I'm not sure it's possible to overstate how much Gary Gygax improved the lives of nerds in this world.
I'm working on a post about it. Stay tuned.
Turning the tables on his own political sympathies like this seems to have freed Moore up in a way he rarely managed before or since. In V, for example, all of Moore s fascists are pretty much stock villains -- they re vicious thugs, mostly sexually perverted in extremely unpleasant ways. Finch is sympathetic, of course -- but he doesn t really believe in the ideology. In Watchmen, on the other hand, the fascist nut-jobs are some of the most sympathetic characters. Rorschach is probably the character who gets the most screen time, and he s...well, lovable. He s got tons of touching moments, from the grandiose when he tries to rescue the kidnapped girl to the small when he tells Dan he s been a good friend. The Comedian s hard to hate, too; he s an amoral, violent jerk, but also vulnerable and insightful and, yeah, it s just not hard to see why Sally fell for him.
Veidt s sympathetic too, of course, but the point is that there are genuinely different perspectives in Watchmen, and as a result the sense of inevitability and moral certainty that can pervade and deaden Moore s writing from V all the way to Lost Girls OPENs up. I mean, the idea of time and narrative as immutable is certainly in the book, but it s tied specifically to Jon, and while he s obviously cosmically powered diagetically, in the overall composition of the story he s got much less motive force than V did. Jon can insist that people s choices don t really matter and everything is already determined, but the narrative ends on a question mark; Veidt, for all his smarts and planning, isn t sure if things will work out, and neither are we.
Just what the title says. And it magically turns an unfunny comic about a cat into a story about a lonely man's descent into madness.
Just kidding.
Seriously, I should get this tattooed on me somewhere prominent.
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