Though three and a half decades have ed since it burst onto the scene, the seminal maxiseries with artist David Gibbons, Moore created what many fans and critics term the quintessential commentary on the superhero genre. The publication of the series is credited with propelling the comics industry itself into a new, more artistically legitimate phase of its very existence. But what was the real message Moore intended with his blockbuster work?
Watchmen tells the tale of a group of former “masked adventurers” who must band together to solve the mysterious murder of one of their own, an amoral sociopath called The Comedian. Set in an alternate, realism-tinged history where the emergence of a godlike being named Dr. Manhattan ended up changing the path of global politics, the series was lauded for its uncompromising deconstruction of the psychology of this world’s “heroes.” Alan Moore often reveals selfish or severely psychotic motivations in characters who would normally be considered sterling role models in the usual mainstream comics fare. Manhattan in particular was deconstructed as apathetic and somewhat capricious despite his ability to manipulate the fabric of existence itself, culminating in his ultimate murder of the character Rorschach at the end of the story.
With such characters as the violent Rorschach and the nefarious Ozymandias, Moore managed to showcase a certain potential within the comics medium hitherto unheard of, as the formerly spotless archetypes of superheroes like Batman and Superman were cast in a “gray and grayer” ethical framework to highlight their underlying flaws. With all that moral ambiguity, and Moore’s own non-committal responses to this perceived uncertainty within his own work, it may seem difficult to find the moral-ethical core of Watchmen. However, in a 2009 interview with Salon.com, Moore explained this elusive quality in his narrative conclusions in relation to a similar finale featured in his other famed series, V For Vendetta. Moore said of his characteristic morally ambiguous endings:
"And the same thing goes for the end of a lot of my works. I mean, I think that the end of "Watchmen," where you've got the whole fate of the world basically being left in the hands of a semi-literate copy boy ... I believe the ending quote is “I leave that entirely in your hands,” which I think was me talking to the reader. Because I don't think that it is the purpose of fiction to actually dictate a political/moral reality. I feel really uneasy about that. I think that's why I introduced a lot of the moral ambiguities into "V for Vendetta" in the first place. Some of the fascists are sympathetic and some of V's actions are very, very questionable. It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit."
Though this appears on the surface to be a customary authorial hand-wave, actively encouraging the reader to make up their own mind as to the nature of his contemplative parable, a closer analysis of the quote reveals that, far from being open-ended, Moore is condemning the one character whose mentality has caused such terrible upheaval: Dr. Manhattan. exhibited by Dr. Manhattan, that is the true evil in his story.
Moore’s reference to the character of Seymour, a “semi-literate copyboy” being symbolic for the moral choice of the reader, is clearly meant to elicit tacit for the most unlikely of heroes: Rorschach whose journal theoretically could reveal Ozymandais’ plot to the world. In this case, Watchmen is making a much clearer point about the nature of personal ethics than appears on the surface: even a semi-literate copyboy can have more moral agency than a literal god-man. Just another nugget of wisdom from the mind of Alan Moore.
Source: Salon.com
