Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (4 points)

 Watchmen totally changes the normal view of the general idea of superheroes. It was like an alternative reality if certain things were to change in the line of history when president Nixon was president. In the story, the world is really close to having a nuclear war that will destroy humanity. The famous image of the couple kissing after we had won the war, becomes a lesbian couple in Watchmen. In the story, that time period was dealing with a gay movement much sooner than in our reality. This was really cool to see, but also jarring in a way because something just feels wrong about the overall state of the people's minds and the world in the comic and in the film. I watched the film and I noticed it was pretty accurate to the comic. This story strongly reminds me of "The Boys" which started as a graphic novel but was turned into a show. I've watched it recently and it also plays on the whole idea of superheroes being not all that good. There's something scary about having superheroes that don't actually have good morals. It feels like they could begin a fight or a war at any minute and nobody could win because they have literal powers and they are willing to hurt anyone and anything because they have no empathy. They don't need it. This puts them in control of the entire society because they can almost be seen as gods to the average person. In "The Boys", society forms a religion around the supers and praises them even though they have no idea who they truly are looking up to. Just like people looking up to the government today. We listen to lies constantly and believe whatever the media tells us. If people would sit back for a moment and look at what the government is doing to humans, look at the patterns of control that we fall for so easily, they would realize that there are things in this world that we have more control over than we have been told. We could be supers if we woke up. I think this whole alternative perspective is really playing on that idea of power and also what is good and what is bad.