Watchmen Chapter XI: Look On My Works, Ye Mighty...

Detail from Cover of Chapter XI: The shape of things to come. White "smeared" with color: this echoes the blood smear on the Smiley button; another "smear" yet to come; and another image very close to the grand finale.

XI.1 Adrian's curious TV viewing habits and Burroughs' cut-ups. Consider what this says about Watchmen itself, and about the act of reading in comics.

XI.1.4 "White noise."

XI.1.6-7 New sensations, casual miracles.

XI.2.1 Veidt's TV-watching compared to "shamanistic divination." But the content of the prophecy is lost. "The insight wasn't major" (XI.2.3)

XI.3.2 Rorschach's journal: "If Veidt truly engineering third world war, we are approaching heart of darkness" -- but everything is WHITE here...

XI.3.3 Dreiberg refers to "those brochures" -- documents appended to the end of Chapter X.

XI.4.5 Fresco: Alexander and the Gordian Knot. A key reference. Veidt: "...no time like the present." Note the clocks visible in foreground.

XI.5.4: The finger on the button. Note the time.

XI.5.3-6 11:25 EST, Nov. 1, 1985: Ozymandias pushes the button. "I've finished my work now." Panel 3 shows something large and globular in chamber (recalling the bombardment chamber in which Jon Osterman was disintegrated); Panel 8 shows empty chamber.

XI.6.3 News vendor describes his place as a "bad intersection." "You never know what's gonna turn up next." Indeed.

XI.7.2 Veidt describes his pleasure-dome as another kind of intersection between "two alien universes." The white world, the green world. See the cover painting of this chapter.

XI.9.7-8 Feud between the cabbie and her lesbian lover. R.D. Laing's Knots -- torn in half, of course. More of that Gordian Knot humor.

XI.10.2 Veidt describes "lateral thinking:" Alexander's solution to the Gordian Knot -- when in doubt, slash the thing in two. The genius of violence.

XI.10.7 Veidt's transformation in the American desert. The depiction of Adrian's epiphany looks somewhat like Jon Osterman's. Only he's using hashish, not particle beams.

XI.11.1 Burying the servants alive. An ancient Egyption custom brought back into fashion by the new Ozymandias, king of kings.

XI.12.7 - XI.13.1 Match cut: the upturned faces of the dead.

XI.12.5 In the background: Veidt plucks a rose from his ruined garden.

XI.15.3 "Hitler was a vegetarian" -- the pacifist, vegetarian, liberal King of Kings.

XI.16.3 (a) another reflection in a convex mirror (Adrian's serving bowl); (b) Veidt's meal -- peas and tofu (well okay, some details maybe aren't so important...).

XI.18.1 "Pyramid Deliveries:" part of the service that delivers Veidt's monstrous plot.

XI.18.6,8 Intercutting between Ozymandias' narrative and Rorschach's attack with fork. Who is the more savage? What is civilization? Is a fork an eating implement, or a weapon?

XI.18.8-9 The speech John F. Kennedy never made in Dallas: "...watchmen on the walls." A second source for the title and conception of the project.

XI.18.9 "We in this country, in this generation, are by destiny, rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom."

XI.19.4-5 Veidt says that the Comedian inspired his plot. Note clock hands in panel 4. Much of the conspiracy is a vendetta against Blake.

XI.21.5-6 Veidt's calculus: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock -- sooner or later, nuclear war will occur, if only by accident. A bit of historical perspective here: 1984-87, the years in which Watchmen came into being, saw intense speculation about President Reagan's "Star Wars" antimissile system, thought by some to be a first-strike weapon, or a cause of instability in the balance of terror.

XI.22.7 In nuclear war, everyone will be wiped out (even the word "gone" would be gone) -- "Save for Richard Nixon, whose name adorns a plaque upon the Moon, no human vestige would remain."

XI.23.3 Why the young man re-reads the pirate comic. "'Cause they don't make sense, man, that's why I gotta read 'em over."

XI.23.5-6 Bernie (the comics reader) meets Bernie (the news vendor).

XI.23.7 The hapless detectives (we met them in Chapter I) finally arrive at Ground Zero.

XI.24.4 History's greatest practical joke...

XI.25.1 "How could genetics and teleportation end war?"

XI.25.4-5 Veidt reveals his plot... and gets laughs.

XI.25.7 The extinction of the brawlers, and hence of superheroes. "The brutal world [Blake had] relished would simply cease to be, its fierce and brawling denizens rushing to join the mastodon in obsolescence... in extinction."

XI.26.3 The Big Lie -- Veidt quotes Hitler.

XI.26.3 Killing half the population of New York.

XI.27.1 "Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago." Adrian, in costume, stands before his fresco of Alexander and the Gordian Knot.

The "heroes" arrive too late. This is awfully important, folks.

XI.27.2 Clock hands approach midnight. Belatedness. The Doomsday Clock itself a red herring...

XI.28.7-13 Final convergence. Bernie meets and embraces Bernie. Young meets old. Black meets white. White-out.

XI.28.13: Final trace of the news vendor and the boy replicates the "smear" figure found in two other places:

The blood smear on the Comedian's smiley button.
The ketchup stain on Seymour's shirt in the penultimate panel.

XI.Doc.1 Gerald Ford's line: "Nobody's human." Humanoids.

XI.Doc.4 "I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one."