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Who Watches the Watchmen?

By Hunter Baker on 3.5.09 @ 12:55PM

I'm excited about the movie and can assure you that the graphic novel is every bit as good as you've heard.  

You can read my take on it here.

Here's a clip:

The author of this masterpiece, one Alan Moore, is a paranoid left-winger (See V for Vendetta, for example), but the man can write.  Perhaps the character people remember the most from the Watchmen is Rorschach, a man in a hat and trenchcoat who covers his face with a mask of ever-changing ink impressions.  Rorschach has no superpowers or even the genius and equipment of Batman.  He is a man determined to set things right and is uninhibited in his willingness to do violence to wrongdoers.  Rorschach was once a more conventional hero, but he has seen too much evil in the world and is no longer prepared to accept limits on his retribution.  This vigilante, full of retrograde opinions and mourning for an America whose best days are behind her, is Archie Bunker without the laughs.  Rorschach walks along a street in the red-light district and notes that he is offered French love, Swedish love, and other exotic pleasures.  But American love, he regrets, "is like Coke in green glass bottles . . .  they don't make it anymore."  He is dangerous.  And he is Moore's idea of a conservative.  If it is intended as an insult, it is one most of us can live with.

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