Watching the Detectives: Home

Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen

Stuart Moulthrop
School of Communications Design
University of Baltimore

REVISED MARCH, 1999 by Jessica Furé and Stuart Moulthrop

Recent Changes

A new category called Readings has been added to this site. It will contain projects that go beyond simple annotation or explore questions of reading and interpretation in Watchmen. The first of these projects is an extended note on "lateral thinking" and the page grid.

About This Site

This hypertext is meant to help people who want to read and write about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' formidable graphic novel, Watchmen (DC Comics, 1987). This work is dense and complicated. There are so many significant details that remembering where they occur can be a tremendous feat. "Watching the Detectives" provides, at minimum, a verbal index to the story. Since the companion is a hypertext, it also provides an interesting way to look at some of the patterns and parallelism with which Watchmen is so richly endowed.

Other Sites

This is only one of several Web sites devoted to Watchmen and to Alan Moore's other works. See for instance Stephen Camer's Alan Moore Fan Site.

How Do I Work This?

Generally speaking, references are to individual panels of the comic. Watchmen is divided into 12 chapters (the original monthly issues of the series) with page numbering unique to each chapter. Following this scheme, I've broken these notes down into separate Web pages linked from the table of contents in the lefthand frame. References in each of these files take the form X.Y.Z, where "X" is chapter, "Y" is page number, and "Z" is the panel, counting in conventional reading order from upper left to bottom right. In some citations the "Y" value reads "Doc" and the "Z" value refers not to a panel but to a page. These entries refer to the invented "documents" included at the end of each chapter in Watchmen.

Actually there are two tables of contents. One links to pages containing commentary by me and a few early contributors (Editor's Notes). If you click on the clock image in the upper left section of the screen, you will see a second table of contents. Links here lead to Contributors' Notes. These pages comprise several thousand words of commentary that various readers have sent in since September, 1995. Notes that don't refer to specific panels or pages within a given chapter are included in a General Notes page in the Contributors' section.

This Is Not a Graphics Archive

You will not find a panel-by-panel reproduction of Watchmen here. If you don't own a copy of the graphic novel, you'll need one. I've reproduced only a few panels to illustrate important points. On average, each chapter file contains three or four small graphics (about 50 kilobytes each). If your Web connection is slow, you might want to disable auto-loading of images.

Spoiler Warning

If you haven't read Watchmen all the way through, you might want to stay off this site. Very important details of the mystery plot are given away in many notes. This text is meant for second and later readings.

Revision History

Created November, 1994.
Revised December, 1995: added contributors' notes.
Revised January, 1996: created separate pages for contributors' notes.
Revised September, 1997: new layout and design (with Apryl Flynn).
Revised June, 1998: added more notes from contributors.
Revised Spring, 1999: added more contribution and new projects under "Readings."

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to all the people who've read Watchmen with me over the years. My greatest debt is to Ron Hale-Evans, who convinced me to give it a first look in 1987. Gavin Edwards and the memorable Nadine also helped, as did Tim Fong, Benj Widiss, and other Stilesians from 1989-90. More recently I've been learning from my classes at Georgia Tech and the University of Baltimore. You know who you are. Special thanks to Bin Chen, Dave Clark, Jim Macek.

Kind thanks also to Greg Bole for his ace proofreading and many smart additions to the commentary. Folks like Greg make me wish I worked a lot faster...

Contributors include:

I've had crucial bug reports from Roderick Young, Scott "King Dinosaur," and Joe Gallagher.

Apryl Flynn did additional scans, editing, and production work for the 1997 update.

Jessica Furé did all the heavy lifting for the 1999 update and contributed the Editor's Notes signed "jef."

Special thanks to Jonathan Sachsman for lending me his copy of the Watchmen hardcover.

Help!

This project is far from finished. I've left a lot of things out. I may also have made interpretations and connections that really don't make sense. Who knows? If you have feedback or suggestions
please send them to me (samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu). Then be patient. I do have a day job.