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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 4343619" data-attributes="member: 8158">Well, if you want a full-on screed, and validation on its themes from more than just my perspective, you can check out what Wikipedia has to say (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen</a>). If that's not enough, Google will turn up plenty more.As to my personal perspective, I see the work as pretty clearly deconstructing the tropes of the superhero genre, and pointing out how it limits comics as a medium. You have Comedian and Ozymandius--the two characters that Moore sets up to provide insightful commentary to the rest of the clueless cast (and, by extension, to the reader)--both explaining that costumed crimefighters going around beating up bank robbers and supervillains is an impotent exercise in bread-and-circusses because it doesn't make any kind of dent in addressing the big problems of the world. Nite-Owl's literal impotence serves as a big red-flag metaphor. Then you have the Tales of the Black Freigher storyline running through the entire series; if you're reading Watchmen solely as a two-fisted adventure, I've got to wonder how this extra, stand-alone storyline comes across as anything other than ballast slowing the reader down. In the world of the Watchmen, the superhero genre is dead, and other genres are popular. A lot of writers trying to experiment with mature material in the eighties got kind of frustrated that they were hamstrung in what they could get published by the dominance of the superhero genre. The notion that superheroes could do more than serve up juvenile power fantasies was tough for a lot of publishers to swallow. It wasn't until after Watchmen that perceptions changed.</blockquote>

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