Watching the Watchmen

Watching the Watchmen While reading Watchmen with the purpose of textual analysis, there are many different things to consider. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took many original approaches to the typical super hero story when formulating this novel. Watchmen is a story about a group of outlawed super heroes in New York City. The story lines and backgrounds of particular characters are shown during the comic, and we see how different these characters are from the stories of typical super heroes. When trying to closely analyze this text, we could consider context, rhetorical strategies, and the comparison to the Catholic Intellectual Teaching. When looking at the context of this piece, it is interesting to think about why Moore and Gibbons chose the comic set up. Usually when we think of comics we think of light-hearted children’s readings. Differently, Watchmen is far from this type of comic. It has very adult ideas and language present throughout like sex, mental illness, corruption, and cussing. Even though it is not traditional to the comic layout, it is a good context for this type of story. The pictures and artistry is half of the story. Without the use of imagery, it would have not been so engaging and interesting to read. Also with so many switches between plot lines of characters, the images made it easy to follow what exactly was happening. Again, Moore and Gibbons have a new take on something typical, and it works to their advantage. Watchmen was packed full of wonderful use of rhetorical strategies that all added to the text, but a strong one in particular was the use of irony. While reading, there were many instances where something was happening that contradicted, or was ironic to another thing that was occurring. One example of this was in chapter VII when Laurie and Dan are beginning to be intimate on the couch, but Dan cannot seem to get going. In the background on the television, Ozymandias is doing his acrobatics. “The grace of

Cited: Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: Warner Books, 1987. Print. “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Mission of the University: A Continuing Conversation.” Office for Mission and Rector. University of Dayton, 2012. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.