"Lateral Thinking" and the Structure of Watchmen

As Scott McCloud points out in Understanding Comics, this medium stands apart from film and fiction in one important respect: though it constitutes a "sequential art" in Will Eisner's famous term, the layout of a comics page allows for many kinds of sequence. We learn to read along the rows from top left to bottom right, one panel at a time, but that's not the only way to look at comics, nor the only way we do look. If a panel lies in the middle of a grid, for instance, we can read up, down, or diagonally as well as forward and back. These moves may or may not be meaningful in terms of the narrative, and the artist may either invite or discourage them, but their possibility points to a basic aspect of our experience as readers of comics. At some stage our eyes take in the whole page, or in the cases we'll consider here, two pages at once. Comics is both a sequential and a simultaneous medium.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were pretty clearly aware of this fact when they created Watchmen. The tension between linear succession and simultaneous perception emerges most strongly in the contrast between Dr. Manhattan's superhuman understanding of time as a multifaceted "jewel" and the struggles of all the other characters to understand what is unfolding around them, minute by minute, as the clock hands approach midnight.

Which brings us to Adrian Veidt, who tells his pursuers at one point that he is "not a Republic serial villain." Arguably this line refers to more than just the movies. Veidt is indeed not a serial thinker. He watches a wall of TV screens at once ("just me and the world") and like his namesake Alexander/Ozymandias dedicates himself to "lateral" solutions like the slashing of the Gordian Knot: actions that go against the ordinary limits of social reality.

There's a clear visual analogy between Veidt's wall of screens and the basic three-by-three grid of Watchmen. (Adrian's video wall actually contains 36 screens, arranged six-by-six.) Both structures present on some level an open visual field where we are free to seek and find associations. It's easy enough to see what this means in terms of the (narrative) plot of Watchmen; but what about that other, visual sense of "plot?" Is it possible to read this comic laterally?

Below are seven examples of simple or first-order lateral reading, constructed by moving from the rightmost panel on a lefthand page directly to the leftmost panel on the opposite page, disregarding the panels in between. This is an essentially arbitrary technique, and you could do it with any comic, but in Watchmen the results can be very interesting.

Though these correspondences probably weren't planned by Moore and Gibbons, they show how densely connected and meaning-full are all the threads of Watchmen. Even if these links and connections were not intended, they are there on the page. Accidents will happen.

Unless you don't believe in accidents...

The original idea for these readings came from Jessica Furé -- sam

Like many connections in Watchmen, this one depends on wordplay and verbal/visual puns. We can read Rorschach's signature "Hurm" against Hollis Mason's remark, "Hey, watch the language!" Watch the language indeed, and in at least two senses: because language (or speech) is here made visible, and because the reader spends so much time "watching the language" of Watchmen as it ripples and flows.

Mason's comment about "the left hook that floored Captain Axis reads against the image of the Comedian's costume (with its echoes of Marvel's Captain America) laid out on the floor of his apartment. "Take care of yourself" always has an ominous ring in Watchmen, but all the moreso when we're looking at a costume without a hero (p. 8) set against an ex-hero out of costume (p. 9). Like Edward Blake, Hollis Mason is about to join the immortals.

This cross-connection sets Laurie Juspeczyk's contemporary visit to her mother, Sally (a.k.a. the Silk Spectre), against a meeting of the Minutemen in the 1960s, a few years before Laurie was born. Scanning across these panels, we move from Sally as an old woman to her daughter, who has inherited the Spectre role, across a crowd of costumed losers (Mothman, Dollar Bill, Captain Metropolis) to Sally in her prime. There's a certain irony in Laurie's line, "The one who asked for your old costume?" -- referring to one of her mother's fetishist fans. The item of "memorabilia" Sally is offering is a "Tijuana Bible," a crude pornographic comic based on her silk Spectre character. Contrast the Minutemen, whose interest in costumes may also conceal a sex kink or two (a notion that will surface again in Laurie's encounter with Dan Dreiberg in Chapter VII).

At the Minutemen meeting, Sally is fending off the attentions of Edward Blake, the Comedian, who will shortly attempt to rape her. This lends a certain edge to Laurie's remark in 1985: "Honestly, Mom, you encourage these guys..." Blake has said something similar himself; and again, it has to do with costumes: "You gotta have some reason for wearin' an outfit like this, huh?" (II.6.2). In a way Sally does "encourage" Blake, since she later has a consensual affair with him during which Laurie is conceived.

The connection between these panels should be brutally obvious. During his attempt to rape Sally Jupiter, Edward Blake throws a fist across her jaw (p. 6). On the facing page, Hooded Justice bloodies Blake's nose as he comes to Sally's rescue. The fists move in opposite directions and are seen from complementary angles. In fact the symmetry is so precise that we'll wager this cross-page matchup was deliberately designed.

In the panel spread above, note how the sequence tracks from Blake, crouched and glowering, to Blake in the same attitude as he accuses Hooded Justice of sadistically enjoying the beating. (This image of a victim in the grip of his assailant is one of the visual signatures of Watchmen.) Note also how Sally and Blake swap places in the second panel of the strip (II.6.5) and the penultimate panel (II.7.5). Like many patterns in this part of the book, it's a warmup for the Fearful Symmetries of Chapter V.

On the lefthand page (III.26), President Nixon listens as one of his "humanoids" analyzes a nuclear war simulation, discussing the impact of winds and fallout clouds on the postwar world. The east coast is toast. Meanwhile on the opposite page, Dr. Manhattan kicks up some unearthly dust as he strolls across the surface of Mars ("My red world means more to me than your blue one"). The man-sized H-bomb enveloped in his own fallout cloud?

The remark about "total devastation" drifts across from the speech of a general (looking suspiciously like George C. Scott's Buck Turgidson in Doctor Strangelove) who assures Nixon that U.S. forces can wipe out half the Soviet missiles on the ground. (I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed...) Mars is of course a scene of desolation, if not devastation: a planet that "chose" lifelessness instead of life, as Dr. Manhattan puts it.

From what we're finding out lately, Dr. Manhattan may be wrong about Mars. But this was the eighties, remember.

This cross-page strip tracks from young Walter Kovacs (Rorschach) threatened by neighborhood bullies to Kovacs standing mute and rigid in his prison cell in 1985. Though there are several panels of action between the two juxtaposed here, they do form a compelling before-and-after pattern. On the righthand page (VI.7), the cut from young Walter's face in VI.7.7 to the adult Walter in VI.7.8 reinforces the terrible logic of his origin. The bars behind which Kovacs stands in VI.7.9 echo the two menacing boys who bar his way in VI.6.7.

The lateral reading on these pages is not as visually obvious as some, but it's all the more impressive for its subtlety. Indeed, there seems to be more of a disconnection than a junction here. From Rorschach's prison interview we go "home" with Mal Long.

Though this is one of Moore's more heavyhanded contrasts -- Ozymandias delivers a stunning gymnastics performance on TV as Dan fails to perform sexually with Laurie -- there are actually a few interesting details in this cross-page sequence. Yes, in VII.14.9 Ozymandias' very rigid legs do project at a certain highly suggestive angle, contrasted in the facing panel (VII.15.7) by the angle of Laurie's body as she settles herself next to Dan. And there are the Ooohs, Aaahs, and a final "Ooommmmm" from Dan in case you need to be bashed over the head.

In the lateral strip, however, subtler things are in play. Note the curved, convex image of the TV screen in the leftmost panel (VII.14.7), which recurs again in the third, fifth, and sixth panels of the series. In the last panel (VII.15.9), the screen is reflected in the curved surface of Dan's glasses, emptily not-watching the white noise on the screen. (This was before 24-hour cable, folks.) These images belong to a larger collection of screens, goggles, windshields, domes, and globes that crop up in this chapter and run throughout the work. They're generally associated with watching and being watched -- which is entirely the point here. Ozymandias performs while the world watches; Dan can't manage, as the dream that follows this sequence makes plain, because he's afraid that an angry Dr. Manhattan may be watching him and Laurie. Though it's okay so long as he's got that mask...