Watchmen: The Annotated Edition

by Leslie S. Klinger, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons (Illustrator)

The best-selling graphic novel of all time is back in an annotated hardcover edition! In-depth, informative and entertaining, THE ANNOTATED WATCHMEN is a new and fascinating look at Alan Moore's masterpiece.
It all begins with the paranoid delusions of a half-insane hero called Rorschach. But is Rorschach really insane--or has he in fact uncovered a plot to murder superheroes and, even worse, millions of innocent civilians? On the run from the law, Rorschach reunites with his former teammates in a desperate attempt to save the world and their lives, but what they uncover will shock them to their very core and change the face of the planet!
Now, DC Comics is proud to present this literary classic in an all-new Annotated Edition format. Edited with page-by-page and panel-by-panel notes, THE ANNOTATED WATCHMEN is a journey through every issue of Alan Moore's classic. Complete with commentary, references and hidden meanings, this new hardcover will deepen and enrich our understanding of the acclaimed series.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Reference

424 pages, Hardcover

Published December 12, 2017

About the author

Leslie S. Klinger is considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on those twin icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. He is the editor of the three-volume collection of the short stories and novels, THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2005, winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work and nominated for every other major award in the mystery genre. THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA, published by W. W. Norton in 2008, delivers promises a similar in-depth examination of Bram Stoker’s haunting classic and its historical context.

Since the 1960’s, the study of the rich fantastic literature of the Victorian writers has been Klinger’s consuming passion. He has written dozens of articles on Sherlockiana, published more than a dozen books on Sherlock Holmes and Dracula in addition to the Norton works, and regularly teaches UCLA Extension courses on Holmes and Dracula.

He and Laurie R. King have co-edited three anthologies of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, the latest being ECHOES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, published by Pegasus Books. In addition, he has edited a number of anthologies collecting original and classic detective and vampire tales.

His groundbreaking THE ANNOTATED SANDMAN, a panel-by-panel examination of Neil Gaiman’s near-legendary “Sandman” comics. Given unprecedented access to Gaiman’s scripts and based on hours of conversations with the author, Klinger adds hundreds of notes describing historical sources, literary and popular cultural references and illuminates the characters and milieu of the rich stories. Published by DC Comics, the first volume appeared in January 2012; the remaining three were published in 2013, 2014 and 2015. His THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, highly praised and nominated for various awards, was published by W. W. Norton in 2015. He is currently working on THE ANNOTATED WATCHMEN for DC Entertainment, to be published in July 2017, as well as THE NEW ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN, which will appear from W. W. Norton in July 2017.

In a completely different genre, Klinger and Laura Caldwell have co-edited a searing, heartbreaking true-crime anthology ANATOMY OF INNOCENCE: TESTIMONIES OF THE WRONGFULLY CONVICTED, to be published by W. W. Norton in March 2017. The volume pairs major mystery/thriller writers with exonerees to tell their harrowing tales.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Klinger received an A.B. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a J.D. from Boalt Hall (School of Law, U.C. Berkeley). Since then, he has lived in Los Angeles, pursuing a legal career in tax, estate, and business planning. Klinger is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Horror Writers Association, and the Mystery Writers of America. He served three times as the Chapter President of the SoCal Chapter of MWA and on its National Board of Directors and currently serves as Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association.

Reviews

[Alejandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-discovering a known masterpiece


This book is an giant-size hardcover annotated edition of “Watchmen” graphic novel. Presenting the entire original work, in black & white, along with reference notes per page. Also includes a timeline of the events in the story.


Creative Team:

Writer: Alan Moore

Illustrator: Dave Gibbons

Editor of Annotated comments: Leslie S. Klinger


WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.

I read Watchmen for the first time in 1998. I couldn’t do it before since getting that kind of graphic novels in my country (Costa Rica) was impossible then, and thanks to a tourist trip to USA, it was that the first thing that I do in a comic book store, it was looking for it and buying it, to read it once back home.

I didn’t know then, but this will be my first “meeting” with my favorite comic book writer (and while I prefer V for Vendetta over Watchmen (yes, I know, it’s not natural, hehe) still I have a high respect for this graphic masterpiece.

Watchmen was a pioneer work that in past decades, when comic books were only avalaible in specialized comic book stores, Watchmen was avalaible in regular book stores, featuring in the Time Magazine Top100 of the best books ever written.

Since Watchmen changed the game, it was one of the first comic books distinguished to be named “graphic novel” since this is without a doubt a work of literature…

…only having drawing along with it.

My favorite character in Watchmen is Rorschach.

Never compromise.

This book is decomposition about the genre of super-heroes and how it was time to “mature” the comic books and making it a writing format not only for kids, but also for adults. Moreover, showing how the super-heroes could impact in the real world, changing it from its original timeline.

Everything begins with a murder. A super-hero is killed and it’s suspected that maybe somebody is starting to assassinate masked heroes. An investigation is soon initiated by one of the few super-heroes still in operations, not matter that US Government already declared it illegal.

What's happened to the American dream?

It came true. You're lookin' at it.

Past & present intermixed to discover the stories of the main characters and how they were pivotal in the new history of the world.


ANNOTATING WATCHMEN? TALL ORDER

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

I have read several times Watchmen (along with watching several time also, the film adaptation), and I naively thought I already know everything that I can get to know about this masterpiece story…

…I was wrong!

God doesn't make the world this way. We do.

This annotated edition opened once again my eyes to Watchmen, and realizing many things that they were there, in plain sight, but I wasn’t careful to watch them.

Of course, sometimes I wondered why there were some pages without any note at all, since I think that hardly there is one single page where nothing happens. Always is happening something in Watchmen, so while definitely this was a titanic Enterprise, offering insightful comments and information, it was curious to find some pages without something to say about them.

Thanks for this annotated edition, it radically changed my appreciation about Watchmen in its graphic novel format, introducing to me, a lot of details and background information that it’s quite relevant to increase one’s reading experience about this bold tale.

I read a chapter per day, since there were a lot of information to process and also I want to enjoy the new type of reading experience.

I won’t spoil those awesome details, so don’t worry about it. It's better if you get surprised in the same way than me, while passing the pages and reading the priceless background information about what it's displayed on them.

I only can tell you that if you’re fan of Watchmen, and not matter if you already have a regular TPB edition…

…this is a MUST-HAVE edition, and you won’t regret having bought it…

…and discovering once again Watchmen.

Nothing ever ends.

[Jovana Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update: Upon reading the Annotated edition I can safely say that I will forever be obsessed with this series. I learned so much from this edition, not only about Watchmen but trivia and historical background of the time it was created. I had fun while reading and definitely going to go back to this series again. Absolutely stunned.

-----------------------------------------------------------

I have been underestimating comics and graphic novels.

This is very very very good. Just go and read this. Maybe I will come back to expand this review later but for now, I am speechless.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

[The following essay is divided into two parts: my critical analysis of Watchmen in general, and then a review of this particular edition, a black-and-white oversized hardcover reprint with annotations by Leslie S. Klinger. If you want my assessment of this edition right away, please scroll down to the horizontal line dividing this review in two.]

Should Watchmen be the only superhero graphic novel on your syllabus? My own answer is a qualified "yes." Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's 1986-7 serial-turned-graphic-novel brings a European perspective as well as the techniques and the politics of the postmodern novel to this quintessentially American pop culture phenomenon.

But it is possible to overrate Watchmen on the question of its revision to the superhero archetype, as most actual superhero devotees will point out: at every moment in the history of the genre, from Superman's disruption of domestic violence and US imperialism in his very first appearance in 1938 to Green Lantern/Green Arrow's 1960s road trip to the polysemous queerness of Marvels mutants in their grand-soap-opera phase of the 1970s and '80s, writers and artists have always brought a political awareness and a critical edge to their ambiguous narratives of characters who try to align morality with power in an often hostile, corrupt society.

Moore and Gibbons, though, carry their revision of the superhero to the point of metafiction. In Watchmen's world, men and women become costumed vigilantes because they are influenced by comic books, just as Don Quixote becomes a knight-errant because he is influenced by chivalric romances. In both cases, the results are the same: the heroic idealism our heroes picked up from their reading matter gets besmirched by the mud and blood of the actual: their sublimated motives, their desires for sex and power, cannot be fully repressed. Moore, like Cervantes, shows heroic idealism to be determined and constricted by material circumstance. (Is it a coincidence that the two works often hailed as the first great novel and the first great graphic novel make this same de-idealizing critical gesture?)

Watchmen's ultimate joke in this vein occurs when an actual super-powered being appears in its world, the atomic demigod Dr. Manhattan, and immediately enters the service of the US government at the height of the Cold War as a kind of superior nuclear weapon. With more secular critical tools at his disposal than Cervantes had —Marx's attack on ideology, Nietzsche's insistence on power, Freud's exposé of desire, and the broad second-wave feminist awareness of misogyny—Moore is able to reveal the material underpinning of the genre by political and sexual realities. This move to the meta is what sets Watchmen apart from most prior critical superhero comics (an avowed precursor, Kurtzman and Wood's "Superduperman" of 1953, excepted).

Moreover, it is not possible to overrate Watchmen as a work of formalist genius. Aesthetically, Watchmen is inflected not only by the social critique of prior European rebels—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud—but also and more so by that of America's own artistic counterculture too, the nightside to Stan Lee's Silver Age New Frontier optimism, as found in Moore's admired forerunners Burroughs and Pynchon. Like these writers, Moore insists upon the dense layering of narrative information, the elaborate use of symbolism and motifs, and the deliberate deployment of carefully contrived structures. Watchmen's nine-panel grid page layout is a kind of poetic meter, allowing the reader to keep time in this time-obsessed novel. Within the grid, Moore and Gibbons set up a limited series of repeating images—the smiley face, the bloodstain, the pyramid, the clock, the Hiroshima lovers, mirrors and reflections, and more—which turn the book into the very clockwork that is one of its images for itself. All the pieces move in concert.

Yet Watchmen is also a critique of linear, measurable time: comics, unlike cinema, does not literally progress in time but rather in space. In fact, it turns time into space. Watchmen is as much a metafictional reflection on its medium as on its message: Dr. Manhattan's perception of time as a simultaneous object in space is instantiated on the comics page as it tells Dr. Manhattan's story as a discontinuous and non-linear array of panels that are chronologically displaced but artistically placed perfectly. When Ozymandias compares his multi-screen TV viewing to Burroughs's cut-up technique—both of them like comics in that they spatialize and juxtapose multiple information channels—Moore can be heard defending comics as an avant-garde artform, superior to film or literature as a way of halting time and inspecting the clockwork of the universe.

Across multiple dimensions, then—political, sexual, and aesthetic—Watchmen presents itself as the return of America's repressed. If there is always an element of self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement in such a gesture (doesn't this go to explain the always worrisome appeal of Marx and Nietzsche not only to rebel poets but to totalitarian dictators?), Moore's postmodern sense of the limits to knowledge save him from this trap.

For what we find when we inspect the universal clockwork is far more chaos and mess than the deists promised. Consider the bravura chapter 5, "Fearful Symmetry," a chiasmus wherein each page echoes its counterpart across the divide formed by the middle of the issue (the "staple" to avid comics readers). Yet, as a critic on the Internet long ago pointed out in a reference I can no longer find, this is not the middle of Watchmen itself; being twelve chapters long, with each chapter of equivalent length, Watchmen has no narrative middle or center—its middle is a gap or absence. There may be fearful symmetry, but no perfect symmetry. Likewise, chief among the novel's motifs is the smiley face with a bloodstain occluding one eye: what could be a better image for the human disorder that prevents ideal happiness and obstructs symmetrical vision?

Are all of these themes within the control of our watchmaker-authors? I suspect not. Famously, the character of Rorschach slipped out of Moore's control: meant to be a caricature of a right-wing lunatic, Rorschach grows into much the most complex character as we explore the traumas that made him who he is and watch him deepen and change; think of the astonishing silent panel in chapter 10 wherein he plainly recognizes his own plight in that of his landlady and her children and ceases to threaten them. Moore and Gibbons themselves palpably come to admire Rorschach more, and to mute his worser tendencies, thus creating their most compelling character.

Rorschach's ethical stature is helped by the fact that the book's villain, Ozymandias, is its ostensible spokesman for the political left. His technocratic utilitarian utopianism is presented without passion or charisma, as a fervorless murderous calculus redolent of fascism, just as his plan to stop the deaths of millions by killing hundreds of thousands participates in the very brutal logic of the nuclear planners. For a book plainly planned as a left-wing critique, Watchmen gathers itself into an essentially Burkean argument—or would Moore just want to see it as anarchist, Pynchonian?—against any and all centralized control schemes and systems, even in the best of causes.

More troublingly, Watchmen's emblem of what man cannot control is woman. At the narrative level, this expresses itself controversially in Sally Jupiter's relationship with The Comedian, which begins in rape and progresses to love. As verisimilitude, this might be persuasive: that Sally could respond in such a way to The Comedian is possible given her class, generation, and character; her daughter, possessed of a post-feminist consciousness, would certainly not have made such a choice. At the symbolic level, Moore gives us multiple images of the vagina dentata (initially pictured on an activist poster advertising "Gay Women Against Rape"), culminating in the genital visage of the "alien" that attacks New York at the novel's climax. Moore's figuration of ungovernable reality quite simply takes the form of the feminine, even the monstrous feminine. (It should be said that Moore pursues the same argument consciously, and thus more critically and humanely, in From Hell.)

Watchmen would not be as compelling as it is were it merely cynical about human possibility. Rorschach's unforgettable nihilism—

The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.

—is answered in the book, as in the balance of Rorschach's life, by a commendation of kindness. The symbolic bloodstain is not merely the effluvium of the murdered but corresponds to another of the novel's motifs, the Hiroshima lovers—the shadowed shape of lovers embracing left by the atomic flash. These two images converge at the conclusion of chapter 11 when two minor characters both named Bernie—an old man who runs a corner newsstand and a young man who frequents said stand to read comic books—run into each other's arms as New York is destroyed. The ultimate force that spoils symmetry, that runs to excess, that can never be calculated, is love.
___________________________

Now to the matter of Leslie S. Klinger's annotations and the overall quality of this edition. I confess I find it promising but disappointing.

First of all, there aren't enough annotations: sometimes pages pass without Klinger's comment. This is an expensive book, and most people (like me!) will be buying it as a second copy of a work they already own, so in this case a lapse in quantity—of the one extra item justifying this book's existence and expense—is a lapse in quality.

Second, Klinger's annotations seem arbitrary: for instance, at times he will explain the provenance and context of each chapter's epigraph extensively, as with Blake (chapter 5) or Jung (chapter 9), while he has little to say about others (e.g., the Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello quotations from chapters 1 and 2). Why does the idiom "see you in the funny pages" get a long annotation, while "here's looking at you, kid" goes without a gloss? Klinger shrewdly notes that AIDS seems not to exist in Watchmen's world, without explaining that Ozymandias probably prevented its spread, as is subtly implied in the prose supplement to chapter 11. He mentions Woodward and Bernstein early on, without observing that The Comedian is intimated to have murdered them in chapter 9. Etc.

Third, there are a handful of errors, some just typos ("thtink" "Alan Ginsburg") and one fairly egregious mistake of interpretation (he confuses a reference in chapter 8 to the Nuremberg rallies for an allusion to the Nuremberg trials, thus reversing the import of one line of dialogue). I generally incline toward forgiveness on these matters—we all make mistakes. But then again, we aren't all charging fifty dollars for them in the form of what ought to be a scholarly text!

Fourth, Klinger often provides contextual information without showing any consideration for how Moore or Gibbons might have come by their facts and ideas; annotations to canonical literature—to Milton, say, or Joyce or Pynchon—will not just gloss the author's allusions but will often comment on where the authors acquired their learning, precisely because these means of transmission make an interpretive difference. Now Moore refused to collaborate on this book, and he is not a long-dead author whose papers and personal library can be accessed by a researcher, which makes the aforementioned task of interpretation more difficult. Still, it could be useful and informative to speculate: for example, can't we be reasonably certain that Moore learned about Kitty Genovese from Harlan Ellison's "Whimper of Whipped Dogs"? and isn't that a case of literary allusion, itself in need of a gloss, as much as of historical reference?

On the other hand, I thought of including the fact that Klinger at times editorializes (as when he defends expenditures on space exploration from the "Whitey on the Moon"-style argument made in Watchmen itself) as a flaw, and I even considered making a nasty remark about Charles Kinbote, but on reflection I think Klinger's incorporation of his own views and sensibility actually makes the book richer and more various—in short, more fun to read. If anything, I might have preferred more of it, just as I would prefer more of the annotations generally.

Likewise, Klinger's quotations from Moore's notoriously verbose scripts (still in Gibbons's possession) are very entertaining, as is his charting of the book's repeating motifs (smiley faces and the Hiroshima couple especially); he also catches a few important allusions, particularly a near-climactic one to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that I had never noticed, and that expand the novel's range of reference.

Finally, I was at first put off by the subtraction of John Higgins's coloring from this book's reproduction of the artwork. Higgins's palette does so much to set the book's tone, and, more broadly, color should no more be regarded as detachable from comics than music should be from film. Even so, everyone will come away from this book with a new appreciation for Dave Gibbon's work, his incredible deep-focus, his delicate brushwork, his enchanting braid of three dissimilar elements—US Silver Age superhero art, European ligne claire, and a ruthless gritty de-idealizing sensibility that, though it has antecedents (Wood's "Superduperman," Ditko's Spider-Man), is largely his own.

All in all, Watchmen: The Annotated Edition is the kernel of a great book, but I wonder if it would be too much to hope that future editions of this particular text might add more material, expanding on Klinger's qualities and correcting its flaws.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still one of the best "comics" of all time. This time I read the "Annotated Edition". Curiously it is printed in black and white. I enjoy the color editions more, but B&W allows me to focus more on Gibbons artwork, which complements the story perfectly. Most of the annotations were not very illuminating to me, but I still appreciated them, and it helped me to slow down and really think about what I was reading.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent idea. The execution was not quite worthy of the premise. I was expecting richer annotations; a deeper conversation in the margins about the deep moral clash between icy utilitarianism and bloody deontology. Instead I know there's a lot more happy faces in the images.

That was mean. The happy faces matter. Our players’ attempts to live in the world they did not make matters.

This book hung a lantern on several visual motifs running through the text that I'd not noticed or not appreciated. The silhouettes of the Hiroshima Lovers painted on the walls again and again, or evoked by the shadows of people embracing or fighting, or on Rorschach's mask as he watches wrathfully. The happy faces on the Comedian's badge reflected over and over in our human-made world. The Lovecraftian nightmares foreshadowed in the corners. I hear more than I see and I did not hear those shadows as clearly.

I wanted the annotations to focus more on the argument the characters have through their fight scenes, lived but rarely articulated. Ozymandius tricks the world out of nuclear war, paying for that trick with innocent lives. His icy utilitarianism coldly reflected in Nixon and Kissinger hiding in NORAD. Rorschach does horrible, horrible things in a small theater. In a deep part of my soul I cannot access directly it is easier for me to forgive what Ozymandius does to New York than what Rorschach did to dogs one dark night -- which I know is because I saw the dogs' eyes as they lay dying. The Bernies' embrace into shadow is both epic tragedy and mere statistic.

The annotations did illustrate that Nixon is still with us. Four More Years is hella creepy.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why?
I've read the standard graphic novel perhaps three times in my lifetime, and saw this as an opportunity to learn more of the layers of this masterwork. I also had a renewed interest due to the HBO series, which at this point, is really drawing from the original Watchmen as source material.

What I thought:
This was a great ride! This was a really informative way to re-read one of Moore's masterworks. It pointed out many of the small background details that are purposeful and indicative of the artistry of both Moore and Gibbons.

This would have been more highly rated, but for a few issues. One is that Alan Moore never involves himself in post comic projects, and his involvement would have been a wonderful and insightful addition. However, there was source material that was referenced throughout the annotation, and so a limited amount of his voice did ring through. I also wish that there was more in the way of annotation. There were several places where patterns are evident, but not explained and pointed out. But for these two issues, this would have been a five-star rating.

Those interested in purchasing should be aware of one more thing - the graphic novel is not in color, but in black and white. I was not bothered by this, but would be afraid that some interested soul would be put aside by this fact.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a review of the annotated edition.

First off, the annotations were entertaining. But I have to say that I don’t think they were nearly as illuminating as I had hoped they might be. I’ve read Watchmen many times before, so many in fact I believe I’ve lost count. But at least 3 times that I can account for: once as the original issues were being published, then when it was published by Graphitti Designs, and then again in preparation for that awful film adaptation in 2009; other times I’ve read it I can’t pin down exactly.
Second, the material itself is, of course, a masterpiece and this annotated edition is a nice addition to the other versions I own.
Third, this addition is only reproduced in black and white. So that was disappointing. But certainly not enough that I’d drop a star off the rating.
But unless you’re looking at the book from an academic perspective or as a die-hard fan, don’t bother with this annotated edition.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

After watching the TV show, I wanted to re-read the source. I put the graphic novel on one tablet and the annotated edition on another. The annotations were uneven in their pacing and certainly in how much they interested me but worked as intended, providing background information, context and details, that I never would have noticed – did not notice – on my own.

[Michael Emond · Rating 3 out of 5]

First - Watchmen, IMO, is the greatest graphic novel ever (okay technically - it is a collected edition because it was first a 12 issue comic book series, but it was always meant to be read as a full story and everyone reads it as a graphic novel these days).

I won't go into a long argument as to "why" other than - I was there when it was first being printed. It was a game changer in a way no other comic book (other than the Dark Knight Returns) changed the game. The amount of imitators it spawned is long. It was written as if heroes could happen in our world, and what would be the very real consequences if they really happened? No "Lois would try to find out their secret identities" no "they would fight villains like the Riddler and Joker". It felt real.

But that premise alone wasn't enough to make it great. It was just the backdrop. The mystery of "who is killing off the super heroes" elevated the story and the "reveal to the mystery" made it legendary.

But this book is about annotating the greatest graphic novel. When it does its job it is great. Noting a small detail in a panel you might have missed. Pointing out a foreshadowing you might not have noticed. And - the best one - pointing out the Fearful Symmetry issues is made to be a minor reflection in terms of the panels.

Sadly, the author did not get to interview Alan Moore and that really hurts the amount of info he can give. And there are so many examples of when the annotations are space fillers. Example - when quarks are mentioned we get a whole annotation on quarks. Not really useful to understanding the story and something I don't need an annotation to understand. There are dozens of examples of this - where the annotation is just "facts about something that was mentioned that you could have looked up yourself on the internet".

Overall I am still happy I read it but I didn't walk away knowing so much more about the behind the scenes of Watchmen that I didn't know before reading it. I learned new things - yes. But I wish I had learned more.

[Jason Bergman · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Note that this review is specifically for the Annotated Edition of Watchmen, as a quirk in the Goodreads database has that as simply another edition of the same book)

Watchmen is one of the - if not the - greatest graphic novels of all-time. That goes without saying. If you are an obsessive Watchmen fan, this book is a must-read. The book itself is printed in black and white, which is fine. Some detail is lost, but if you're the kind of fan who wants to read this, chances are you already own a better version anyway.

The important bits here are the annotations, and Leslie Klinger has done a fantastic job in writing them. I've been reading Watchmen over and over again for decades, and Klinger manages to find details I never knew about. And there are excerpts from Moore's original scripts, insights directly from Dave Gibbons and so much more.

If that sounds good to you, consider this highly, highly recommended.

[Gizmo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este comentario es sobre la versión anotada y no sobre Watchmen en sí porque es obvio que Alan Moore es lo más grande que hay.
La verdad que esperaba bastante más sobre las anotaciones y comentarios de una obra tan cargada de referencias, repeticiones y reflejos. Entiendo que quizás hacer demasiado aspaviento cada vez que aparece el "smiley ensangrentado" termine siendo tedioso pero he visto mayor nivel de detalle analítico en blogs de hace 15 años. Va con 3 en lugar de 2 porque la verdad que volver a leerlo en blanco y negro fue una experiencia interesante, especialmente con la suficiente distancia temporal como para no recordar con tanto detalle los originales.
Es una buena opción si quieren releer Watchmen pero si es la primera vez vayan con la original a color, sin duda.

[Keaton]

watchmen good. art beautiful. annotations... weirdly disappointing? kinda wish I hadn't read it this way the first time lmao (I read the first issue online like a decade ago but forgot to finish lol) because they didn't add much and mostly just distracted from everything. towards the beginning, there are interesting insights into the writing process, etc, but as it continues they just get less and less necessary, to the point where I was like... ah, coulda done that myself, can I get back to the story now?

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of the annotation was about items I was aware of, having lived through them, but the "refresher" was worthwhile. I was hoping this would be more of a dissection of the story but there was enough of that sort of thing that it held my interest and encouraged me to do a little dissecting of my own.

[Paul Griggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us already familiar with the base text, it’s worth reading this volume to get additional perspective and background.

[The Jaded Bookshelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

The annotations are mostly great (though some are quite superfluous), but the lack of color, especially for the covers, really does a disservice to the work.

[Marilynn Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly I found the annotations impossible to read—faint and small text. So I had to return it to the library unread!

[Gabriel Davis]

07/14/19