10 Recommended Comics | Watchmen

Welcome back to my top 10 recommended comics where I talk about my favourite comics and why you should read them. If this is your first time reading please look at my previous entries there are links provided below.

Alright let’s get the second obligatory mention out of the way with. It is as good as people say. My personal distaste for Alan Moore aside, I do believe him to be one of the greatest comic book writers of all time and Watchmen legitimately does deserve to be held in high regard as one of the greatest comic books ever written, if not the greatest.

Watchmen was revolutionary in the way it deconstructed superhero tropes and brought mature reality to them- it addressed the fact that being a superhero probably sucked and that superheroes were probably not all great people. Doctor Manhattan is so powerful (not unlike superman) that he has lost the ability to relate to his own species, and now no longer finds them interesting. Rorschach is emotionally scarred by the things he’s seen as a superhero and has turned into a crazed vigilante. There are many more examples as every single character is incredibly well fleshed out; there isn’t a weak cast member at all although I would argue that more could have been done with Silk Spectre.

Watchmen brings you into the world incredibly, being more than just a comic book it also features news clipping and excerpts from the original Nite Owl’s autobiography which tells you more about characters such as the Comedian and more about the history of superheroes in this alternate 1985. With superheroes being a fact of life the comic books don’t tend to feature superheroes in this world either, with a boy reading “Tales of the Black Freighter” a comic within a comic. However rather than just being a gimmick it actually matters in the comic book as it serves as a counterpoint to Adrian Veidt’s motivations and story as well as other plot points within the book.

Watchmen may well be my favourite comic purely because like a well oiled machine everything it does works and everything runs properly. There is nothing in Watchmen that doesn’t add up to the overall story, the subplots and side stories all drive towards the key themes that Watchmen aims to get across and it’s an absolute master piece. A magnum opus that helped to create the modern age of comics and it’s undoubtedly the most influential comic on this list.

The trouble with talking about Watchmen is saying things that haven’t already been said. This is why next week I’m going to be covering something that while decently popular is in my opinion, a little underrated.

 

Previous Entries:

Daredevil: Born Aagain

Akira

The Dark Knight Returns

X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

The Crow

HellSpawn