Watchmen

I struggled through part of the Watchmen, and eventually had to give up. The novels’ writing is verbose and often feels very cliché, even for a comic. While I didn’t mind the art, I didn’t find it especially engaging either – it seems purely functional and there wasn’t much about it that endeared it to me. What ruined the Watchmen for me were the panels – they’re all the same size and shape – rectangular bricks on a brick-shaped page. It was hard for me to feel any sense of dynamic movement throughout the novel when every picture was trapped within a small static brick. I read a lot of manga, which typically tries to emphasize the energy of its drawings through the shape and composition of its panels. I would have really appreciated even a little bit of that, because spending an hour squinting at bricks was not fun. I was never a huge fan of noir films either – the sprawling monologues that the main characters often have always felt very indulgent to me. Unless it was used as a device for parody I didn’t see anything really appealing about it.