As a part of my leisure and de-stress time in this semester, I picked up the typically easy to engage in hobby of comic books once again. With this new perspective of primary and secondary worlds in my head, I picked up the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore for what must be the 15th time in my life. For anyone who doesn't know, Watchmen is often heralded as one of the greatest works of the comic book medium, if not one of the greatest pieces of fiction in the modern age. Its hyper-critical take on hero-making of politicians and societies is one that has remained pertinent since its release in the late 80s.
Essentially, the novel makes use of the 20th century history of the United States and inserts super-heroes into the mix, with very real and very measurable problems. As a result, there are a great number of consequences.
Here demonstrated is the use of a secondary world of an alternate history to our own to show the nature of things within our primary world, to criticize things that happened surrounding these events. Through this, Alan Moore criticizes the use of the atom bomb by having a godly "hero" who can bend and obliterate any objects with the barest lifting of a finger. He shows here that in the secondary world, his being is a dehumanized being of great destruction. This compares with the primary world use of an atom bomb which killed many people in WW2.
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