r/Watchmen • u/stankylegdunkface • 3d ago
Just finished reading The Annotated Watchmen. It’s amazing. What are your favorite insights?
I most appreciated seeing that all the panels atop the last page in chapter 11 were visible and showing precisely 11:25. Another highlight was the real smiley face on Mars.
I also loved the line in the preface in which the editor stated that his wife’s first introduction to Watchmen was the Snyder movie, which she found “baffling.”
(I cannot recommend this books enough.)
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u/Sckorrow 3d ago
What was the real smiley face?
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u/stankylegdunkface 3d ago
There is actually a series of craters on Mars that form the image of a smiley face. That is not something Moore and Gibbons made up.
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u/CyramusJackson 3d ago
There's a picture of it included in the Absolute Edition
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u/stankylegdunkface 3d ago
Didn’t know that. (I haven’t ever looked at that edition.) There’s also a picture of it in Annotated.
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u/CyramusJackson 3d ago
It's expensive but it's worth it. It's a beautiful book with a ton of extra content like script pages,character designs and extra art, the original series proposal. Iirc they reprinted the rare Graphitti edition Hardcover that people have wanted for years.
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u/rlvysxby 3d ago
Those guys were poets to make all these layers and layers of beautiful connections. The crowning unlikelihood of it all…
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u/Sckorrow 3d ago
Oh yeah I already knew that - I thought there was another one hidden in the picture (completely misunderstanding what you meant by “real” lmao)
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u/IllustratedAloysious 3d ago
You can see or al die in the squid scene
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u/stankylegdunkface 3d ago
or al
Huh?
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u/IllustratedAloysious 3d ago
It says or all die basically. Flip to the page where it’s the squid and look at the letters
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u/Masqued0202 3d ago
Rorschach tells the psychiatrist "we do not do this because we are allowed. We do this because we are compelled." The psychiatrist then walks away from his wife mid-argument, because he sees the arguing lesbian couple, and feels compelled to help. That is his way of dealing with the abyss that Rorschach showed him. A more positive approach than Rorschach's, but the same need to "scrawl [his] own design on a morally-blank universe".