Watchmen Chapter I: At Midnight, All the Agents...

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Go out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do.

'Desolation Row' is one of Dylan's most apocalyptic and biting social critiques. You should check it out. It's on _Highway 61 Revisited_."

I.1.1 Opening frame; Rorschach's journal: "Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."

Text/graphic crossover: frame shows bloody smiley button. A clear instance of what Alan Moore calls the "under-language" of comics.

"Creeping Manley" (ROSOSIN@vaxsar.vassar.edu) points out that "the blood smear on the Comedian's button is also echoed by the raindrop hitting the statue on the cover of issue II, and in the flowing bottle of Nostalgia on the cover of issue IX." Much obliged for those important details. Once you start to notice these things...

I.1.2 "The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown." As J.D. LaFrance points out, this passage echoes Scorsese's Taxi Driver [more].

"Gutter" is of course a technical term from comics (and book) design. The gutter of the page is the blank space between panels or columns of print. It is the space between enlightenment, like the space of blackness between frames in a movie -- sort of.

I.3.3 The Comedian's wrecked face in the hands of his murderer. This is an important, recurrent image. And note that it's the opposite of a "smiley face."

I.3.7 Real-time/flashback intercutting: "Ground floor, comin' up" (detective's dialogue laid over Comedian's fall through the window).

I.4.3 Background fragment, newspaper headline on news vendor's stand (which also shows pirate comics): "Vietnam 51st State"

I.4.6-8 Detectives mention Rorschach. First glimpse of Signboard Man (guess who); detective shivers as Signboard Man goes past. A common pattern, and it seems so clear now. And yet, how obvious was any of this in 1986, the first time you read it?

I.5.2 Rorschach's shadow.

I.9.1 Hollis Mason (the retired Nite Owl) reminisces about meeting "The Screaming Skull" in the supermarket. They trade addresses. "Nice guy." The banality of superheroes.

I.9.8 First appearance of graffito (fragmentary): "Who Watches the Watchmen?" Note the attribution for this line that will be given at the end of the book.

I.13.5 Dan Dreiberg slumps over next to his disembodied costume. Rorschach has just reminded him that "You quit" (I.13.4). Compare I.8.8 (Rorschach looking down at empty Comedian costume) and also panels showing Dan and Laurie in the Owlship hangar.

I.14.5 Discarded newspaper: "Congress Approves Lunar Silos." Graffito: "Viet Bronx."

I.17.7-8 Rorschach and Adrian Veidt. R: "Might as well call me a Nazi, too." Veidt: "Hm." He's obviously begun to entertain this idea as a possible course of action; but you don't understand this until the second time through. Watchmen is designed to unfold one way in "real time," another on re-reading. Compare the first glimpse of Rorschach, I.4.6-8. Relate this to Dr. Manhattan's curious, meta-human perspective on time and mortal experience in Vol. IX.

I.18.4 Newspaper on Adrian Veidt's desk: "Nuclear Doomsday Clock Stands at Five to Twelve."

A major theme, obviously. Clocks, watches, horologes and astrolabes. Not to mention All Soul's Day, Apocalypse, the Witching Hour, and -- My God, Too Late!

I.19.1 Sigil on signboard for Rockefeller Military Research Center -- suspiciously close resemblance to the Superman emblem.

I.20.1 First glimpse of Dr. Manhattan, "The Indestructible Man" - stark naked, deep blue, 25 feet tall, welding (or something) with his fingertip.

I.21.1 Dr. M. says CIA suspects the Libyans killed the Comedian

I.21.3 Dr. M: "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"

I.21.8-9 Laurie Juspeczyk argues with Rorschach about the Comedian's guilt of rape.

I.23.7 Jon gives Laurie his consent for her "date" with Dan Dreiberg. "I'd join you, but I think I'm close to locating a gluino, which would completely validate supersymmetrical theory if we could include it in the bestiary." Next frame: Laurie makes the dinner date.

I.23.8 Dr. Manhattan's smile: is it because he has located the gluino, or because he foresees Laurie's happiness with Dan? And remember, of course, what smiling faces mean here...

I.24.1 Graffito: "Krystalnacht" (name of band)

I.24.5 Rorschach's diary: "Soon there will be war. Millions will burn. Millions will perish in sickness and misery." Rorschach as the Judge of Armageddon (though that position will be given to Jon, not Rorschach; and even he won't really fit).

I.24.6 "...there are so many deserving of retribution..." Also note the pattern of Rorschach's mask here. James Harvey points out that there is a direct visual match with XII.20.4-7. Taking off from this correspondence, Harvey suggests that the shapes of Rorschach's ink-blot mask are consistently and systematically meaningful (!).

I.24.6: second image has been edited to show mask pattern.

I.24.7 Campaign poster for Nixon: "Four More Years"; Rorschach: "...and there is so little time."

I.26.3 ff. Parody of superhero work: Laurie and Dan reminisce about "Captain Carnage," a sadomasochist who wants to be punished.

I.26 Laurie and Dan's laughter collapses into seriousness as Dan relates the death of the Comedian. Refrain: "A comedian died in New York."

I.Doc.2 From Hollis Mason's Autobiography, Under the Hood. "Photo" of "Vernon's Auto Repair," showing Hollis Mason with his father. Hollis's father bears a certain resemblance to the Man of Steel.

I.Doc.4 "With tears in my eyes while people died laughing" (recounting death of Moe Vernon); Note Hollis Mason's full name: Hollis Wordsworth Mason.

I.Doc.5 Hollis Mason's affection for pulp magazines. "For me, it all started in 1938, the year they invented the super-hero. I was too old for comic books when the first issue of ACTION COMICS came out, or at least too old to read them in public without souring my promotion chances, but I noticed a lot of the little kids on my beat reading it and couldn't resist asking one of them if I could glance through it. I figured if anybody saw me I could put it all down to keeping a good relationship with the youth of the community. "There was a lot of stuff in that first issue. There were detective yarns and stories about magicians whose names I can't remember, but from the moment I set eyes on it I only had eyes for the Superman story. Here was something that presented the basic morality of the pulps without all the darkness and ambiguity. The atmosphere of the horrific and faintly sinister that hung around the Shadow was nowhere to be seen in the bright primary colors of Superman's world, and there was no hint of the repressed sex-urge which had sometimes been apparent in the pulps, to my discomfort and embarrassment. I'd never been entirely sure what Lamont Cranston was up to with Margo Lane, but I'd bet it was nowhere near as innocent and wholesome as Clark Kent's relationship with her namesake Lois.

I.Doc.6 "Anyway, although I'd occasionally manage to trick some unsuspecting tyke into lending me his most recent issue of the funnybook in question and then spend the rest of they day leaping tall buildings inside my head, my fantasies were to remain as fantasies until I opened a newspaper in the autumn of that same year [1938] and found that the super-heroes had escaped from their four-color world and invaded the plain, factual black and white of the headlines."

The first "real" super-hero is Hooded Justice, perhaps a German carnival strongman, a homosexual, and (so people say) a Red agent.