Comics in academia: Connecting panels to theme in Watchmen

A brief preface to this essay: I am lucky enough to go to Penn State, which offers an English class focusing on graphic novels (and some trade paperbacks). This series of posts is meant to look at the materials being taught in this class analytically (connecting themes and art, etc.).

After reading Watchmen again and thinking about the themes discussed in class, this panel sticks out quite a bit. This takes place toward the beginning of Chapter III, right after Laurie leaves Jon’s lab. It is juxtaposed against an interview with Janey Slater, another of Doctor Manhattan’s former girlfriends. Janey discusses how she discovered she had cancer, assuming it to be Doctor Manhattan’s fault. As Janey begins to cough uncontrollably, the interviewer tells her, “…If you want, we can stop here,” with emphasis on the word “stop.”

While the entire scene is one of several examples of excellent juxtaposition of words and pictures in the text, this panel in particular is one major hint at what drives Watchmen. Watchmen is a story about nostalgia. Many of the characters in the story are driven by nostalgia, and almost all of them have moments where they are stuck in the past. This panel is an example of one of these moments.

First, part of the context of Janey’s interview is that she cannot let go of the past. While she does have what seems to be a good reason for speaking out about Jon, her willingness to be interviewed also stems from a place of deep bitterness. She is admittedly bitter (“Bitter. Bitter as hell.”) about the way things ended between them, and also doesn’t seem to care about living in the present. (“I started smoking three packs a day!”) There’s also the obvious advertisement for a perfume called Nostalgia, which takes up about half the panel. This connects to the idea that Adrian Veidt is using nostalgia as a marketing ploy. Moore builds up the idea that nostalgia is a product. Veidt says later that he plans to “use the nostalgic imagery as long as we can” and then move toward the future. This instance of using it in an advertisement is foreshadowing the end of the novel.

Even if they don’t have any sort of personal relationship, Janey and Laurie are linked by their close relationships with Doctor Manhattan. The near-parallel construction of the text and images in this chapter emphasizes these relationships. This context also functions to give the text more than one meaning. The interviewer says, “…If you want, we can stop here.” While it is relevant to what’s happening in the scene, it also relates to the other events happening in the larger narrative.

Many of the characters in Watchmen are frozen in time. Doctor Manhattan is literally frozen—unaging and all-knowing; Hollis relives the past through his memoir and Dan relives it through Hollis; Rorschach never really gave up the past and still acts as a vigilante. It’s no accident that Laurie is walking in front of a sign that says “Nostalgia.” She is going back to Dan Dreiberg, someone from her past with whom she had little to no contact for years before the Comedian died. Laurie seems to be trading one nostalgic relationship for another, and it serves to underscore that this yearning for the past is what drives many of the characters.

The fact that the word “Nostalgia” is so centered in the panel is something that a first-time reader would glance over, but a closer reading of the panel and narratives around it suggest it is much more than a background advertisement. The characters’ present lives are portrayed as unfulfilling, and the advertisements throughout the novel emphasize this—without the past, many of these characters have nothing.

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