The open panels of Watchmen put a bad taste in my mouth, and a very familiar one at that.
"the streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown."
The noir-ish telling of high morals as concieved through hate seemed very familiar with Travis Bickle's daily musings in the movie Taxi Driver:
"All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."
Like Bickle (DeNiro), Rorschach is an extremist nut with his own set of extreme and not totally accurate set of morals. Like Bickle you can see Rorschach's way of using his own form of justice. But also like Bickle's thoughts as told through voice over, Rorschach's scribblings seem like they're trying to be stinging and isolating but at the same time "interesting and full of meaning." The decent metaphor and dark feel made me inclined to not like the novel.
As the story moved however, I got more into it. I find it really interesting how unlikable and messed up these 'heroes' are. I like that one of their main adversaries are college demonstrators ("campus subversion" Ch. 2, pg. 10). It gives an interesting parellel universe (a la Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick) and it's pretty engaging.
Unlike Blankets though, the art is hardly as compelling as the writing and the story. There's something about the typical superhero/greek statue style that seems really overbearing and silly. This kind of stale art is a big part of the reason I stopped reading Super Hero comics so many years ago.
Don't dislike, just throwing out some grievances about "the greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced."
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I would argue, actually, that the art in Watchmen is atypical of superhero comics, which tend to exaggerate proportion much more. Yeah, the art is kind of boring, but I wouldn't knock it.
As for the Taxi Driver similarities, I think they're just that: similarities. The commonalities between the two works probably amount from being conceived around the same time and being concerned with similar things.
On a rip-off tangent/rampage, Scorsese has become a hack. I noticed that he used "Gimme Shelter" in The Departed - he used that song in Goodfellas! Tarantino can't use "Little Green Bag" or that Dick Dale song again, Wes Anderson can't use "Ooh Lah Lah" again, and Scorsese can't use "Gimme Shelter" again. He's just ripping himself off. Not to mention that The Departed was a mediocre remake of one of the best gangster films ever made, Infernal Affairs.
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