I sorta accept that it’s a “classic” in the same way that I accept William Faulkner or James Joyce to be “classic literature”: I get the importance, but I really just cannot embrace the comic like other people have. I thought that its “big” themes, about how morality could be viewed from different perspectives, was deeply flawed — part of the reason I think a lot of people embraced the moral absolutist Rorschach, eve though I don’t think we the readers weren’t meant to sympathize with its POV.

The most novel thing it did was cast the “heroes” as unheroic — and even that bothered me from a narrative standpoint, since there should be a character for the reader to identify with, and in the end the only one (Rorschach) meets a bad end. Alan Moore doesn’t write good characters, I don’t think. Every one of them sounded like his voice. Compare that to his contemporaries like Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison. When they write characters, they have their own voices. So, when “Watchmen” focused on characters like Dr. Manhattan or Nite-Owl, I found myself not caring much at all.

Eh, I suppose it does. I know it’s not a popular stand to make, especially in the comic-reading world. But that’s my honest opinion. I think a good review lets you in on the likes and dislikes of the the writer to help the reader better understand the thinking process, so I sneak in these embarrassing little snippets whenever I can.

The ending of Issue #4, though, did make me groan unpleasantly.