
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