Considering Watchmen

Watchmen was published at a time when the graphic novel was emerging as a popular art form. It transformed the comic book medium into something that would later be considered as literature. Alan Moore stimulates the readers of this novel in his persistent questioning of values upheld in Western society. He poses challenging obstacles in the face of American idealism and points out the social contradictions that counteract our collective morality. Through plenty of symbolism and visual rhyming, Moore conducts a series of mind games with his readers. He carefully manipulates the interaction between images and texts in a new and unconventional way. Although comic book series depicting the superhero genre in previous eras have experimented with the interaction among images and texts in the past, they could not quite achieve the same dynamic relationship demonstrated in Moore's work.