The insertion of these costume-clad figures into an event that is actually happening is either simply in too poor taste, or too jarring, to take seriously

What is a superhero supposed to do about heroin addiction--punch it in the face and throw it in jail? 

In the early days, no one would have expected superheroes to change the world, or to be obliged to try

Neither DC nor Marvel are likely to become the comics publishing equivalent of the Weather Underground or Occupy Wall Street.

Editors enter their fictional worlds as meddlers, bureaucrats, and outright villains

What if, in order to make the world a better place, the supherher’s decided to take it over?

Jon's defining superpower turns out to be "comic book vision.”

 Rorschach will not be a bystander; he will take action

Watchmen calls into question both the morality and the sanity of those who choose to act as vigilantes

When should intervention stop?

Most of these nightmare scenarios implicitly confirm the rightness of mainstream Marvel continuity: look how bad it would have been if things had gone differently!

"The Trial of the Watcher" is not an unambiguous rejection of the superhero ethic of intervention

The inclusion of an aggressive animal antagonist is simultaneously a concession to the rules of the superhero genre, a comment on these rules, and the means for reframing the philosophical conflict that is at the heart of the story

Uatu is an excellent Watcher precisely because his sympathies are aligned with the genre in which the action so often unfolds: he watches like a superhero reader

The Watcher arrives on the scene for precisely the sort of stories that have little room for Spider-Man. Yet they are worth thinking about together, because each is the philosophical antithesis of the other

Watching, then, is what happens to reading when it is transposed into the medium of (superhero) comics

At this point, it looks like this book will consist of five chapters

The continuity-altering event encodes the roles of reader, creator, and editor within the narrative itself.

Continuity revisionism makes the superhero's dedication to maintaining the existing order both literal and metaphysical

Foth the readers and the heroes are mere spectators