Science Fiction: Watchmen Analysis Exercise
Do this exercise in groups of 2 and 3. Choose any chapter after chapter 2 in Watchmen and take some time to analyze its structural components following one of the prompts below. Record your names on the Google Doc and develop your group’s response in a Google Doc that you share with me and (if all are comfortable) that you share openly to be linked here. This exercise is worth points toward participation and in-class activities portion of the grade. In your responses, be sure to refer to chapters, pages, and panels precisely. For example, the large picture of the newspaper vendor on the first page of Chapter III should be referred to as: (Ch. III, p. 1, panel 4).
Options:
A. Consider the use of color, shading, scale, or line, focusing on representative panels within the chapter. How do one or two particularly significant graphic elements contribute to telling the story or developing character(s)? In what ways are the images related to the use of words in the panels?
B. Consider the representation of print media (signs, newspapers, books) or televised, moving images as framed within the panels of the chapter.
C. Consider the representation of spoken words from settings other than what is directly pictured in particular panels, and the connection of those words with the images on the panel, page, and chapter.
D. Consider a long text document that Moore represents within the comic—as an image of a material document from the world of Watchmen. How might this document relate to elements of the chapter in which it is placed? How do the contents of this document help to set up a theme, a point of characterization, or an ironic statement in a particular chapter or in the comic as a whole?