The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alan Moore, with Dave Gibbons · a comic in twelve chapters with prose back matter · DC Comics, twelve monthly issues dated September 1986 to October 1987, collected in one volume in 1987 · script by Moore, page drawing and lettering by Gibbons, colours by John Higgins, scored as one text in which script, page design, drawing, colour and lettering are weighed together · read from knowledge; no text in hand, and words quoted only where they are certain
Mode
A detective story, a Cold War thriller, a history of an invented profession and a meditation on time and responsibility in one serial comic
Mythos
The superhero as the modern American myth of the protector, built from inside; Ozymandias, the king whose works are left in sand; the watchmaker god who sees the mechanism and withdraws; a mariner’s damnation, in the pirate comic, told in counterpoint
Phase
October and November 1985, with the history of the masks from the 1930s held in memoir, document and memory, and one chapter that holds a whole life from 1945 at once
Presentation
Twelve chapters, each an issue, each closed by a quotation that gives its title; a base page of nine equal panels, three by three, joined into larger units but never abandoned until the six full-page splashes that open the last chapter; covers that are the first panels of their chapters; prose and document pages after the first eleven chapters
Register
Noir procedural, a vigilante’s journal, a decent memoir, period horror narration, psychiatric notes, cosmic meditation and a romance between two retired heroes, carried in drawing that is clear, dense and exact
Scale
A few blocks of one city, centred on a newsstand at a street corner, and the whole of an alternative American century, with Mars and the arms race beyond it
Governing Proposition
In a New York of 1985 that has lived for decades with masked vigilantes and for a generation with a man who can remake matter, the murder of one of the old masks sets the survivors moving, while the doomsday clock on every chapter runs down toward midnight and a war between the powers comes near. The wager of the book is that the fantasy of the protector who stands above the law, taken at its word and followed into politics, the body, age and history, is either a pathology or a tyranny, and that a serial comic built on a fixed grid of nine panels can hold that argument with the architecture of a novel.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The first chapter takes its title from a line of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”, printed on its last page, and every chapter after it closes the same way, on a quotation that names it. Its cover is its first panel, a close detail, and so is every cover after it. Each chapter carries a clock face, and across the twelve chapters the clock’s hands move from eleven minutes before midnight to midnight. The book announces at once that it is built: a serial comic of twelve monthly issues, each a chapter, made to be read as one thing and to end at a stroke set from the start.
A man has gone through a window. He was the Comedian, one of the masked vigilantes who have worked in this America since the 1930s, and the blood on his smiley badge is the first image of a book that will return to the shape again and again. Rorschach opens his journal over the death: “Dog carcass in alley this morning.” The voice is clipped, disgusted and absolute. The investigation that follows is a detective story, and it takes Rorschach to the others of his generation and to what is left of the one before.
The page is a grid of nine equal panels, three by three. It is joined into larger units of two, three or six panels and never abandoned, and on it every panel weighs the same, so that a gutter can mark a second or thirty years. At the corner of 40th Street and 7th Avenue a newsstand keeps appearing: a vendor, and a boy who sits reading a pirate comic. Behind the main story the city is drawn as people, and after the chapter comes prose: chapters of Under the Hood, the memoir of Hollis Mason, one of the first generation of masks, giving the history the drawn story cannot stop to give.
Movement II
Doctor Manhattan is the book’s one superhuman, made so by an accident in 1959. The fourth chapter, titled from Einstein, is told from where he sits on Mars, alone, and it is told out of order: his father the watchmaker in 1945, the accident of 1959, the present, all held together, because for him they are.
He experiences time as a jewel already cut, every moment present at once, and the page lets the reader do what he does: the grid sets moments side by side, and the eye can hold a life across it. The parts of a watch fall. The son of a watchmaker has become the deist’s maker, who sees the whole mechanism and can no longer find a reason to touch it. His omniscience has abolished his capacity to care.
The prose after the chapter is Milton Glass’s essay on Doctor Manhattan. The book around him lives under the clock: an America that won in Vietnam and has kept Nixon as president, an arms race, a city whose people go about their lives while the hands move toward midnight. The god who sees the mechanism is the one figure who could stop it, and he is on Mars.
Movement III
The fifth chapter takes its title from Blake, and it is laid out as a mirror: its pages answer each other in composition across the centrespread, so that the reader moving through it comes back through the same shapes reversed. It ends with Rorschach taken. The symmetry is the book’s pattern made visible, the pattern by which one figure answers another across the work: the mask and the face beneath it, the story and its double.
In prison Rorschach is examined by a psychiatrist who shows him inkblots, and the sixth chapter, titled from Nietzsche’s abyss that gazes also, is the descent. The psychiatrist’s notes and the file behind them show the child under the mask, the wound under the absolutism, and the psychiatrist is left to reflect on what he has found. In prison Rorschach says: “I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me.” The chapter is the turn on which the book’s sympathy and its horror meet.
The double the book keeps closest is the pirate comic the boy reads at the newsstand. Its period narration is laid over the street, so that the words of one story run over the pictures of another and each comments on the other. A mariner, trying to save his town from the ship of the dead, becomes the monster himself. The back matter gives the comic its own history inside the book’s invented one, and the boy turns its pages chapter by chapter while the city goes on around him.
Movement IV
Laurie, the daughter of Sally Jupiter, the old masked heroine whose scrapbook is printed among the documents, is with Manhattan on Mars in the ninth chapter, titled from Jung. There she finds out who her father was: the Comedian. Manhattan sees in her birth, against every improbability of the two lives that made it, a reason to care again, and he turns from his glass palace toward the earth. It is the warmest page of a cold book.
Adrian Veidt took the name Ozymandias, and his empire of commerce and media bears it. The eleventh chapter is titled from Shelley’s sonnet, the king whose works are left in sand. When Rorschach and Dan Dreiberg reach him, he explains his whole design: a catastrophe of his own making, millions dead to save billions. He has not waited for them. “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”
In the same chapter the pirate comic reaches its last page. The mariner, who has become the monster to save his town, swims out at last to the Freighter. Veidt’s story has been told first, in a comic a boy was reading, and the book lets the two endings meet. The rational benefactor and the damned mariner are one figure, and the doubling the whole book has set up now carries its verdict.
Movement V
The last chapter opens on six full-page splashes, without words, the first time the grid is broken. They show the city dead: the street, the newsstand, the vendor and the boy among the bodies, the people the book has drawn in its backgrounds for eleven chapters. The clock has reached midnight. Veidt’s creature lies among the buildings, a thing out of pulp, and the war the clock counted down to does not come.
Rorschach, unmasked in the snow, tears on his face, demands to be killed. Manhattan, who has come back to the earth, does not stay on it: he goes to make a world elsewhere. His last words to Veidt are these: “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” The book does not say whether Veidt was right.
The last scene is in the office of The New Frontiersman. Rorschach’s journal lies in the crank file, and a young man reaches toward it. The book ends there, on his hand and the question the graffito has asked from the first chapter, and leaves its reader to decide what one reading of one book will do.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is unusually hard to pass against this book, because the grid of nine panels makes each page a fixed budget, and the book spends it with very little slack. The background is load-bearing: the newsstand at the corner of 40th Street and 7th Avenue, its vendor and the boy reading the pirate comic, recurs in nearly every chapter and is where the end falls. Most of the back matter is required: Under the Hood gives the first generation of masks the history the main narrative cannot stop to give; the psychiatric file makes the turn of chapter VI possible; the pirate comic is the book’s moral double. What could go: some back matter is fill, the ornithology article and the number of The New Frontiersman doing less than the rest; Veidt’s account of his own life runs longer than the reader needs; and the mechanics of the island and the creature are told at a length the idea does not compel.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the fantasy of the protector who stands above the law is, when realised, either a pathology or a tyranny, and the question the graffito asks, “Who watches the watchmen?”, has no answer inside the fantasy. The book makes it concrete in four watchers: the Comedian, who sees that the world is a joke and becomes its cruellest punchline; Rorschach, whose absolutism is a wound, the child shown behind it; Doctor Manhattan, whose omniscience abolishes his capacity to care; and Veidt, whose rational benevolence kills millions to save billions. The second disclosure is Cold War dread made social, a city living under the clock. Held below the top because much of the meaning is spoken, by Veidt, by Manhattan, by the psychiatrist, and because the thesis is partly about a genre, though the book carries it out into power and its uses.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The heights are many and mostly cold. Manhattan on Mars in chapter IV, holding his whole life at once while the parts of a watch fall, rises by the form itself. Laurie on Mars in chapter IX, finding out who her father was, ends with the turn from the glass palace toward the earth and the improbability of any one person’s birth: the book’s warmest elevation. The six wordless splash pages that open chapter XII, the dead city, the newsstand, the vendor and the boy among the bodies, are its terror at full height. Rorschach unmasked in the snow, tears on his face, demanding to be killed, is its tragic summit. Against these, long passages of procedure are deliberately flat, the drawing’s even clarity rarely lets a page overwhelm, and the creature in the last chapter is grotesque rather than sublime.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myths are built, not evoked. The superhero is the modern American myth, and the book builds it from inside, generation by generation, so that the archetype of the protector is examined as structure. Ozymandias is load-bearing: Veidt takes the name of the king whose works the poem leaves in sand, and the chapter titled from Shelley ends with the deed that will either save the world or fall to the boy in the last panel. Manhattan is the watchmaker god of the deists, who sees the mechanism and withdraws, and the book closes him by sending him to make a world elsewhere. The pirate comic builds a damnation in counterpoint: the mariner who, to save his town from the ship of the dead, becomes the monster and swims at last to the Freighter. Held below the top because some myth is labelled by epigraph rather than found, and the Comedian is more type than archetype.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American superhero comic from 1938 on: the costume, the team, the secret identity, the monthly serial, with Moore’s own Marvelman and Swamp Thing and Frank Miller’s Daredevil immediately behind. The turn is total. The genre’s premise is taken literally and its consequences followed into politics, sexuality, ageing, history and physics, and its form is turned from the splash and the fight to a grid of nine panels and a novel’s architecture, with prose documents interleaved and a pirate comic inside the comic. The stake was real: a monthly mainstream title for the largest American publisher, with invented characters and a structure that would fail if any issue failed. Held from the top because the instrument of revision was already in hand, in Marvelman from 1982 and The Dark Knight Returns in the same year: the swerve lies in completeness and form more than in first discovery.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and most of the knowledge goes; the film of 2009, which kept the plot and much of the dialogue and lost the rest, is the controlled experiment. The grid is the clockwork: a fixed frame in which every panel has equal weight, so that a gutter can be a second or thirty years, and chapter IV can hold a life at once because the page holds moments side by side, as Manhattan does. The mirrored layout of chapter V makes the symmetry of its title from Blake into the experience of reading. The text of one scene laid over the images of another, the pirate comic’s narration over the street, makes irony a function of the medium. The documents change the reading of the panels: they are the world the drawn world claims to be. Held a little below the top because the back matter’s prose is a lesser instrument than the pages it follows.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over nearly four decades. The book has drawn a continuous literature: annotations panel by panel from the 1980s onward, Gibbons’s own Watching the Watchmen (2008), Leslie Klinger’s Annotated Watchmen, a large literature in comics studies, and readings in philosophy and political theory. The questions it plants are still argued: whether Veidt is right, and whether the book thinks he is; what the last panel decides; whether Manhattan’s determinism is the book’s view or one character’s; whether Rorschach is its conscience or its warning. The pages keep yielding detail on return, the repeated backgrounds and the symmetry of Veidt’s act and the mariner’s rewarding each pass. Held below the higher reaches because four decades is a short test, and because part of the yield is the spotting of detail, which is density before it is depth.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the comic in English, and through it the literature of its language in the 1980s. The intrinsic force is very high: the book showed that the serial comic could carry the architecture and moral seriousness of a novel without leaving its own means, and that those means, grid, panel, gutter and the counterpoint of word and image, could be the instrument of thought. Charged against it: the reach most immediately taken was its surface, violence and grimness in the mainstream superhero comic for a decade after, which Moore himself regretted, and its reach into prose literature beyond the comic is real but narrower. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Maus and The Dark Knight Returns it made the graphic novel a shelf in bookshops and comics a subject of literary criticism; it won a Hugo Award in 1988, in a category given once; it is the one comic on Time’s list of 2005 of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923; it opened the American industry to the British writers who followed; and it was adapted for film and for television.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over nearly four decades. The form survives whole: the collected volume has been in print continuously since 1987, and the pages stand as drawn and lettered. Presence is as wide as a book of its age can have: taught in courses in literature and in comics, translated widely, and kept before a public by Zack Snyder’s film (2009), by Damon Lindelof’s series for HBO (2019), which took the book as its premise thirty years on, and by DC’s continuations, Before Watchmen (2012) and Doomsday Clock (2017 to 2019), made against Moore’s wishes. Fabric: Higgins’s colours were made for newsprint and its flat processes, and Higgins himself recoloured the book for the Absolute Edition of 2005, the smallest of charges, since the hand is the same. Its surface is fixed to the Cold War of 1985, but that is its matter, and it is read for what the moment disclosed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read on the same terms as prose, film or painting, with script, page, drawing, colour and lettering as one making. Gibbons’s drawing is clear, dense and exact: every panel legible at a glance and full on a second look, the backgrounds alive with signs and objects that carry the plot, the figures acted with restraint, faces that hold a feeling without caricature, and transitions engineered so that a shape or a word at a panel’s edge hands the reader to the next scene. His lettering is uniform and quiet, with balloons of their own for Rorschach and for Manhattan. Higgins’s palette of secondaries, purples, greens and oranges, gives the book its night and its unease. Moore’s script commands a wide range of voice. Charges hold it at the bar: much dialogue is portentous, Veidt speaks in lectures, some back matter is pastiche rather than writing, and the creature is a lapse of design.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the pirate comic, a period horror story read by a boy at a newsstand, and Manhattan on Mars thinking through time as a jewel already cut. They obey one law: everything is already made, and the question is what a person does who sees the mechanism. The mariner cannot stop his ship, the god cannot stop seeing, the vigilante will not compromise, the planner builds his own ending. The same law holds the tone from noir procedural to cosmic meditation to the romance of two retired heroes. Charged: the creature and the island of artists belong to a pulp physics the rest of the book does not obey; Manhattan’s change of heart on Mars is argued by a miracle of chance rather than tested; and the resolution of the plot depends on a device more than on the law the book has set. The range is very wide, and almost all of it holds.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders, held by one question of power and its watchers. Consciousness, in Rorschach’s journal and Manhattan’s simultaneous time. The family, in Sally Jupiter, Laurie and the Comedian, and the paternity found on Mars. Sexuality, ageing and the body, in the first generation of masks grown old. The city, in the newsstand and the street, the vendor and the boy, the psychiatrist and his wife, all of them killed. The state and history, in an alternative American century. Science, in Manhattan; commerce and the media, in Veidt’s empire; ethics and the sacred, in the calculus of the end and the god who leaves. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a form of watching. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour, faith and the inner lives of the ordinary people are held more thinly than in the great novels, and the alternative history is drawn as setting more than as weight.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.3, then The Swerve and The Made at 9.0 each. A form in which the grid of nine panels is the book’s clockwork, so that a life can be held at once, a chapter can be a mirror and the words of one story can run over the pictures of another; a turn of the American superhero comic, taken at its word, into the architecture of a novel, at the stake of a monthly mainstream title; and a making, script, page, drawing, colour and lettering together, in which every panel is legible at a glance and full on a second look.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.5, held by what is thin among its many orders: labour, faith and the inner lives of the ordinary people, and an alternative history drawn as setting more than as weight. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Sublime at 8.6: some of the back matter is fill and the account of the island and the creature runs long, and the heights, many and cold, are spaced among deliberately flat passages of procedure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by eleven tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, published by DC Comics as a limited series of twelve monthly issues with cover dates from September 1986 to October 1987, and collected in one volume in 1987. The unit is the twelve issues as collected, the back matter included: the prose and document pages that close the first eleven chapters, among them the chapters of Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood, Milton Glass’s essay on Doctor Manhattan, the material on the pirate comic Tales of the Black Freighter, Rorschach’s psychiatric file, Dan Dreiberg’s ornithological article, a number of The New Frontiersman, Sally Jupiter’s scrapbook and Adrian Veidt’s papers. The work is scored as words and pictures together: Moore’s script, Gibbons’s page design, drawing and lettering, and John Higgins’s colours are weighed as one text, and Moore’s script alone is not the unit. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on its pages, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and words are quoted only where they are certain: the first line of Rorschach’s journal, his words in prison, Veidt’s answer, Manhattan’s last words to Veidt and the graffito; the chapter titles named are those given with their sources. Gibbons’s Watching the Watchmen and Klinger’s Annotated Watchmen are cited as reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the collected volume, the origin of the characters in another publisher’s heroes, the year of the annotated edition and the sources of the titles of chapters II, VIII and XII, are not given.