Oh, absolutely. They make it pretty obvious that Laurie is filling a slot, not actually mattering in John's life. "Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Pregnant woman. Gunned her down. BANG. And you know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia... but you didn't lift a finger! You really don't give a damn about human beings. I've watched you. You never cared about Whatsername, Janey Slater, even before you ditched her. Soon you won't be interested in Sally Jupiter's little gal, either." - Comedian, "Absent Friends (II)", pp. 15 That, right there, is Alan Moore grabbing the audience and shaking it by the lapels and saying SUPERMAN IS BAD, ASSHOLES. When your author puts the subtext in the text, he's so adamant that you get the message he's willing to suffer ridicule to get it. When The Comedian says this, he and Doc Manhattan have just finished napalming rice paddies. Doc Manhattan is the proximate cause for the United States prevailing in an unpopular, unjust war widely accepted at the time as a moral and geopolitical failure. Notably, Moore has the Soviets invade Afghanistan the very day that Doc Manhattan bails for Points Unknown - in the grand scheme of things, the geopolitical impact of Doc Manhattan is nil other than the stick. Doctor Manhattan isn't John Osterman - he's the ghost of John, a superhuman intelligence playing at being the memory of a man killed too soon through a needless nuclear accident (no metaphor there). He's amoral and aloof - but he still runs off with a teenager. Doctor Manhattan is a fickle god. Which is pretty much the majority opinion on Superman, by the way - the dude has far too many powers to actually be interesting. His morality is Manichean. Anyone with that power would end up essentially being an extension of foreign policy if he picked sides... or a malevolent God to whoever he wasn't favoring at the time. That's another allusion Moore is making: absolute power corrupts absolutely.I would like to know if anyone noticed that at one point, Laurie wears the same earrings that Jon gave to Jenny Slater. Jenny is pictured wearing them several times; notably, she wears them on page 11 of Chapter II, "Absent Friends."
- I don't like Jon. I know below eightbitsamurai and kleinbl00 talk about Rorsarch and characters they don't like but feel maybe they are supposed to like. I on the other hand feel I am supposed to be more positively inclined towards Jon and I am less.
Worth saying here, that Vietnam scene was a bit more powerful, back when the wounds that war left on America were still fresh. The Comedian talks about it himself - "I mean, if we'd lost this war ... I dunno. I think it might have driven us a little crazy, y'know? As a country?". That's one of the lines that hit me like a hammer on the first read, years ago.
The irony is that it's driven him a little crazy, that we won (with Jon's help).
OH GENTLE READERS POSSIBLE SPOILERS; DARE NOT VENTURE HERE Laurie filling a slot - and/or Laurie & Janey just being interchangeable objects, which then opens up a nice presentation into probably how Jon feels about all humans all the time, right? Which would make sense for why he decided to save the earth - one human equals all humans, and so on (although to be honest it seems like it's on a whim and not really because of Laurie at all, just "oh you're so special i'm going to make this seem like it's about you"). Is this spoilers? Am I getting ahead of myself here? I don't know where we were supposed to stop. I could keep drawing Swamp Thing parallels here, except I think everyone else would get bored with me. The Swamp Thing isn't Alec Holland either and that's something he seems to grapple with pretty constantly - while on the meantime, it doesn't seem to bother Jon at all that Jon is no longer human/who he used to be. I mean, (Swamp Thing Spoilers) ST went and dug up the skeleton of his old body and gave it a burial, as opposed to Jon who didn't have a body left behind and just reconstructed one out of air and his powerfulpowerful consciousness. I have always thought Superman was just plain old boring because he is just so vanilla plain-jane good, but I have never read the comics on him himself, just seen the videos and live-action comics and suchlike.Doctor Manhattan isn't John Osterman
I've got jasmine on my deck. It was a gift to my wife. It's a pain in the ass to keep alive, but I do it because I'm fond of the jasmine. Does not mean I relate to the jasmine. Doctor Manhattan has a human habit. He's clearly not one of us, though. Given the choice between helping humans or hurting humans he'll help because he's not malevolent... but he's got no skin in the game. That's one of the allusions Moore and Gibbons are making about power - the more of it you have, the less the little people matter to you. It's something Moore didn't feel with Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing is very much not omnipotent. As super powers go, he's basically a more durable version of Bigfoot. He's also barely interested in protecting humans - he mostly cares about nature. Moore makes a point with Swamp Thing that if Swamp Thing weren't there, "bad things would happen" but bad things happen anyway. With Doctor Manhattan not there, the world teeters towards armageddon.
I think Doctor Manhattan, in some ways, represents nuclear weaponry. A new thing in the world, with more power than we really know what to do with.
I've always wondered why Jon chose to make his body so un-human - surely he could have done it differently if he wished? Maybe just a literary device.
In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. They definitely talk about having Dr. Manhattan the same way we talked about having "The Bomb" prior to 1949. However, there's no "balance of power" involved in Dr. Manhattan to shape history from 1949 until 1986, and most of the World's history was shaped by that. With only one Dr. Manhattan, he means a lot more than nuclear weaponry. I don't think Dr. Manhattan chose to make his body un-human - after all, he spent months painstakingly reassembling it from the aether. I think he got "close enough" and stopped. Dr. Manhattan, after all, drifts further and further away from humanity. "Brilliant blue skin and no pupils in his eyes" is only foreshadowing.
In some ways quite explicitly! I think ... why would he make it human? He's not human anymore and doesn't attach any special significance to the word human. If anything I think the fact that his body is still recognizably that of man is a literary device that Moore needed to have him interacting with other people semi-normally.I've always wondered why Jon chose to make his body so un-human - surely he could have done it differently if he wished? Maybe just a literary device.