Some of you might enjoy this extended essay on the Watchmen and it's place in superhero comics history.
Who Sent the Sentinels? by Andrew Rilstone
It's very long - about 60 pages, but I loved it. There's a lot of genuine insights here, as he compares it to 60's Supergirl and Stan's early Marvel breakthroughs.
It begins with a Doctor Manhatten-esque sequence of jumps through the writer's life as a fanboy, to set the personal context - being a UK comics fan is like living in a parallel universe - but then settles into a more conventional discussion.
It has a new angle on what Stan was doing in the 60's (new to me anyway), and how Watchmen continued that tradition.
It's a bit too long for me to take out selections, but there's a good flow to his argument, even though it seems to be all over the place at first, and everything is best read in sequence.
Anyway, it got hailed as one of the best internet comics criticisms of 2009 in various places and Eddie Campbell says of it:
"The finest analysis of Watchmen that I have so far read."
So I thought I'd share.
I printed it out to read it like a book, and its probably best enjoyed that way...
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