Watchmen

I am more than halfway through Watchmen, and I have to say that so far, I love it. This is my first graphic novel, but I'm learning that I really like graphic novels as a medium. I never realized how they allow a number of different stories to occur simultaneously in a way that other mediums do not allow. Point in case--the overlapping and interplay of the guy reading The Black Freighter and the newspaper guy talking. It's awesome.

I can see why this falls into the "Exceptions" category on the syllabus because it takes place on our planet, but history as we know it is altered. I find Jon interesting because of the aspect of a super-soldier who, in the book, is an integral part of the US's national security strategy. I really like how Moore and Gibbons tell the story of his "becoming" and overlap all the different time sequences within that. What I find interesting is how it all relied on a series of coincidences--ie, forgetting the watch, the fat man stepping on it. The prominence of watches in how they interplay into fate in the story of Jon's becoming is a bit reminiscient of a discussion of Deist philosophy that I had in high school in which my teacher told us their views that God created the world as a perfect machine, like a clock, and stood back and did not interefere. But that's a stretch...
Still, I think the presence of clocks=watch(men)= time ticking toward the end of the world throughout the story so far is interesting and really want to see where it goes. Also, we have the aspect of the meaninglessness of time in Jon's case.

Another theme that has emerged so far that I find interesting is what I guess I would phrase "The Golden Rule and limits thereof"--namely, for criminals, what is just punishment for their crime? Should crime fighting be left to "official" channels (police, government) if it is ineffective? The distinction in Watchmen seems to be that only violence/force sanctioned by the state is justifiable (and therefore the superhero crimfighters are not), which kind of goes with Weber/Schmitt's ideas (although I'm not arguing they do so wholly).

I can't wait to see where the story goes because I'm really into it so far...