5/25/2023 0 Comments Watchmen 3 minutes to midnight![]() Watchmen, however, remains mostly the same. ICBMs have been traded for dirty bombs, geopolitical brinksmanship for angry dudes on planes with box-cutters. But the iconography of the times, the type of fear embedded in the collective unconscious, is different. Not at all unrelated, the Afghanistan story continues to unfold. to dramatically change the tenor of political discourse in this country. Rogue states and radical terror groups are the new bogeymen, and it took only a single, spectacular terrorist attack in the U.S. The Russian threat isn’t that the country has nukes, but that it has lost track of them. More than 20 years later, our world has moved on. In this way, Moore and Gibbons subtly announced that their 12-issue miniseries would deal directly with the possible end of the world. But there, on the cover of the comic book - dwarfed by the main-panel illustration of a smiley-face button in a stream of blood - was the Doomsday Clock itself, hands set, ominously, at 12 minutes to midnight. Aside from a few signals (newspaper headlines, a red-headed crank’s “The End is Nigh” sign visible in the comic’s third panel) scattered among artist Dave Gibbons’ drawings, there was no indication this story would ultimately hinge on the fear of all-out nuclear war between the U.S. The first issue of Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, didn’t make conspicuous reference to global politics. Manhattan and the Comedian were behaving like Blackwater agents wasn’t so much a funhouse mirror turned on world events as merely a dark reflection of them. Watchmen took place in an alternate reality that functioned in part as political parody - the joke was that this other universe where superheroes named Dr. Strangelove and War Games, which had scenes set inside NORAD’s war room, had a special resonance on the Colorado’s Front Range. I was a teenager in Pueblo, Colorado, living about 35 miles from the NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, where the military kept an eye out for a Soviet nuclear-missile attack. The so-called “Doomsday Clock,” a symbolic creation of atomic scientists that attempted to quantify the likelihood of global nuclear war, was set at three minutes to midnight. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a battleground where it faced off against the U.S.-armed mujahideen, was still grinding on, and the threat of nuclear annihilation was nightmare material for anyone who lived near a big city in the U.S. When the original Watchmen comic-book series began publishing, with a cover date of September 1986, the Cold War was still reality.
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