The Brave New World of HBO’s <em>Watchmen</em>
Damon Lindelof’s new show advances the clock on Alan Moore’s original series but retains the comic’s skepticism of heroes in masks.
This story contains spoilers for the first episode of HBO’s Watchmen.
The first issue of , written by Alan Moore and penciled by Dave Gibbons, was released in September 1986 by DC Comics. It came out in the final years of the Cold War and told an alternative history of nuclear fears curdling into fascism; the story was set in a world where caped vigilantes once walked the streets freely but now could exist only in the employment of the U.S. government. In Richard Nixon won the Vietnam War decisively and extended his presidency permanently because of the superheroes under his command. But Moore was also contending with the end of the “” of comic books, which
