The Last Word in Comics?
Many of the scenes in Watchmen are clearly cinematic (particularly the opening pages), and comics defenders have traditionally invoked the cinema as a model for an audiovisual art form that is taken seriously, even as comics scholars have more recently explored the limitations of the model. [1] But Moore has stated repeatedly that his primary interest in comics creation is do something that cannot be done in any other medium. In this light, Watchmen serves as Moore's manifesto.
Two elements of Watchmen defy a facile comparison of comics and film. The first is the narration itself. The book has multiple narrators, each of whom take a turn providing the rough equivalent of a voiceover in captions at the top of the panels. Rather than comment explicitly on the action, these narrative streams more often run parallel to it, creating an aesthetic effect based precisely not the juxtaposition or counterpoint between the captions and the pictures. The sheer density of information would overwhelm film, but is manageable in comics, where the reader controls the passage of time.
Nowhere is this more jarring than in the Tales of the Black Freighter, the pirate comic whose narration has no direct connection to the overall plot, serving instead as a thematic or allegorical double to the outer story. By the end of Black Freighter, the careful reader will have seen that the story could be a critical commentary on Adrian's actions, and on the very idea of intervention and heroic rescue.
Multitasking is a narrative superpower
More spectacular are the chapters that feature the second element that defies the power of cinema: Jon's fourth-dimensional perspective on reality. Chapter IV is devoted entirely to the life and times of Jon Osterman, but the times are far more intriguing than the life. A physicist accidentally transformed into a god-like superbeing, Jon experiences life roughly the same way as the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. But where Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in time," bouncing back and forth through his life seemingly at random, Dr. Manhattan is perfectly at ease with his fourth-dimensional perspective.
Note that the photograph, which is like a comic book panel, becomes a comics panel in the middle
To Jon, time is not linear or sequential, but (in echoes of the physics problem at stake in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed) simultaneous. All moments happen at the same time, and can be viewed or experienced in any order. Certainly, the comics page, with its sequences of juxtaposed panels organized on a plane, serves as the perfect vehicle for conveying Jon's experience of time; while it is possible to skip back and forth among the pages of a prose novel, it is far more disorienting. But far more intriguing is the possibility that Jon essentially views all time as does a reader reading a comic book. Jon's defining superpower turns out to be "comic book vision.”
Even Photographs show the future. Jon protests that they’re not lovers; later in the page, they’re lovers. When Jon is “dead',” it becomes a picture of a dead lover.
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