I finally finished this book today. It took me a lot of time, considering that it is a Graphic Novel, but mostly it took time because I kept reading other stuff.

I really liked it. I has a good story, with some comics superheroes, and is set in a nicely constructed alternate reality.

About the detective part of the book: At first I thought 2 or 3 characters could be the masked killer, then I decided on one of the characters as the killer, and every little detail started to point him out and I kind of dropped the other suspects, but one of them not completly.
I got my main suspect wrong, it was one of the guys I dropped...

And most of all I simply loved the little graphic details, some blood drops, sugar cubes and other little background details that made me really pay attention to all the pictures.

I'll reread it with the Annotated Watchmen as guide, just to make sure I didn't miss some of those little details that I loved! ( )

Crime fighting endangers world to protect without regard to the few is a sacrifice worth it? The nonnegotiable right to not lose ethical judgment but in the end nothing ends and truth is always found out ( )

wow, very graphic and bloody but an interesting way to read a graphic novel that still has written chapter sections w/out pictures. Not my kind of story, though. ( )

What can I say about Watchmen that hasn't already been said? As with anything that's so enormously popular, most people either like it or hate it. I liked it. It probes some deep issues, and it made me think.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Watchmen is the 1986 comic book (or "graphic novel" as they are called these days) that turned the industry on its head. It features superheroes who are very human, often not so super. They exist in an alternate 1985 in which America won the Vietnam War--due to their participation--and Nixon was subsequently reelected multiple times.

Some people are turned off by what they see as the writer's endorsement of an extreme leftist political ideology, but I believe the writer has also said that one of the goals of the story was to set up a group of characters with highly different worldviews and let the reader choose which they agreed with. In that sense, the story is a huge success. It shows us multiple interpretations of a desperate, cruel, gray world and forces us to choose our own.

What I got out of the tale with its morally questionable "heroes" and the catastrophic outcomes of their decisions was this: we all want heroes. We all want to be saved. Especially in times like these of economic misery and war, we want to hear happy stories of perfect beings like Superman who believe in the good of all mankind and stand by their principles. Watchmen is not such a story. It is a story of what would happen if normal people (yes, "normal"--most of us are at least half this messed up, we just don't want to look at it) were given extraordinary powers (in the case of Dr. Manhattan) and extraordinary responsibility. It's a story of people who question everything about the meaning of life and the nature of existence, coming to some rather amazing and beautiful conclusions--and then still make mistakes.

These flawed vigilantes draw lines in different places, proving that human beings are not the best judges of good and evil, that even giving a human God-like powers does not make him God, and ultimately, that truth has a chance at prevailing somehow even if its suppression is attempted in the name of false justice. ( )

Very interesting. This is my first foray into the graphic novel and it was...well, interesting. Apparently this is the holy grail of graphic novels and set the standard for more to come (at least from the research I've done). If I had to explain this to someone, it is the anti-superhero superhero novel. It takes the traditional idea of a superhero and subverts it, sometimes making fun of it and other times taking it very seriously, to the point of being uncompromising.

The other part that is interesting about this particular take on the superhero is that there is NO superhero here. The "good guys" aren't all good guys and they aren't completely bad either. Some of them are monsters that protect the world while others are cowards who monopolized on the world's situation. Very interesting to hash these all out.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience. The philosophy sometimes struck me as "try hard" and I glazed over a few pages that were less than inspiring. ( )