Intimacy and Human Connection in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen”: Part I

When I chose to add Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen to my “Who Watches Superheroes?” course, I hadn’t read it for a few years. So, while I knew many of the overall plot points and themes, I always thought about the graphic novel as a work that solely deals with the height fears during the Cold War of mass nuclear destruction and with the commentary on the roles of “superheroes” in our cultural imagination. However, as I reread Watchmen this semester with my students, I became struck by the fact that these themes are merely the window dressing for the true core of Watchmen, an emotional examination of our humanity and our needs for intimacy and connection in a chaotic, out-of-control world.

We see this focus on human connections throughout Watchmen, with almost all of the characters in the series, including the newspaper vendor and the boy reading Tales of the Black Freighter. We even see it with the narrator of the Tales of the Black Freighter and he works to get back to Davidstown to save his wife and kids from the impending freighter. Dr. Manhattan drives this theme home while talking with Laurie on Mars when he says, “[T]he world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget.” We forget human connection; we forget our shared humanity; we forget to…