Watchmen Book Review

Andy Lipocky

Watchmen Review

September 3, 2012

I am going to be honest, this is the first time I have ever read, or even picked up for that matter, a comic book. So I really did not know what to expect. I did not feel like I would be interested in this book at all, considering I have never really been into the fantasy world kind of things, plus the fact that I have never been into reading to begin with. I have seen the batman and avengers movies just like everybody else has, but I was never really able to dive into the comic book scene as a child, so I did not feel that I would enjoy reading this book at all. But man was I wrong. The action and anticipation of what would happen next came on every single page. I was hooked right from
the beginning. It took me a couple chapters to figure out who every character was and what their purpose to the novel was, but by the end of the book it all made sense. Turns out someone who you thought was a good guy, Adrian Veidt, was actually the bad guy in the book was a great way to go about things for the authors.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is this one.

“So many questions.
Never mind. Answers soon. Nothing is insoluble. Nothing is hopeless. Not while there's life. In the cemetery, all the white crosses stood in rows, neat chalk marks on a giant scoreboard. Paid last respects quietly, without fuss. Edward Morgan Blake. Born in 1924. Forty-five years a comedian. Died 1985, buried in the rain. Is that what happens to us? A life of conflict with no time for friends...so that when it's done, only our enemies leave roses. Violent lives, ending violently. Dollar Bill , The Silhouette, Captain Metropolis...we never die in bed. Not allowed. Something in our personalities, perhaps? Some animal urge to fight and struggle, making us what we are? Unimportant. We do what we have to do. Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was
lonely.”

This quote in the book is from Walter Kovacs, or Rorschach as we all know him.
I like this quote a lot because it really makes me think about the life we live today. When I read this, I think about what I view as the “American Dream” and how we all strive for this. Dreiberg mentions this as well. But in the end, none of us really get to where we originally set out to be. Life takes so many different routes and wrong turns that now we kind of just go with the flow, going wherever life takes us. The American Dream stays a dream and hardly ever comes to reality. There are always the select few who do end up there, but for the majority of us we are always searching for more. We try to make everything look like its perfect, when in reality we are far from it. “Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood.” Everyone lives life a different way, some of us just try to make light out of situations, like the Comedian did. At least he knew what was going on, while most of us are just oblivious to the
facts.

I think the idea that Doctor Manhattan brought up to Laurie when they were both on Mars together is pretty philosophically relevant. He said "Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle." This quote really got me to thinking. The comparison of oxygen turning to gold and the chance of one sperm out of a thousand million other sperm fertilizing a single egg kind of baffled me for a second, to where I had to go and read that section over two more times, almost to the point where I knew I would bring it up in this paper. But then I finally got it. The point he was trying to get across to Laurie, and to the audience, is that you really are your own individual, that it is technically a miracle that you are who you are today, like turning air into gold. The chance that your one specific sperm and one specific egg combine to form what you become, and that you could be completely different with one change of DNA results in the thermodynamic miracle. I feel like the depth of this quote, along with the meaning behind it, is what makes it so philosophically relevant in the book.

Like I stated before, I really enjoyed reading this book. The way the book ended really sealed the deal for me. The authors could have had the end go in so many different directions, like having Dr. Manhattan, Laurie, Rorschach and Dreiberg stop Veidt from destroying half of New York City’s population, or even have Veidt go as far as destroying half of the United States. But in the end, the goal of the whole operation by Veidt was to unite the world, and it looked like that would happen in the future. At the end, Veidt asks Dr. Manhattan if it will all work out in the end, with what he has done, and Manhattan says “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” I believe that means that no matter what, there will always be chaos in the world; it’s just how we minimize it that will tell how the world will unite as a whole. I believe that is the purpose of this story.