Watchpanels, Part the Fifth

WATCHPANELS

One compulsive reader’s observations ...

after gazing into Watchmen for the umpteenth time

PART THE FIFTH

All right, I’ve got photons in my teeth and my wrist brace on ...

      In this balanced view of Rorschach’s unbalanced life, we see on page 11 that even the food stains on his dirty dishes are symmetrical!

      On the last panel of page 21, Joey is reading the lastest issue of Hustler.  After some squinting, I think I deciphered the ad on the back of the mag,

      Obviously, the tagline of the ad is, “FOR SMOKERS WITH BALLS.”  *insert rimshot*

      This guess was proven when I encountered the B&W version of this panel in Annotated.

·         The quotation ends with a period.

·         The epigraph box in the comic gives the writer’s name as “Wm. Blake.”

·         The second “tyger” is capped in the rebound edition.

·         A question mark appears at the end of the quotation.

·         Blake’s first name is spelled out.

      There’s an amusing misprint on two pages of the supplemental materials.

     Did you notice it? 

      The book-title sidebar should read “TREASURE ISLAND,” not ‘TREASURY ISLAND.”

      And take a look again at the other side of the page.  If pirate comics are all the rage, and superhero comics fizzled in the early 1940s, why does the “DC Bullet” include Superman’s name?  Of course, the answer is that this is an authentic image from “our” world.

      I made my own version of what the DC Bullet might have looked like in the Watchmen world.  What do you think?

      I want to make two observations about this brief piece of the last page of Chapter 5’s supplemental material.

      I wonder if the title of Max Shea’s book Fogdancing was inspired by Ben Mears’s Air Dance, from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, published in 1975?

      Secondly, notice the typo in the first sentence of the paragraph at the end of this image.  Do you suppose that “the time of this writhing” was a subtle clue to the nature of the Space Squid?

      At any rate, “writhing” was corrected to “writing” for the bound versions.

      The last thing to be found in the comic, on the paperclipped note about the "next issue," doesn’t appear in the reprints.

      That’s all for Chapter 5.  Seven chapters left!

See you next Monday for the next silly or profound ruminations on the Super Blog!

PS you may find all previous observations about Watchmen under the rubric WATCHMENUTIA on the right-hand sidebar.