Observation: Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs' cut up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through...an impending world of exotica glimpsed only peripherally. Perceptually, this simultaneous input engages me like the kinetic quivalent of an abstract or impressionist painting...phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence. Transient and elusive, these must be grasped quickly: Computer animations imbue even breakfast cereals with an hallucinogenic futurity; music channels process information-blips, avoiding linear presentation, implying limitless personal choice...these reference points established, an emergent worldview becomes gradually discernable amidst the media's white noise. This jigsaw-fragment model of tomorrow aligns itself piece by piece, specific areas necessarily obscured by indeterminancy. However, broad assumptions regarding this postulated future may be drawn. We can imagine its ambience. We can hypothosize its psychology. In conjuction with massive forcasted technological acceleration approaching the millennium, this oblique and shifting cathode mosaic uncovers the blueprint for an era of new sensations and possibilities. An era of the conceivable made concrete...and of the casually miraculous. - Alan Moore The Watchmen
That is the coolest comic book ever. I finished reading it last night and wanted more instantly. Unfortunately there is no more to read. It is about lies, humanity at is finest and at its worst, war, fear, conspiracies, doing the right thing, making mistakes, sacrificing some for the good of many. One of the chanracters in it that I found most fascinating was Dr. Manhatten (the only hero in this comic book with special powers I might add, aside from the most intelligent man alive, Veight, but I don't really consider that true super powers, but he is really damn smart). He was human once. A son of a watch maker who was forced into atomic physics by his father who thought in this world of hate and war that a watch maker was a thing of the past. While working as an atomic physicist, he was accidentally shut into this cell that took things apart at the molecular level. He was totally taken apart by light essentially, but managed to reform himself from the cellular level. First there was bone, then the ciculatory system and muscles began to form...you see the progression. After the accident, he became super human; he could control everything down to the molecular level. He could make anything he wanted, change things into whatever he wanted. He existed everywhere in time. He was living in the past, present and future. He knows everything that is going to happen, but before it happens he really doesn't understand it. He was quite well done. Alan Moore did very well on the development of characters. I knew each one and why they were the way they were. Unfortunately his wonderful writing style does not transfer to the theatrical screen (case in point The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) but on the page it is completely awesome and draws you in completely. The art in this book, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins, is way ahead of its time (the book came out in 1986 or 87) and even a noob to comic books like myself can see why this is the difinitive in comic books to this day with both story and art.
I am finiding that comic books are just as good, if not better, than what one would consider "normal literature". They are used as political and social commentaries of this world more so than other literature I think. They use forshadowing, irony, and symbolism (among other literary devices) more than any other pieces of literature that I have read. It is a subculture I think that people think that they know about, but they have yet to scratch the surface.