Oct 2nd 1-2-3: Watchmen - On Alan Becoming Moore
Greetings again, and welcome back to the compendium!
As I continue refining my process to research and writing these entries, I also continue my research for the next few entries within my series covering all of Hideo Kojima’s works.
So for the sake of, much like my last entry, giving both you and I a sort of break from all the Kojima entries; I will be cover another legendary comic in today’s entry.
So without further ado, what’s the story behind Alan Moore’s Watchmen?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 5 minute read )
Even today I can still remember being a young boy sharing a room with my older brother, and staring at that big yellow smiley face that was on the cover of that comic titled ‘Watchmen’ that sat on the bookshelf above his bed.
And every now and again I’d hear him discussing how impacting, and thought provoking this ‘Watchmen’ was with both our comic loving older cousin, and a close friend of his.
As a child there was instantly something about this comic that caught my eye. Whether it was its cover art, its bold font choice for the title, or the title itself reading ‘Watchmen’, there was just something so alluring about it.
And pairing that allure with the seeming reverence I could perceive in my brother voice when he spoke about it, you could color me an intrigued young lad.
So when I was finally of the age where I could just go on a buy myself a copy, you bet your ass that’s exactly what I did. Then when it came to actually reading the thing, well… that was an interesting story in and of itself.
It’s not very often you experience a piece of art with so much cohesion between its purposed goal and its execution, that you are left in an almost dazed state.
Dazed in the sense that you know what the story was about, you see how it concluded, but you still don’t fully realize how masterfully it was pulled off; you just know that you need time to fully digest it all.
Watchmen was one of my first experiences of this effect, and as time went on I’d have the most random moments of life that would trigger this story into my mind.
Its almost as if reading the comic was only one part of fully experiencing it, and another part was just letting life ‘flicker’ its many meanings, philosophies, and perspectives in and out of your mind through the lens of the ‘Watchmen’.
This comic I first read when I was maybe 13 or 14, so you can imagine what I was able to garner from this story at that time as a young snot nosed teenager.
But fast forward to today, almost 10+ years later, and its still stuck in my head; and it sure as hell is still ‘flickering’ in and out of my mind.
So when I chose to write on it for a Compendium entry I was largely doing it out of my own selfish purpose of delving into Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ again with the perspective that was afforded to me from living through a few more ‘slivers’ of life since I last read it as a teen.
But I was also curious how something as profound and timeless as watchmen was even created.
On Alan Becoming Moore.
As cliché as it may sound, it all really does start with Alan Moore.
The long in very short is that Alan was a young boy from Northampton, England, who was born in 1953, and had always had an affinity towards literature of all kinds as well as a desire to write for himself.
He began with poetry, even got some of it published at a rather young age, and as soon as he completed his school studies he jumped headfirst into the workforce.
More specifically, he jumped headfirst into a bunch of odd end jobs that as he puts it “look great on the dust jacket of your first novel, but were shit to actually live through!”.
He’s painted quite a gruesome picture of the toil he endured while working at a local tannery by saying he and his fellow workers would “go to work at seven thirty in the morning, drag these blood-sodden sheepskins out of vats of cold water and urine, chop off extraneous testicles or hooves and throw them at each other in this concentration camp gaiety we’d established to cope with the grimness of our surroundings.”
He worked plenty of unpleasant manual labor jobs building himself up within the social ladder to become a toilet cleaner at a hotel.
Around the time his first child was on the way he was struck yet again with the sad reality, and dissatisfaction, that came from not following his calling to write.
So he decided to take a leap of faith towards writing, as he knew he’d definitely reason himself away from it once the child was born.
Fast forward through a ton of Moore’s career, and a bunch of ‘potential future compendium entries’, and you find an Alan Moore who had this ‘crazy idea’ for how he wanted to tackle the ‘Superhero’ genre at that time.
For art he had one man in mind, a man who he’d tried to work with on multiple projects before this one; projects that always ultimately fell through.
Projects with lots of ideas tossed into the air, only to hit the ground flat on their faces; but then to be picked back up once this new ‘project’ was getting off the ground.
And that mans name was Dave Gibbons.
Who Will Watch the Watchmen ?
When it came to writing Watchmen, it all began with DC’s purchasing of the rights to a bunch of Charlton Comics Superheroes.
When Alan got word of this, he was already ingratiated with DC in some senses, and so he began to write a story where he could explore, deconstruct, and commentate on the entire ‘Superhero’ genre that was very popular at that time.
He wrote a rather extensive outline and presented it to the ‘father’ of a lot of the popular Charlton Comic characters, Dick Giordano.
Dick was amazed at what Moore had written thus far, and gave Moore his praise, but he also asked Alan if he could try coming up with new characters to tell this rather ‘risky’ story with.
Or as Alan in the most ‘Alan Moore’ way puts it, “Dick loved the stuff, but having a paternal affection for these characters from his time at Charlton, he really didn’t want to give his babies to the butchers, and make no mistake about it, that’s what it would have been.”.
Alan was a quite unsure if it would work with ‘new’ characters but he honored Giordano’s wishes, and when he brought this news to Dave they were now two peas sitting in the same ‘uncertain’ pod.
However that wouldn’t be forever as they quickly found a stride with the conception of the ‘Watchmen’.
“Alan did quite a detailed synopsis plot-wise, but I visualized it first as being the Charlton characters, but I seem to remember as far as the design of the characters goes Alan came up with the names and a sort of character description, but not anything specific about how they would dress.” - Dave Gibbons, The Comics Journal interview alongside Alan Moore, and mediated by Neil Gaiman.
The character designs just ‘came together’ as both Dave and Alan have explained on multiple occasions.
Dave has explained how his process in designing the Watchmen wasn’t as deliberate as most would come to think. He even says that he, “didn’t actually sit down and say ‘I’m now going to design the Watchmen,’” he just “did it at odd times and spent maybe two or three weeks just doing sketches.”
He goes on to say how he’s “hazy about where they came from”, and explains how to him it feels like “the Watchmen have always been there.”
The designs for the Watchmen themselves was rather instinctual from the standpoint of Alan’s writing as well as Dave's illustrations, and when it came to the world that these Watchmen inhabited it was a similar story.
Being that this story wasn’t supposed to be the same earth that we in real life inhabit, both Dave and Alan took their own respective ‘liberties’ with their portrayal of ‘America’, though they both followed suit in following their own respective ‘intuitions’.
Dave came to the observed realization that western comics never paid much mind to the background details, or the details of the buildings in metropolitan settings, and he concluded that this was due to the fact that to the western audience, these things were common place and therefore not a very interesting thing to spend too much time on.
To subvert this fact, he decided to approach visualizing their ‘America’ through his lens as a non American. He did this to add the outside perspective of America being this, exotic culture, an exotic, far-off country. He believed this was probably a more realistic perspective on how America is, than how it is perceived if you actually live in America.
Alan agreed, and added how he believed this also would provide Americans the chance to see their culture as an outsider would.
Alan also has explained how his written portrayal of America isn’t supposed to be perceived as ‘Anti-Americanism’, rather its supposed to be ‘Anti-Reaganism’.
“these are only personal opinions, not necessarily shared by Dave or John. My personal feelings, because I’m the writer and can do anything that I want, is that at the moment a certain part of Reagan’s America isn’t scared. They think they’re invulnerable.” - Alan Moore, The Comics Journal interview alongside Dave Gibbons, and mediated by Neil Gaiman.
He has expanded on this philosophy further citing a quote from an explorer name Freya Stark who had said “The society that knows fear is not the society that’s faced with extinction. It is the society that has forgotten fear that is faced with extinction.”.
These are some the ways that both Alan and Dave used their instinct, and their trust in each other to craft the world, philosophies, and characters for ‘Watchmen’.
They ultimately wanted to tell a story with multiple perspective moral, ethical, and philosophical realities all playing in and out of each other to give the reader something to think about; something that would ultimately assume, and then immediately challenge the intelligence of the reader.
“We tried to set up four or five radically opposing ways of seeing the world and let the readers figure it out for themselves; let them make a moral decision for once in their miserable lives! Too many writers go for that “baby bird” moralizing, where your audience just sits there with their beaks open and you just cram regurgitated morals down their throat.” - Alan Moore, in 1988 interview with Vincent Eno and El Csawza
With this very grey story full of conflicting opinions of the vast array of blacks and whites coming along well, it was still literally very black and white in terms of color.
So for color Dave and Alan both deliberately chose John Higgins to be the colorist for Watchmen.
They chose him for a multitude of reasons, but many of which could be broken down to Johns understanding of what both Dave and Alan had been putting to paper, as well as his similar trust in instinct and intuition.
He was a perfect fit, and Alan’s example of how John approached coloring issue #6 of watchmen I think perfectly illustrates this fact.
“The cover (for Issue #6) is a Rorschach blot, a card from the psychology tests just lying on a table, a pretty simple cover. John colored the cover and colored it really warm and cheerful, and it looks really nice. And Dave was saying, “Look, this is a bit of a bleak issue. Why have you colored it warm and cheerful?” And [John] said, “Well, that’s my plan. It starts off really warm and cheerful, so you color them that way, and on page five we make it a bit darker, and on page seven darker still, and it’s like the lights are going down the entire issue, so when you get to the end it’s really dark and really black.” Emotionally, John is using the colors to really take the readers down, which is really clever.” - Alan Moore, The Comics Journal interview alongside Dave Gibbons, and mediated by Neil Gaiman.
The whole of Watchmen’s conception, its reading experience, and its long-term effect on the reader can equated to the sum of these three men’s trust in each other.
But it starts with a carefully selected, and rather small, group of individuals who stayed in their lanes, and knew how much they all followed their creative intuitions.
They individually understood how far trusting your creative instinct takes you, and they also knew how each creative that stood with them also trusted their own instincts.
And the results of this, I don’t believe anyone would argue me on this, very clearly speaks for itself.
The original Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins run of ‘Watchmen’ continues to be a landmark for comics and storytelling in general.
It is also a prime example of ‘artists’ fully understanding their ‘medium’, and using that in every aspect to their purposed goal.
2: Creative Insights From Us
I. Trust your instincts. If your art doesn’t ‘feel’ right, think logically and practically, find the parts that work and the parts that don’t. Once you’ve found the parts that don’t work, try something different.
II. When you show people your works, always do your best to choose the right words to convey what it is, that is your vision. Try to get them to see it how you do. Observe the areas where they either get distracted from your vision, or where they simply don’t see your vision, write them down and meditate on them. These things will become priceless tools in your arsenal. For those who see your vision, that are fellow artists in some regard, you might have just found a future collaborator.
3: Inspirational Quotes From The Team
I. “The story was about super-heroes, and it didn’t matter which super-heroes it was about, as long as the characters had some kind of emotional resonance, that people would recognize them, so it would have the shock and surprise value when you saw what the reality of these characters was… Originally it was designed around a number of the Charlton characters.”
- Alan Moore
II. “I gave John color guides as to how the costumes were colored … But his color choices outside of that sometimes almost frightened me.”
- Dave Gibbons
III. “Well, if you go back to the “Watchmen,” Dave Gibbons always gave you the opportunity to backlight the characters. He was someone who always allowed you to do side-light, then back-light and front-lighting. He gave you the opportunity to make the color a 360 degree sensibility … That gave you extra depth …”
- John Higgins
Thank you so much for reading!