me, giving something a star-rating in the year 2019? it's... dare i say... a thermodynamic miracle.

but Watchmen is more than a miracle—it is far more planned, articulate, masterful than chance. as a newcomer to the graphic novel and Synder's film, i find myself delighting in an alternate reality, for the most part. it is dark, violent, morally askew, erotic, crude, self-referential and self-critical. but it is also a very masculine text, both literature and film; it is universal inasmuch that the universe is made in the image of powerful men with faulty egos, hubris.

this Watchmen, though? it is of today, of yesterday, of a long history not represented, acknowledged, documented enough. the writers exploded an already fleshy political…

Lindelof's career has been focused on the limitations of our presence in time, the limits of our aging and the hurt that ripples outward from where it is created inside of us. The new step that Watchmen takes is to make this focus disciplined, racially motivated, and formally coherent: the central narrative act of Mesmerism is intrinsically tied not just with the inception of the superhero genre but also the inception of film itself. Where the original comic was a critique of the medium at the time, Watchmen entangles a critique of the propagandist dimensions of media in relation to the long-term sprawl of history.

So, it's an imperfect work from television’s ballsiest writer. It is both dorky and a…

"Now you know everything. My origin story." --Will Reeves, Watchmen episode 9, "See How They Fly"

For this longtime fan of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's seminal graphic novel Watchmen, one of Hooded Justice's defining characteristics has always been that he wasn't defined, that the reader never knew exactly who he was. He was the first man to put on a costume to fight crime in New York City in the 1940s and he was, for all intents and purposes, the costume he put on.

Moore, though Hollis Mason's memoir Under the Hood, allowed the original Nite Owl (who was inspired by Hooded Justice's example to dress up in a costume himself) to speculate that he might be deceased strongman…

I really enjoyed the Watchmen TV show. I burned through it in a couple of days. I possibly would have enjoyed it more not bingeing it and watching it week to week, because there is quite a lot of ponder with the series, as mysteries are set-up and dispensed with great ease of storytelling. The first four episodes are intriguing and good, but the show really gets going with episodes 5, 6 and 7. These episodes are tremendous pieces of work and really brought back the first (and only) time I read the graphic novel 20 years ago. The style, the persuasive storytelling, felt right to me, but I am far from an obsessive and comic books are pretty low…