Watching the Watchmen, Mediating the Mediators

Abstract

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen (1987) is the only graphic narrative included in “Time's Greatest 100 Novels: 1923–Present.” The text abounds with the detritus of American Cold War culture. Among many other things, Watchmen solicits informed re-readings of Cold War (fictional) narratives and their legacies. Watchmen proves to be an apocalyptic and encyclopedic story replete with stories – notes, journal entries, photos, backstories, flashbacks, newspaper clippings, comics, signboards, graffiti, and a litany of literary allusions proliferate in this very long, very graphic, graphic novel. But this text is also about more than intertwining and conflicting over- and underworld Cold War-historicities and histories and stories. Moving beyond Watchmen's problematizing of American Exceptionalism, its humanizing of heroism, and its reconceptualizing of Cold War America, the Hugo Award-winning novel questions the official traffic of official information – and the official act of representation itself. At stake here is the fact that ideologically polarized newspapers, The New Frontiersman and Nova Express, vie for the monopoly of publicized truth, or, more rightly, for the control of a “formally-sanctioned cultural narrative.” No scholars, to date, have discussed the media battle that rests at the heart of this seminal graphic novel. Every reading of Watchmen forces intentionally frustrated reader to sift the doomsday ashes of so-called information, disinformation, and misinformation. The graphic novel thus speaks to the fundamental quandary of the contemporary human experience: the impossibility of unfiltered truth.