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Minutemen also was able to weave some broad themes into its story, such as the injustice of “public” heroes, the unfairness that people in the public eye receive, and the importance of not sharing every dark secret you know.

I really enjoyed Minutemen, it felt like reading a graphic novel version of Under the Hood. It had a good balance of backstory and character depth while staying faithful to the original Watchmen. It takes the baton from Watchmen, and analyzes the Minutemen with some added magnification.

It did a good job at creating character depth for those that had little part in Watchmen, such as Hooded Justice, Moth, etc.

The Comedian’s assault is the climax of this. Because of the smaller coverups that they all participated in, they gave up the ability to hold him accountable.

It was a genius move to display the panels of the cheesy Minutemen comics within it, illustrating the dissonance between how they wanted to portray themselves, and who they really were.

The theme of issue #3 is the dissonance between the Minutemen’s public image and who they truly were. Mason’s tell-all book represents the truth that will torpedo the “spotless” image that the members of the Minutemen spent decades cultivating with cover ups and hidden truths.

As we already know what happens to the Minutemen, it is a daunting task to attempt to write a case that we genuinely feel in suspense about. The end of issue 2 does this well.

It creates a subgroup of the Minutemen that is actually concerned with saving children from a sex trafficking ring, a crime not flashy enough for the publicity focused members.

This crime is is interwoven with learning about the characters.

Interesting how, although Minutemen of course cared about doing good, their primary responsibility tended to be publicity. This led to the downfalls of their individual integrities as soon as they joined forces, since they had to cover for the worst of them when they did true evil.

The Before Watchmen format is perfect for Minutemen. Many of the other characters that had their own BW series were already fleshed out in Watchmen, so the prequel series was really just redoing what Watchmen had already done, but in a far less original way.

However, Minutemen’s story has not yet been told. This gives Cook the opportunity to be original, creative, without intruding on what Watchmen created.

The brief backstories told by Nite Owl I do a good job of giving depth to the characters without treading already charted territory.

The Moth is particularly fascinating. Cook makes you really feel to fear that a man would feel using a flying machine that could easily falter. His descent into substance abuse was already mentioned in Watchmen, but the rationale for it here is especially creative.

The choice to make this opening monologue be a “failed attempt” at a first draft for his book actually works so well. It allows Cook to be less than perfect or subtle in his writing, while it also puts it at a foundational observation that will drive the rest of the story.

Off the jump we have an attempt at making a statement on humanity and how small we are, and powerless compared to beings like Dr. Manhattan.

I like the attempt at having intellectual depth and not just the dark grittiness of Watchmen. However, it is quite less subtle than Watchmen. They are dealing with issue constraints, as they don’t have near as much space to develop ideas as watchmen does, so it makes sense.

"People have an amazing ability to cope with the madness of life. It's called denial. It'll take you a good mile but only if life's horrors stay on the pages of your newspaper where they belong."