Frontispiece. A close-up of the “fallout shelter” sign, with the smoke partly obscuring certain letters. What we’re left with looks a lot like “all hell.”Page 1. The front page of the New Frontiersmen* proclaims: “Missing writer.” I don’t know that anyone reading this for the first time could really put all the clues together and figure out where this grand scheme is heading, but nevertheless, M&G strew plenty of clues about.
* Incidentally, this right-wing newspaper provides the domain name for a nifty viral site for the film, containing lots of Watchmenverse background. Worth noodling around if you’ve got some spare time.
Pages 1-3. One of the most admirable things about “Watchmen” is its attention to detail — and that includes a completely perfect imagining of this intersection in Manhattan. On one corner stands this little news shanty, in front of the Institute for Extraspatial Studies. We’ll see this corner time and time again, from multiple perspectives, throughout the story. Gibbons always illustrates it accurately, no matter what “camera angle” he’s drawing from.
And still there’s more: The comic-within-a-comic, that pirate tale from the pages of “Tales of the Black Freighter,” begins here. Moore uses the dark and overblown first-person prose of his hapless sailor protagonist tale to echo the events and themes unfurling in the main story. Admittedly, this doesn’t make “Watchmen” easy to consume: All these narrative layers and odd juxtapositions are enough to deter any less-committed readers. (I personally know of several who never finished reading “Watchmen.”)
Pages 4-5. One of my all-time favorite bits in the entire book: “Jon, be one person again!” (Btw, I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks Laurie’s a little nuts for not enjoying herself. You can sign me up to have sex with multiple Dr. Manhattans anytime!) Of course, her reaction points to her larger dissatisfaction with their relationship, only further exacerbated by the hilarious discovery (well, hilarious to us) that he’s also been busy with research the whole time.
Page 8. A worker from the Gordian Knot Lock Company fixes Dan’s door, which Rorschach broke in issue 1. The name provides another of the seemingly endless examples of coincidence that come to the fore later on.
Page 10. One of the many visual tropes in this book involves the repetition of the image of the smiley-face with the splotched right eye. You could argue that we’re seeing an echo of that pattern here, in the image of Laurie’s eyes reflected in her cup of coffee. Reflections in general are also common in “Watchmen,” as is Gibbons’ penchant for drawing a panel from a particular character’s point of view, which includes their hands in front of them.
Pages 11-16. I doubt anyone’s ever alleged that “Watchmen” is a subtle work, but in this sequence, I believe we see a prime example of Moore overdoing it. He just can’t resist connecting the words of one sequence to the images of another, and it becomes a bit too obvious here, meshing Doctor Manhattan’s ambush by the overzealous journalist with Laurie and Dan’s near-mugging by the knot-tops.
Pages 26-28. The sequences on Mars (specifically in the very next chapter and again in chapter 9) are among my favorite in the entire book. But the nascent astronomy geek in me must note that, despite our celestial next-door neighbor’s popular nickname, “the Red Planet” isn’t really red — nor pink, as colored here. If Mars is “red” at all, it’s the same sort of red we think of when we talk about redheads — in other words, more orange- or rust-colored. To be fair, it seems that even NASA scientists can’t really agree upon exactly how to describe Mars' ruddy color. For my part, I distinctly recall looking at Mars through several different telescopes several summers ago, when the two planets’ orbits brought us as close together as we’ll experience in our lifetime. (Remember that? He was just beaming in the night sky all summer long, back in 2003 or ’04.) Mars looked distinctly amber, really. I’m just sayin’.
Anyway, as the chapter concludes, that “all hell” wording from the cover page makes more sense. As in: “All Hell breaks loose.” Given the events that just occurred — Doctor Manhattan’s self-imposed exile to Mars, leading to the Soviets’ quick invasion of Afghanistan — that cliché sounds about right. The minute hand on the Doomsday Clock just ticked that much closer to midnight.
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