Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

We live in a post-superhero world. Today's presidential events aside, as a society we seem to be past the need for a cool dude--wrapped in American determination and blessed with superb ass-kicking kills--to sweep in and dispose of our street crime. We've got bigger problems.

The interesting thing about Watchmen, a limited-series DC comic, is that its creator saw this coming--23 years ago. Now retroactively repurposed as more of a graphic novel (thus saving its dignity, I guess), Watchmen is more sophisticated than your average superhero comic.

The main action of the book takes place in an alternate October 1985, where Nixon is still president (!). About seven years earlier, a federal act illegalized (is that a word? I'm going with it) "costumed adventurer" vigilantism, because the self-appointed heroes were getting in the way of the police. By the time the act was passed, costumed adventuring had become a cottage industry: some heroes had cashed in with endorsement deals and action figures; others offered themselves as rent-a-heroes for corporations; and the porn implications were pretty much endless. In short, Americans ruined helpful vigilantism the way we ruin everything else. So all practicing adventurers were forced into retirement or underground.

These included an old clique of heroes, who spent more time bickering than actually saving anyone:

• the Comedian, a brutal government mercenary who's not actually funny;
• the Nite Owl, a nebbishy guy who came up with a lot of Batman-esque gadgets with a bird theme;
• the original Silk Spectre, the token chick, who pushed her daughter into the family business;
• the second Silk Spectre (Laurie the daughter), who bitches a lot about being forced into the costume, but enjoys the benefits of dating other heroes;
• Ozymandias, a genius with an Alexander the Great fetish, who turned his previous hero popularity into a multibillion-dollar brand;
  
• Rorshach, an ink-blot-masked sociopath who avenges anything and everything he can get his hands on; and
• Dr. Manhattan, the one genuine "superhero," who was accidentally baked in a nuclear test oven, was obliterated to atoms, and reconstructed himself somehow as a godlike being. He has the ability to change matter, teleport, and know everything that will ever happen at all times. Because he's indestructible and has unlimited powers, of course he's on retainer by the U.S. government as the not-so-secret weapon of national security.

The story kicks in when one of them is found dead, and it starts looking like someone is hunting "masks," or the adventurers of old. But the more intriguing underplot is the unfolding of these heroes' history together--all the nastiness, the ineffectiveness, and neuroses that undid the whole lifestyle. The comics themselves, divided up into about ten different "chapters," are interspersed with fake memoir excerpts, magazine articles, etc. which give context to the characters.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the idea of how America would really approach grown men in costumes, taking it upon themselves to fight crime. This is the kind of thing that was touched upon in The Dark Knight last summer--what happens when a social construct outlives its usefulness? What do you do when the hero causes more damage than the villains he's chasing? You legislate it out of existence, that's what you do. But by then it's already part of the larger cultural consciousness, so you get a weird, shadowy area in the middle.

The writing is sharp--beyond the superhero issues, there's an interesting channeling of Cold War anxiety. And the art is pretty gorgeous, in a dark and grim kind of way. I don't know that this will get me into comics any more than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did last summer, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. If the movie is anywhere near as good, I'll happily fork over my ten bucks.