Tara Marie

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Alan Moore’s From Hell is, in all honesty, one of his only works I can reread. Most of his works have such a skewed and odd response to violence against women, it’s interesting that the one work that is explicitly and almost only about that very thing is the one that I’m able to revisit. Amidst his books about Lovecraftian frogs raping women in bathrooms, ancient dieties who raped the universe into existence and Watchmen’s quiet love story that expresses itself most fully in a child by rape, the book about a serial killer who butchers women… it seems almost quaint in comparison to the Invisible Man’s sexual escapades in a children’s boarding school.

The book begins with white and black stark lines clashing – Eddie Campbell’s art appears to me like a mountain coming into view only at the last moment – you see the rocks, and then you see the boulder, each bit unfolding like origami in reverse, and then you see the cliff it’s on is on a row of them, like noticing the bottom of a snowman before seeing the whole, like seeing the forest for the trees, the work unveils itself, starting with what it really, simply is, harsh scratches of black on white… forming a world. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? ‘From Hell’ Review!