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- Watchmen is a graphic novel. The study guide contains a biography of writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
www.gradesaver.com/watchmen/study-guide/summary
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In 1985, detectives investigate the death of Edward Blake in New York City, after an intruder threw him through the window of his high-rise apartment. After the police leave, the costumed vigilante Rorschach enters Blake’s apartment and starts his own investigation, quickly discovering that Blake was the Comedian, another masked vigilante.
Watchmen is a comic book limited series by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. It was published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987 before being collected in a single-volume edition in 1987.
Main Events and Story Points. The story begins with the murder of the Comedian, which leads Rorschach, a vigilante with a problematic moral compass, to investigate his death. Rorschach believes that someone is targeting former superheroes.
Watchmen Summary. Back. More. How It All Goes Down. Since Chapter XII is literally midnight, and there are more clocks in Watchmen than Geppetto’s workshop in Pinocchio, we’ll break this summary down into hours. One o’clock (I) An old superhero named the Comedian is dead.
- Who watches the Watchmen? Catch up on the comic before you check out HBO's upcoming sequel series.
- Who Are the Watchmen?
- The Watchmen’s Story
- A Shocking Twist
- A Second Comic
- A Lesser Known Inspiration
- An Unimaginable Impact
By Rosie Knight
Updated: Oct 10, 2019 4:49 pm
Posted: Oct 10, 2019 4:42 pm
As HBO and Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Lost) prepare to enter the world of Watchmen with their follow-up series, which debuts on October 20, this seems like a good time to catch up on the events of the original 12-issue graphic novel by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins.
That seminal book was of course turned into a movie directed by Zack Snyder in 2009, though by its very nature the film had to drop or alter several elements from the comic. Additionally, the HBO Watchmen TV series is a continuation of the book, not the movie, set some 34 years after that story. (The movie, of course, had a different ending than the comic.) Read our first impressions of the Watchmen pilot.
So here's everything you need to know about the original Watchmen series, the men who made it, and the massive impact it's had on pop culture history.
The titular team is made up of six costumed heroes (although they’re never really called Watchmen in the comic). Our "in" character is Walter Kovacs' Rorschach, a desperate and deranged vigilante who will stop at nothing to find the truth. Edward Blake is better known as the Comedian, a Vietnam vet, mass murderer, and rapist whose suspicious death ...
Watchmen is set in an alt-universe version of America where the country won the Vietnam War with the help of Doctor Manhattan, and Richard Nixon is still President after the repeal of the 22nd Amendment. Though in this universe masked crime-fighters were once a part of everyday life with the heroic Minutemen living as both vigilantes and celebrities, they have been banned by the time the book begins, leaving the former heroes in disarray. After the murder of the Comedian, his former teammate Rorschach dedicates himself to solving the crime, unitentionally uncovering a vast and terrifying conspiracy that reconnects the old team and will ultimately end up changing the face of the world as they know it forever. As Rorschach seeks out his old teammates, the history of the Watchmen is revealed in flashbacks even while their relationships unravel as the ragtag team tries to uncover who's really pulling the strings behind the death of their former friend.
Check out IGN's History of Awesome video below, where we delve into the importance of the year 1986 in comic books.
When the book was originally released, Watchmen’s biggest surprise came in the final issue. It opens with a technicolor massacre, half of New York dead, and the world in shock at an apparent alien invasion. With the heroes finally reunited it's revealed that the big bad all along was in fact one of their own, Adrian Veidt, who -- along with some of the greatest minds in the world -- concocted the machiavellian scheme to save the planet.
In fact, Veidt had genetically engineered a giant, squid-like creature and teleported it into the middle of Manhattan, causing immense destruction and the deaths of millions of New Yorkers. This fake invasion accomplishes Veidt’s ultimate goal: The United States and the Soviet Union, which had been on the brink of nuclear war throughout the story, unite in the face of this supposed greater, alien threat. It was this bonkers plan that had driven the Comedian mad when he discovered it, leading to his murder at the hands of Veidt himself in order to keep it all secret. (In the movie, of course, the squid was dropped and Veidt's plan involved framing Doctor Manhattan as the threat that would unite the nations.) Adrian Veidt's squid attack.Perhaps even more surprising, however, was the fact that the other Watchmen choose to stay quiet about this plan after confronting Adrian about his machinations, seeing the devastation, and hearing his justification that the world is now at peace, united against the faux-alien threat. The only one of the so-called heroes who doesn't play along is Rorschach, who's instantly killed by Doctor Manhattan for trying to leave in order to tell the world the truth. Seen as one of the biggest final act twists in comics, it turns the idea of superheroes on their head by making the characters that readers had spent a year following complicit in what is tantamount to a genocide, a brutal killing of the relative few for the betterment of the many.
One of the most interesting narrative and formatting choices that the creative team made with Watchmen was to include a secondary story which runs throughout the book, introduced through the pages of a comic that a young boy reads at a local newsstand. Tales of the Black Freighter is an in-universe comic which is seen as something of a classic, and it breaks up the main story, appearing in issues three, five, eight, 10, and 11 of the series. Moore came up with the idea of a pirate story after realizing that seeing as superheroes were real, the people who lived in that universe likely wouldn't really care about stories that feature them. Though it might seem like a random interjection, the story of a young man who ventures back to his hometown to warn them of an oncoming attack from the mysterious phantom ship known as the Black Freighter actually ends up thematically reflecting the journey of Ozymandias. It's a conceptual commentary on the idea of heroism and the lengths that people will go to "save the world."
This might not seem like it fits in with what we know about the Watchmen TV series so far, but Lindelof does appear to have been hinting at the importance of the story in the trailer for the show, where one can spot a yellow and black Jolly Roger flag hanging from a scythe.
The Watchmen characters have become iconic in their own right, but the series began life as a way for DC to use their newly acquired IP from Charlton Comics. Though that never came to pass, each of the core cast still works as an analogue of the classic publisher's roster. Rorschach is a reworking of Steve Ditko's the Question. Both iterations of N...
It's not hyperbolic to say that Watchmen changed the way that comics were both made and read. Watchmen has, since its release in 1986, never left comic book -- and, eventually, book store -- shelves. It was included in Time's 100 Best American Novels list, which introduced it to an entirely new audience and began the wider (and painfully late) reconsideration of comics as a true form of literature. The book has long influenced the way that comics were made for decades, with the gritty deconstruction of supers becoming the norm and their campy origins often forgotten, obliterated just like Rorshach was in the Antarctic.
Watch the trailer for HBO's Watchmen:
Watchmen is a graphic novel created by English writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins, published in 1987. Set in the US, Watchmen follows an alternative history in which superheroes emerged in the 1940s, the US won the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal was never revealed.
Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, was first published as a comic book series in 1986-1987. This groundbreaking graphic novel spans 12 issues and offers an intriguing reimagining of the superhero genre.
