WATCHPANELS
One compulsive reader’s observations ...
after gazing into Watchmen
for the umpteenth time
PART
THE THIRD
All right, I’ve got photons in my teeth and my wrist brace
on ...
CHAPTER 3
In panel 1,
we encounter the first excerpt from the Tales of the Black Freighter comic
book. Being someone who is sometimes
analytical and often obsessed with the WRONG minutiae, I wondered, “Where is
Davidstown,” the home that the “Marooned” sailor is so desperate to save from
the supernatural evil of the pirates?
Here’s our first clue, “the yellow Indies sky.” So, which
Indies, the West (centered on the Caribbean), or the East Indies, the seas
around South and Southeast Asia?
And, by the
way ... Where is Davidstown?
Our
information points are
·
The just-noted “Indies sky.”
·
the sailor sails his ghastly raft “east, borne on
the backs of murdered men” (5:9:4).
·
When he arrives home, a few miles from
Davidstown, the sun is setting behind him (10:12:1). This means he arrived from the west.
·
He views the moneylender and his doxy “through a
curtain of whispering maram grass” (10:12:3).
According to Wikipedia, “marram grass” (the common spelling) is found in
the US, the UK, and Australia.
Putting these clues together ...
My guess is
that Davidstown is located on the western edge of Australia. The western half of the continent was
designated the “Swan River Colony” in 1829.
If this is correct, then the atrocities of The Black Freighter
represented the last gasp of the Pirate
Rounders, who plundered the valuable treasure ships of the East Indian Sea.
In Annotated
Watchmen, Leslie Klinger makes a kind of boneheaded suggestion. He theorizers that the magazine closest to
the head of Bernie the newsdealer is titled Home Baker. It is a lot more likely to be Home
Maker, don’t you think? Especially since there was a Homemaker
magazine in the UK in the 1960s, and nowadays too.
In the comic, the chapter name is in quotation marks, with
the credits underneath. The bound
versions contain no credits, and have no quotation marks around title.
In this and subsequent chapters of the bound editions, the
chapter title is printed in a larger font, filling the same width as “title +
quotation marks” in original.
At the end
of Laurie’s fight with Jon, we have this non-response from Ol’ Blue-Butt: “If you think there’s a problem with my
attitude, I’m prepared to discuss it.”
It’s sort
of the same answer that Dr Malcolm Long gives his wife in 6:13:7-8.
And both of
these scenes remind me of HAL’s words in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Bowman is
beginning to decerebrate him: “I know
I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete
assurance that my work will be back to normal.”
When Janey
Slater talks about “three packs a day,” she is smoking a ball-pipe – do
you suppose she’s talking about “three packs” of the little balls of tobacco
which go into the bowl of the pipe?
Dan’s clock
is on 24-hour time, it’s 18:03 = 6:03PM.
This is only notable because a later chapter depicts the clock using
12-hour time.
Here’s one
of the Briticisms in Watchmen that sounds odd coming from
an American – when the
lock guy says that now Dan is “safe as houses.”
In the
comic, there’s no black bar at the bottom of page 28.
In bound
editions, the added black bar contains
the scripture, its citation, and a clock face.
On the last
page of the comic, the “next month’s Milton Glass” clipping is not in bound
editions.
Thanks for
stopping by. We have nine chapters to
go!
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