More posts coming; please stay tuned

Hello Reader(s?),

I am writing to assure you that the ten-day moratorium on new Nuclear Houseplant posts is just a temporary kink; as one of the approximately 1.2 billion ABD grad students worldwide, I am working just now to get through my dissertation, and I have been working hard on getting a final draft of one of its chapters out to my advisor. I do have new content coming, so please keep checking your RSS or Google Reader or clicking your bookmarks bar.

Here are some quick thoughts in the meantime. Really quick, in fact! Today's post will probably be more bloggy than anything else I've ever written here. Lately, I've been re-reading Watchmen for the first time in several years; I'm astounded by how young I must have been the last (and I'm mildly embarrassed to admit, first) time I read it, because while I really did love it the first time, I now find myself truly invested in these complex, damaged individuals in ways that I don't remember having been the first time around. I do remember feeling deeply saddened by the segment of the narrative focused on Dr. Manhattan last time, and it has even more power for me now, but then, the other characters' narratives are no less fascinating. I commented in an earlier post that Alan Moore could probably swipe the temper tantrum method from Hideo Kojima (since that's how Metal Gear Solid 2 is sometimes portrayed), but I've realized that, amusingly enough, some of the bizarre direction of MGS2's plot is actually sort of like Watchmen. I think. I'll have to see. Anyway, that's not to say that Watchmen is anything like the same beast, just that one of the major questions it asks is one that's crucial to MGS2. That hardly makes Watchmen a temper tantrum, obviously.

One thing that's really great about the book is the way that Moore suggests the interconnectedness of the various plot strands, which I think is crucial to the book both thematically and in terms of the narrative, through the seamless transitions between scenes in almost every moment of the book. It feels gimmicky, until you realize that there really is a purpose to this kind of interconnection, which, if you weren't clued in before Chapter III, surely you'll be getting the idea by the time the newsstand guy is talking about it. Also, enjoy the Pessimistic Pirate Comics in that chapter, if you're planning on reading this thing. And you should; I commend this as highly as possible.

Finally, I'm struck by the maybe unexpected way Watchmen sticks to the norms of the superhero genre. There isn't much action in any given section until fairly late, but what there is is a ton of complex, intertwining, non-linear narrative. It's a soap opera, in some ways, though I mean this in terms of the narrative's progression and complexity, not in any negative sense. Which isn't to dismiss soap operas, but come on. You know what I mean. A few years ago, my (not then) wife and I were having a conversation about superhero comics, and I was explaining a handful of plot threads from the 1970s era of Amazing Spider-Man. These centered mostly on Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, with a few footnotes (you should never get into a conversation with me in real life) on the post-"death" career of Norman Osborn. Carrie observed that, at least from what she was gathering from my synopsis, Spider-Man sounded like a big soap opera. And it is; that's what's so fascinating about superhero comics. The action, hey, whatever. It's the serial exhibition of Peter Parker's messed-up life we're all there to see. And that's such a huge part, really the part, of Watchmen. It isn't just a parody of the superhero genre in the sense of sort of twisting our expectations; it also, as parody sometimes should (when it can do so well), takes the conventions of the genre and blows them up to humongous proportions. It's amazing.

So please, please, for heaven's sake, read Watchmen. You don't have my permission to go see it until you've at least read the book, and maybe not even then, ugh. Read it. Read it now.

That is all.