LITERATURE: Watchmen

Strange how old habits return. Reading Watchmen feels familiar to me now. I stop and wonder if I haven’t read it before, knowing full well I haven’t. But the characters, the text balloons, the grimaces, the prevalence of red and blue, overemphasization of visual emotion, the perfect bodies of the women and men in their square-jawed prime, the softly rounded forms of the middle-aged; it all becomes so normal that when you switch back to regular text at chapter’s end it is like being rudely interrupted. I am trying hard to remember what comic books I read as a kid, and there were a few I enjoyed following, although I am not reneging on my former statement that comic books were never a big thing with me. But I cannot remember reading Superman or Spiderman. I do relate some of the visuals with Saturday morning cartoons. But cartoons like these weren’t really around when I was a kid; it was still the Roadrunner or Betty Boop. Or is familiarity just so quickly set in…from Watchmen, Chapter I…