I recently finished the graphic novel/comic book series Watchmen for the first time.  After seeing and enjoying the movie, I resolved to eventually get my hands on it.  Last week, after lurking back-and-forth for a while in the Emmet O’Neal Library fiction aisles with nothing else catching my eye, I walked over and happened on it in the young adult/required reading section.  Good taste (and subversive), those Mountain Brook schools.

It’s excellent and dark.  Read it.  Especially if you’ve never read a “graphic novel” before, it’s a good place to start.  And now I’ll be looking for more Alan Moore (I’ve read From Hell) and wanting a list of other non-standard works of literature I’ve somehow missed.

The picture on the right is a single panel from Watchmen.  I wanted to share it because I liked it so much.  I’d love to find someone to paint or draw this for me.  My limited talents couldn’t do it justice, I’m sure.  I can’t draw.  Who could do this?

Another note, I admit that law school molded me into a compulsive tabber of good quotes in books.  If I own the book, it goes back on my shelf with all the tabs in.  (And anyone unfortunate enough to borrow it has to flip around all my tabs.)  If it’s a library book, I usually take some time to type all the quotes down before I take it back.  Just for a lark – and to share one of my OCD habits – here’s some of the stuff I tabbed from the book.

• Beneath me, this awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.
• Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it’s seldom when anything ever really gets resolved.  It’s taken me a long time to realize that.
• Blake is interesting.  I have never met anyone so deliberately amoral. . . .  As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.  Blake’s different.  He understands perfectly . . . and he doesn’t care.
• American psychology and its Soviet counterpart are [not] interchangeable.  To understand the Russian attitude to the possibility of a third world war one must first understand their attitude to the second.  In WWII, none of the allied powers fought so bitterly or sustained such losses as did the Russians.  It was Hitler’s lack of success in his assault upon the Soviet heartland that assured his eventual defeat, and though it was paid for mostly by Soviet lives, the entire world reaped the benefits.  In time, the Russian contribution to the war effort has been downplayed and dismissed – most noticeably as our political differences became wider – as we glorified our own contribution while forgetting that of our estranged former allies.  The Russians, however, have not forgotten.  There are still those who remember the horror of a war fought on their soil . . . .
• Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.
• [Rorschach] said, “None of you understand.  I’m not locked up in here with you.  You’re locked up in here with me.”
• Why do we argue?  Life’s so fragile, a successful virus, clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.  Next week, I could be putting her into a garbage sack, placing her outside for collection.
• Tactically, Rorschach was brilliant.  He was so unpredictable.
• People swallow lies easily, provided they’re big enough.
• I’m not a . . . serial villain.  Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting it’s outcome?  I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
• What does fighting crime mean, exactly?  Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?  Yes, I’ve busted drug rings and been accused of being an establishment pawn for doing so . . . that happened a lot in the sixties.  I’ve also uncovered plots by breakaway extremist factions within the Pentagon, for example the plot to release some unpleasantly specific diseases upon the population of Africa . . . .  I guess I’ve just reached a point where I’ve started to wonder whether all the grandstanding and fighting individual evils does much good for the world as a whole.  Those evils are just symptoms of an overall sickness of the human spirit, and I don’t believe you can cure a disease by suppressing its symptoms.