Sources Related to Watchmen

Alan Moore

Interview with Alan Moore, pp. 162-63

What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control of both the verbal track and the image track, which you don't have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply can't be achieved anywhere else. You control the words and the pictures -- and more importantly -- you control the interplay between those two elements in a way which not even film can achieve. There's a sort of 'under-language' at work there, that is neither the 'visuals' nor the 'verbals,' but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two.

A picture can be set against text ironically, or it can be used to support the text, or it can be completely disjointed from the text - which forces the reader into looking at the scene in a new way. You can do this to some extent in film, in terms of striking interesting juxtapositions between the imagery and what the intent of the characters may be, but you cannot do it anywhere near as precisely as you can in comics. Here the reader has the ability to stop and linger over one particular 'frame' and work out all of the meaning in that frame or panel, as opposed to having it flash by you ar twenty-four frames per second in a cinema.

p. 171

What I enjoyed about comics as a youngster wasn't just that adolescent male power fantasy element. That's true to a degree, but they're not just boys' power fantasies. ... The biggest element for me was the world of imagination that comics opened up! It was not the fact that Superman could push planets around that impressed me, but that he had a Fortress of Solitude, and possessed a bottled city, and he could travel back and forth in time and get involved in all sorts of strange time paradoxes, and that the planet he came from had a gold volcano and a jeweled mountain.... It was the same with the early Marvel Comics: it was the wonderful concepts, not the superhero's muscles, which gave me the biggest charge.

There's also a question of morality here. [Moore goes on to say that his strongest moral example in childhood wasn't his parents - "It was Superman." He worries that the pomo/nihilist superheroes will corrupt the youth.]

p. 66 panel 3:

"Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea."

"Judge's Optimistic Signature on a Grim-Faced Death Row." New York Times, July 28, 1993, p. A7.

Judge Charles J. Hearn, a Texas state judge, has been putting a happy face on his signature for years.

The happy face is on his driver's license, on all the checks he signs, on thousands of court documents. Now it is on an execution order he sent to a state prisoner here, informing him of the date he is to be put to death, and therein may lie a legal issue.

The judge insists that he meant no disrespect when he sent the order this month to Robert Nelson Drew, a death row inamte, setting his execution for Oct. 14 and concluding with the judge's customary bold signature, complete with a scribbled happy face.

"It's just a signature like yours is or anyone else's is," the judge said in a telephone interview today. "It's that simple. I'm a happy person. You've got to be a happy person. We've got too many people walking around this world with grim looks on their faces."

But Mr. Drew's lawyer, William M. Kunstler, said his client interpreted the grinning face as a bit of callous mockery and was outraged by it. Mr. Kunstler said he planned to file a motion asking for a new trial.

"It's like saying, 'Have a nice death,'" Mr. Kunstler said.

[several sentences omitted]

Judge Hearn, 62, said the happy face was meant to symbolize his born-again Christian faith. He is well known here for saying "God bless you" as he sentences people to prison, and on a few occasions he has held hands and prayed with convicts as they are sent away to Huntsville, the state prison where dozens of Texas convicts are executed each year.

SMILE WHEN YOU SAY THAT.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fires of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Alan Moore's "V." reads from Thomas Pynchon's V. From V for Vendetta

Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.

p. 251

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 703

"Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination -- not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, perhaps a route In for those... who are held at the edge...."

Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 751-52

At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, 'My God, we are too late!' always with the trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension -- because of course he never arrives too late [...] now, finally, Sir Denis Nayland Smith will arrive, my God, too late.

Superman will swoop boots-first into a deserted clearing, a launcher-erector sighing oil through a slow seal-leak, gum evoked from trees, bitter manna for this bitterest of passages. The colors of his cape will wilt in the afternoon sun, curls on his head begin to show their first threads of gray. Philip Marlowe will suffer a horrible migraine and reach by reflex for the pint of rye in his suit pocket, and feel homesick for the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building [....]"'Too late' was never in their programming. They find instead a moment's suspending of their sanity -- but then it's over with, whew, and it's back to the trail, back to the Daily Planet. Yes, Jimmy, it must've been the day I ran into that singularity, those few seconds of absolute mystery... you know Jimmy, time -- time is a funny thing.... There'll be a thousand ways to forget. The heroes will go on, kicked upstairs to oversee the development of bright new middle-line personnel, and they will watch their system falling apart, watch those singularities begin to come more and more often, proclaiming another dispensation out of the tissue of old-fashioned time, and they'll call it cancer, and just won't know what things are coming to, or what's the meaning of it all, Jimmy....

The fireball [at Hiroshima] flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable, and animal surfaces of the city itself.... A human being left the memorial of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank.

Notes from his visit to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima -- June, 1995

20:21 Minshuku Ikedaya; Hiroshima -- Japan :: 13 JUN 95

The Peace Museum in Hiroshima presents its anti-nuclear message with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer. Any attempt at describing the visual and mental experience of walking through it would fall well short . There are scale models of the city as it stood at 8 AM on August 6, 1945 and what remained when the last fire burned itself out. There are pictures and video of the damage both to the buildings and inhabitants of Hiroshima.

What follows are some examples of the descriptive text accompanying the exhibits. Re-reading them now, I am struck by the reduced impact of these statements when taken out of the context of the museum.

Japan's military situation in the Pacific War worsened in 1945. Imperial headquarters foresaw that the Japanese mainland would become a battlefield and called for "100 million deaths with honour."

President Truman's national address on August 7, 1945:

The basic power of the universe has been harnessed
for war by the United States. The force from which
the sun draws its powers has been loosed against
those who brought war to the Far East.

Three factors probably led to the hasty deployment of the atomic bomb just days after the first successful test:

1) In forcing Japanese capitulation the US averted
the high cost of lives likely to accompany a
conventional assault of Japan

2) At Yalta in 1945, Stalin promised a Soviet
presence in the Pacific war. The US secured
its political presence by forcing Japan's
surrender before Soviet involvement.

3) Measure the effectiveness of the bomb as
a weapon.

By August 1945 most Japanese cities had been destroyed by air raids. Hiroshima was unusually spared. It's choice as the primary target of attacks was probably determined by:

1) The size and shape of the city was suited to
A-bomb power and since there was no existing
damage, assessing effectiveness of the bomb
would be relatively easy.

2) Despite being previously spared as an air-raid
target, Hiroshima was an important city with high
concentrations of troops, military hardware,
industry and it was a transportation hub.

On August 10 the Japanese government formally protested the new bomb, claiming it to be a cruel, inhuman weapon that violated international law.

Those who survived called the A-bomb 'pika-dori'. Pika referred to the flash of light. Dori was an onomatopoeic reference to the tremendous sound.

On a charred wall at Fukuromachi Elementary school, about 500 meters from the hypocentre, people scrawled news and messages in chalk. In addition, small message boards were setup at the ruins of burnt houses telling of family members who had died or where survivors were taking refuge.

On or about August 8, a Japanese study team discovered that film in a hospital x-ray room had been exposed. From this evidence, the Japanese government deduced that the new bomb was atomic.

During September and October of the year, another team of Japanese scientists surveyed residual radiation. The documentary film they produced during their study was confiscated by the occupation forces and taken to the US. It was finally returned to Hiroshima in 1973.

In October 1945, US soldiers and scientists surveyed and measured what was called the A-bomb effect. The complete results of that study have yet to be made public.

The atomic bomb that exploded 580 meters above Hiroshima was powered by splitting 855 grams of uranium. The energy released was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT.

The splitting of uranium nuclei generated both initial radiation (gamma rays and neutrons) and residual radiation. The neutron radiation lasted a brief instant. The initial gamma rays remained at dangerous levels for approximately 20 seconds. Residual radiation consisted of gamma and beta rays emitted over an extended period.

The bomb created a high-temperature, high-pressure fireball which grew to a diameter of approximately 410 meters one second after detonation. The fireball emitted intense thermal rays for up to three seconds and continued to glow for approximately ten seconds. The shock wave at the leading edge of the blast traveled eleven kilometers in 30 seconds.

The super-hot fireball (several million degrees in the center) emitted thermal rays primarily as ultraviolet and visible light radiation. The temperature on the ground near the hypocenter reached 3,000 to 11,000 degrees Celsius.

The fireball created a super-sonic shockwave and pressures of several hundred thousand atmospheres. On the ground near the hypocenter this pressure reached 35 tons per square meter. The intial shockwave was followed by winds blowing 440 meters per second.

The following is a verse from "Flower of Summer" (Natsu no Hana), a collection of short stories by Tamik Hara (1905-1951), writer and A-bomb survivor.

This is a human being?
Look how the atom bomb changed it.
Flesh swells fearfully.
All men and women take one shape.
The voice that trickles from swollen lips
On the festering charred-black face
Whispers the thin words,
"Please, help me."
This, this is a human being.
This is the face of a human being.

There were two types of residual radiation. Induced radiation resulted from the interaction of initial radiation neutrons with the materials in the ground and buildings. Fallout ("Ashes of Death") derived from fission fragments produced when the uranium atoms were split. Levels of induced radiation remained high for approximately 100 hours within 11 kilometers of the hypocenter. Radiation from fallout and fission fragments was weaker but lasted longer. Furthermore, large amounts of radioactive material fell in the "Black Rain."

The damage done to human bodies by radiation has been referred to generally as A-bomb disease, or radiation sickness.

Acute damage refers to symptoms that appear within four months. In addition to complications associated with burns and external injuries, common symptoms of radiation sickness include hair loss, bleeding, lowered levels of white blood cells.

The symptoms known as aftereffects began with keloids, which appeared the year after the bombing. Later, radiation produced high rates of cataracts, leukemia and various cancers. It also produced high rates of birth defects among those exposed in-utero.

Some victims who entered the city after the bombing became sick or died from what is believed to be exposure to residual radiation.

In and around what was known as the genbaku sebaku (A-bomb desert) the city struggled to gather enough manpower to dispose of the corpses, but many remained in view nearly two weeks after the bombing.

Some symptoms of A-bomb disease imitate dysentary. Thus, many health care providers were surprised by what seemed to be an epidemic of dysentery spreading throughout the city and surrounding areas. Only later was the cause found to be radiation.

After the bombing violent fires raged throughout the city, and a giant windstorm broke out. Heavy rain fell over the north-west of Hiroshima. For the first hour or two the rain fell black, discoloured by mud, dust blown up at the time of the explosion. The soot too was strongly radioactive. It killed many fish in the rivers and ponds and people who drank well water suffered from terrible diarrhea for up to three months aftwerward.

After the A-bomb sickness had passed, healed scar tissue became thick and contracted, toughening and wrinkling the skin to form growths known as keloids. This symptom was most common during 1946-1947. Keloids developed on fifty to sixty percent of those who suffered first-degree burns within about 2 kilometers of the hypocenter. Being grotesque, painful and itchy they caused people both physical and mental suffering.

Huge numbers of people unable to endure their injuries or burns, jumped into the river that runs in front of the A-bomb dome. Thousands of corpses were seen floating in all Hiroshimas rivers. The once majestic dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall will be preserved in perpetuity on the bank of the Motoyatsu River as a mute reminder of the tragedy and concrete appeal for world peace.

Several days after the A-bombing, many children could be seen wandering alone, or in groups, through the burnt ruins of the city. Thousands had been evacuated prior to the bombing and returned later to find that their guardians had perished. THese "A-bomb orphans" were housed in camps, but many died from the effects of radiation or acute malnutrition.

At noon on August 15, 1945, those who had survived the war heard the Emperor's voice on the radio. "...the enemy used a cruel new bomb..." The voice, distorted by static, faded in and out, but the message was clear. Japan had surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces.

The people of Hiroshima greeted the news with mixed emotions. Bitter at the defeat, dazed by disaster, and mourning the relatives they had lost to the atomic bomb, they were also relieved that the threat of further bombing was gone. They had been assured for years of Japan's certain victory. Now they were facing a turbulent, uncertain future.

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of nuclear weapons in war has been prevented but there have been consistent outbreaks of crisis in which their use was a possibility. The following list summarizes past incidents in which the United States contemplated the possibility of using nuclear weapons.

• 1946, March - Deployment of Soviet Army to Iran
• 1946, November - Shooting down of US plane by Yugoslavia
• 1948, January - Inauguration of a new Uraguayan President
• 1948, Apr-Jun - Sealing off of West Berlin by Soviet Union
• 1950, June - Break-out of war in Korea
• 1953, August - Deterioration of Korean War
• 1954, Apr-May - Offer to supply French in Vietnam w/ A-bomb
• 1954, May - Guatemala chooses pro-Soviet policy
• 1945, August - China's liberation of Taiwan
• 1958, July - Iraq military coup and Taiwan Strait crisis
• 1959, May - Berlin issue
• 1961, June - Berlin issue
• 1962, October - Cuban missile crisis
• 1968, January - Seizure of USS Pueblo by North Korea
• 1968, February - Vietnam War (Battle of Quesan)
• 1969, November - Intensification of Vietnam War
• 1970, September - Invasion of Jordan by Syria
• 1973, October - Desire to halt 4th Middle-East War
• 1980, January - Desire to halt Iran Crisis
• 1991, January - Anticipation of chemical weapons use by Iraq in Persian Gulf War

Hibakusha [survivors of the A-bombs] say simply, "I met with the A-bomb." Perhaps they use this expressioni because the event they "met with" defies description, an instant of massive destruction, mind-numbing death and injuries and grief of watching helplessly as family members, relatives, friends and neigbours died in agony. They also say, "It's painful even to remember." The A-bomb witnesses have overcome that pain and are passing on their experiences of that day. They feel duty bound to tell the world why nuclear weapons must never be used again.

The number of hibakusha in Japan 339,034
(holders of Hibakusha health book)

Hibakusha living in Hiroshima 101,939

Total population of Hiroshima 1,086,536
(As of March 31, 1993 -- 48 years after the bomb)

Sadako Sasaki, exposed to the A-bomb in Hiroshima at the age of two contracted leukemia a decade later, and in 1955 died at the age of 12. Believing that folding 1,000 paper cranes would cure her disease, Sadako folded one after another in her hospital bed. After her death, her classmates at the Nabori-machi elementary school conducted prayer meetings to console the souls of many children who were killed by the A-bomb. They also initiated a movement that lead to the Children's Peace Monument.

Sadako's story has spread throughout the world and through it, folded paper cranes have become a symbol of peace. At the foot of the Children's Peace Monument lies a continuously replenished pile of folded cranes sent from all over the world.

Successive mayors of Hiroshima have sent telegrams protesting every nuclear weapons test since 1968. The telegrams are sent to the countries responsible for the tests, and each expresses the fervent hope that it will be the last such telegram.

Patrick -- Responses Sought --

Contributed by J.D. LaFrance, April 12, 1996

Among the many influences on the character of Rorschach I think one has to be Martin Scorsese's film, Taxi Driver (1975). For example:

Watchmen I.2.2. Rorschach's diary: "The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood aand when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown." Now this mirrors Travis Bickle's narration/diary at the beginning of the film when he says: "All the animals come out at night. Whores, skunks, pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick. Venal. Some day a real rain'll come and wash all this scum off the streets." Both use diaries to document their mission to wipe out the scum of New York City.

There is more of Taxi Driver's influence on Watchmen that supports my Travis Bickle/Rorschach link:

In II.25.1-4: Rorschach's dejected walk down 42nd St. mirrors Travis' own stroll through a similar red light district in Taxi Driver. These panels strongly echo this scene and even the famous movie poster where De Niro's posture and the background scenery eerily resemble these panels.

Contributed by Jay Brogee, July 14, 1998

I thought you'd appreciate this Web site. It contains copies of mailing list messages from the late 80's about Watchmen. It has quite a few theories that range from possible (Hooded Justice tiped off the cops about Rorschach) to stupid (The Comedian's brain was in Veidt's 'alien'). It's at:

ftp.white.toronto.edu/pub/comics/watchmen/