Continued from part 4, book 2...

Book Three


Book three starts with the much talked about imagery of "the bomb." As the book opens we see a City worker affixing a fallout shelter sign to a building adjacent to a newsstand where a News-vendor blathers on and on about how "we oughtta nuke Russia and let God sort it out." A kid sits near him reading a lurid pirate comic book, paying the vendor no mind.


The tale of the pirate occasionally runs throughout the rest of the series with its tale of murder and insanity underlining the same in the "real world" in which Watchmen is set. It punches in and out at particularly violent or menacing times until the end of book eleven. As the kid reads the pirate comic, the News-vendor carps on about the Russians, "the bomb" and war. Since the kid and the Newspaper vendor are some of the few recurring characters that aren't super-heroes it seems that the writer is utilizing the pair as representatives of the average American citizen. The news-vendor, callous, uninformed, loud and insistent and the kid, indifferent to everything around him including the news of the day and the great questions of life, content to lose himself in simple entertainment to escape a bad home-life. These are certainly stereotypical characters. In any case, neither character is a very flattering portrayal of the American citizen. (Did I mention that the writer AND artist of Watchmen are Englishmen?)


In book three Dr. Manhattan begins to drift ever further away from interest in humanity. He perceives everything down to the molecular level and sees life and morality as relative and meaningless concepts. If he were a bit more passionate I'd say he was nihilistic. Manhattan can teleport himself anywhere in the universe as well as splitting himself so he can be in more than one place at a time. He also sees time, past present and future all at the same time instead as a linear flow as normal humans do. He has a spat with his girlfriend who leaves him to move in with the Owl and, during an interview on a TV show, is accused of giving his coworkers cancer. This causes him to teleport himself to Mars abandoning humanity.


Book three ends with President Nixon and his advisors considering the fallout of all out nuclear war because Russia has invaded Afghanistan. Now that Dr. Manhattan has left Earth, he no longer causes the Soviets to fear a move to invade its neighbor.


Now, in our real world, the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979 for a two-fold reason. 1) to enlarge their sphere of influence and, 2) to edge closer to the oil fields of the Middle East where they hoped to be able to control an important resource; oil production. In the book there seems to be no clear reason offered by Moore for Russia's invasion of Afghanistan and later this causes him a problem in credibility where it concerns real political commentary, one of his stated goals of the project. Moore's lack of grasping even a little bit of the geopolitical substance of the era seriously undermines his story.

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