Our cover by Adam Hughes is a haunting image of Dr. Manhattan serenely observing a nuclear explosion, while people burn and die all around him. What really makes this a frightening image is that it seems like he’s actually enjoying this carnage. For better or worse, J. Michael Straczynski is really challenging Alan Moore’s portrayal of Dr. Manhattan as an uncaring personification of passivity.
The variant cover is by Neal Adams and it’s just … fine. Nothing terribly interesting going on here. I’m not sure what all the dots on Dr. Manhattan are supposed to be. I guess Adams was attempted a transparent look? I don’t know. And I don’t really care.
The second issue of this series really blew me away — it was everything I could have hoped for in a Dr. Manhattan story. But the first issue left me flat. Unfortunately, so did this third issue. It brought back everything I hated from issue #1 and many elements that I hate from the broader Before Watchmen project. I guess I should have known that amazing issue #2 was just a fluke.
Anyway, this story begins with Dr. Manhattan fretting over the infinite realities he has discovered. For some reason, he has determined that he was the one who created all these realities, and that if he doesn’t get rid of them, then all of existence would be destroyed. And he believes that this all began at that fateful Crimebusters meeting when he changed Captain Metropolis’ paper so he could be paired up with Silk Spectre instead of Rorschach. Dr. Manhattan concludes that by altering reality in this way, he inadvertently created two versions of himself — one that went on patrol with Rorschach, and one that went out with the Silk Spectre. Of course, neither one of those realities happened in the original story, but Straczynski doesn’t care about that.
Straczynski also decided that Jon Osterman really needed a tragic backstory because heaven forbid a boring, ordinary person become the main character. So now, all of a sudden, Osterman is a Holocaust survivor. He fled Germany with his father and mother in 1939, but his mom was killed during their escape. She had a rather depressing motto she repeated during this ordeal: “You cannot make the world what you want because you want it.”
Dr. Manhattan decides to take his mom’s motto to heart and he begins to travel through time to undo all the changes he made to reshape reality into the way it’s “supposed” to be. He makes sure his mom is killed by Nazis and his grieving father becomes an obsessive watchmaker. He prevents his dad from taking a 17-year-old Jon to a baseball game, so he’d be in a bad mood when he learned about the atomic bombs and would subsequently force Jon into a career of science. Dr. Manhattan made sure a research scientist at Gila Flats would die of cancer so that Jon would be able to take his place.
He then carefully guides the pacing of people’s footsteps so that Janey’s watch would be stepped on and that Jon would forget the repaired watch in the particle chamber and that the door would lock him inside before he left. Dr. Manhattan then watches with satisfaction as Jon is gruesomely torn apart atom by atom — an image that transition thematically into the grotesque Crimson Corsair backup.
One of the most disturbing things about the original Watchmen story is how little Dr. Manhattan chooses to interfere in the affairs of men — even allowing the Comedian to kill a pregnant woman right in front of him. I think Moore deliberately made this disturbing. Here was a man who could literally do anything, but chose not to because he didn’t care. But that wasn’t good enough for Straczynski. He needed Dr. Manhattan to covertly be acting altruistically all this time — carefully choosing when and when not to act in order to guide the events of mankind in the best way possible. I hate this. And I also hate that he — and Nite Owl — suddenly have cliché tragic backstories. In my opinion, changes like that really undermine Alan Moore’s original intentions.
