Alan Moore: Watchmen review

I have seen most of the great comics as movies before I read the original ones. It was the same case with Watchmen too. I loved the movie and... I loved the comic.
If you compare it to another film made from Moore's great comics, like V fro Vendetta for example, Watchmen movie is more true to the original as in the plotline and the timeline.
But, to the comic itself.

Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen is a comic about masked heroes - not really superheroes, but masked ones. It is situated in an alternative Earth, in year 1985, when the cold war was among us and the thought of World War III was a threat lurking just behind the corner.
At the early years after the second world war, some people got sick of the ways the government wasn't doing anything about the crimerates and took the law in their own hands. So the first costumed heroes were born.

Later on the law forbade all the masked heroes as vigilantes and outlawed them. Some got out by working for goverment, like the only real superhero of the book, Dr. Manhattan, a blue "entity", who can be best described as a reincarnated god; some retired, and some continued to work under the radar, like my favourite character, Rorschach.

The story follows the Watchmen, the masked heroes as they try to live their lives without masks, or with them in secret. Behind everything, there is a constant treat of the war.

Watchmen is a comic everyone should read. It's an amazingly illustrated tale that moves between the past and the present and follows the fates of both normal people and the ones looking over them behind their mask. It's violent, raw and at the same time it touches your inner self as a description of human nature and what we are prepared to do to save ourselves.

Read it. It didn't receive the Hugo Award for nothing.
/ [Caterin S.]

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