All posts Comics

The Watchmen grid traces to EC war comics

By the PopJunk Serials desk. Published

Review details

Title
Watchmen
Issue or volume
Issues #1 to #12, collected in one volume
Publisher
DC Comics
Creators
Writer: Alan Moore. Art: Dave Gibbons, colors by John Higgins
Cover date
September 1986 to October 1987
Edition
Collected edition
Covered
The series' documented structure and page layout, the artist's own account of the grid, and the published critical record. Sourced analysis, not a reading.
Verdict
Still the clearest case for what a comics page can do when it holds a fixed shape. The form is the argument, and the record has not dented it in forty years.

Watchmen's most imitated feature is a layout two decades older than the book. Artist Dave Gibbons ruled all twelve issues into a strict nine-panel grid, and he has said plainly where it came from: Harvey Kurtzman's EC war comics of the early 1950s, next to the tight grids of European albums and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man, per a Tripwire interview. Writer Alan Moore and colorist John Higgins round out the team. DC Comics ran the series monthly from September 1986 to October 1987 and collected it in one volume that same year, per Wikipedia.

The grid is a pacing instrument, not a cage

Gibbons chose the grid to keep Watchmen from reading like every other superhero book on the rack. "There's a power of doing something in a regular grid," he told Tripwire. "It's almost a hypnotic feel." The fixed shape let Moore time a reveal to the panel, echo a composition two pages on, and trust it to land. Gibbons drew it hard and flat, after a documentary look, with none of the splash-page flourishes that yank a reader out of the moment.

The lineage runs through Kurtzman's war books

Kurtzman edited Two-Fisted Tales and its companion Frontline Combat for EC in the early 1950s, and he worked the opposite way from most comics editors of his day. Where others let an artist lay out a story however he liked, Kurtzman drew detailed layouts for every page and made his artists follow them exactly, per Wikipedia. That habit, a page built to a plan instead of to a flourish, is the thing Gibbons carried into 1986. The grid in Watchmen is a war-comics discipline wearing a cape.

The structure does more than the costumes

The book sets an alternate 1985 where masked heroes turned up in the 1940s and 1960s, the United States won Vietnam and Watergate never broke, per Wikipedia. A murder pulls retired vigilantes back out. Around that spine, every issue but the last closes on fake documents, and a pirate strip called Tales of the Black Freighter runs inside the main story. The supplements and the grid are the review's real subject, because the form is the part the imitators never quite copy.

The record backs the reputation

Time later listed Watchmen among the best English-language novels since 1923, and the BBC called it "the moment comic books grew up," a line Moore himself rejected, per Wikipedia. Argue the praise however you like. The craft underneath it is not in dispute, and the book has stayed in print in collected form since 1987, so this is not a slab to hunt at auction. The story is on the shelf, and so is the grid.

Sources