QUIS EVALUATES IPSOS WATCHMEN? WATCHMEN AND NARRATIVE THEORY

One of three books that deeply influenced generations of comics writers and readers in 1986, together with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is as close to a canonic work as one could get, regarding comics. It won the 1988 Hugo Award, for science fiction books, in the Other Forms category, and was mentioned as one of the hundred best novels by Time magazine. One of the first comics to break out of the sphere of specialized reviews and receive acknowledgement from other media, it is an obligatory mention whenever one attempts to understand the History of the medium. And yet, it has not been thoroughly studied until recently. Most works dealing with the comic focus on its historical properties, the psychology of its characters or how they relate to Philosophy – different aspects of a merited novel which has achieved a large public throughout the years. But what these studies have in common is that, focusing on the detail, they overlook the narrative – the story presented in the work. This work focuses on the comic as a whole, its story and the way it is construed, through narrative theory – a theory based on the understanding of narratives and their constitutive parts, and, as such, clearly appropriate for the task. Narrative theory is the focus of the first part of the work, put together with the introduction for economy reasons. The most prominent works on the subject are reviewed and commented. The language of comics and its specificities are the theme of the second part of the work, also with reviews of its most significant works. The third part is dedicated to a few attempts of conciliation between both theoretical frameworks already developed. The analysis of Watchmen takes place in the fourth chapter. Besides listing the comic’s different narrative components, such as events, setting, time (divided in order, duration and frequency), narrative and focalization; there is also an extensive analysis of style and colors, presented as a necessary step in understanding the tone and views of the narrator, here divided into meganarrator, monstrator and reciter. In the final part, dedicated to considerations about the research and what it may have achieved, an interpretation of the novel is also presented, based on a personal reading.