Considering Watchmen

From Comic to Graphic and from Book to Novel: Sandman’s Invisible Authors and the Quest for Literariness

“…With this in mind, I'd like to end by reframing some of these observations in terms of some recent work that has been done on comics and legitimation and extending my conclusions to the wider cultural search for legitimation apparent in fiction and the changing nodes of the novel-network. Jean-Paul Gabilliet (2005) and Paul Lopes (2009) have done significant work on the historical legitimation of comics, which has been continued by later critics such as Andrew Hoberek (2014) and Christopher Pizzino (2016). Gabilliet's cultural history looks at the structuring social and economic relationships that have defined the development of comics publishing.…”

“…Sandifer and Eklund point out that "[t]he desire for legitimacy has pushed comics scholarship into a contradictory position, in which literary merit is valued, and Gaiman valued for his literary qualities, but the 'low' cultural tradition of popular comics and comic art is devalued" (2008). Andrew Hoberek (2014) demonstrates that many existing critical approaches to Watchmen as literature do not stop to question the concept, and instead his own work uses Watchmen as a lens to examine what we mean by literature and the consequences of including graphic narrative within this. Beaty and Woo suggest that comics critics and scholars often engage in doublethink by positioning a "great" comic as the exception to the rule (as Karen Berger does in discussing Alan Moore), or by using the language of cinema or prose to analyze it (2016,32).…”