Alan Moore's America: The Liberal Individual and American Identities in Watchmen

Abstract

core is an ensemble of diverse characters that explores fundamental issues for American national identity during the second half of the twentieth century. Moore’s work performs thi st ask in two ways, fi rstly, by presenting a group of diverse ideologically contingent American figures in the individual characters, and secondly, by highlighting a sacrosanct element of America’s image of itself, the primacy of the ‘‘liberal individual’’ not just as an American type but as the naturalized core of the national ethos. This article maps this subject identity into a national identity such as that typified in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities ,as mall-n nationalism as a successor to kinship and religion, ‘‘an imagined political community [. . .] conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’’ (5 – 6). Alan Moore’s depiction of America is influenced by his love of American comics, but the thematic heft of his work is due to solid evaluative research on American history, politics, and technology. The resulting product presents a coterie of costumed heroes as players on the stage of history in a type of story that resonates with the preoccupations of postwar American culture, a conspiracy narrative that highlights the issues of individual and collective identity and agency. Watchmen is an alternative history that starts on October 12, 1985 and runs to early the following year. While it frequently references historical occurrences until 1970, it covers a time period in the immediate past barely a year previous to publication. Because of the