The Watchmen- A Deconstruction of Superheroes, and why they are more Human than Super.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a fictional book that genuinely engaged me, page to page, and while some have come close, “Watchmen” has rekindled what I thought was a long extinguished love for fiction. From the very first panel, the book grips you with gorgeous illustration after gorgeous illustration, each one intricately drawn with amazing attention to detail. It is easy to get lost in each picture and look at every detail, finding little nuances that a quick glance would easily miss. Each panel feels specially made to serve the overall plot, one which deserves praise for its tone and execution. This is not a light hearted adventure book for kids, but a serious, intricate plot with three dimensional characters. Each character feels distinct and different from one another, with their own backstories, quirks, manner of speaking, and flaws, which are explored in ways that can be uncomfortable to read due to how dark some of them can be, but do a lot to add complexity to already riveting characters. I could almost hear the characters’ voices in my head as I was reading the dialogue, which speaks to the immersity that the book has. The plot is basically a murder mystery, or several murder mysteries; when masked heroes start suddenly dying, our main characters must figure out who is responsible and what their purpose is. When the villain is finally revealed, he gives a massive exposition dump explaining his motives, justifying why he did what he did what the intended consequences of his actions are. It’s a lot to take in, and makes you wonder, because he did a good job justifying himself, whether he is in the right and our heroes in the wrong. Needless to say, the book touches on several heavy subject matters, including sexual assault and whether the ends justify the means. This is a book whose themes I will think about long after I’ve finished it, since it deals with such timeless problems such as man’s cruelty to each other, the inevitability of death, and the existential dread of whether all our accomplishments as a species will be ultimately pointless against the eventual death of Earth. All these problems can be conveyed in fiction in a way that non fiction can’t, since non fiction only deals with these questions in a cold, impersonal way, while fiction can allow us to care about these big subjects through engrossing stories and characters we care about. For a long time, I’ve felt that reading fictional books was a waste of time. “Why read something that’s fake when you can read to learn about the world and history?” I thought. For me, books were strictly a means of obtaining knowledge about the real world, a way for me to soak in information I could use later. I now realize that my thinking was too narrow minded, that in actuality, we can learn a lot from reading fictional books.About philosophy, psychology, the human mind, there are a lot of things we can learn from reading and analyzing the best fictional books from history. None of my conclusions I would have reached were it not for one graphic novel, a style of book I’ve never read, about superheroes, a genre that I’ve never cared for, to open my eyes to the possibilities that great fiction can achieve and how they can affect us. It can truly be from the most unlikely of sources that we can learn the most from and open our eyes to worlds we never thought possible.