WATCHPANELS, Part the Eighth

WATCHPANELS

One compulsive reader’s observations ...

after gazing into Watchmen for the umpteenth time

PART THE EIGHTH

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

           Today’s Sunday, October 27 – If Halloween is “next week,” why the heck are kids putting on their costumes and wearing them tonight?

           In panel 2 of the second page, we see that Mason smokes from a regular pack of cigarettes just like in our Earth.

            In a jarring Briticism, Bernard the all-American uses the Briticism “27^th October” instead of the American usage “October the 27^th” or even “the 27^th of October.”



            Beginning with page 4 ... Can somebody explain to me the sudden jump in time?  As we turn the comics page from 3 to 4, all of a sudden, instead of October 27^th, it’s the 31^st.  I guess nothing happened for four days?

            Here’s another Briticism.  This was my own first exposure (in 1986, at age 30) to the phrase “early days.”  It’s a Briticism (according to the nigh-scriptural OED).

            On page 8, we’re reminded that Detective Fine smokes regular cigs, too.

           On page 11, Max Shea pinpoints Veidt’s island as being on “the Coast of Mosquitoes.”  This is in the Western Caribbean, off Nicaragua and Honduras.

           For the first time, the clock over Dan’s kitchen door is on 12-hour time.  It was on 24-hour time in 3:8:6 and 7:11:3.  But now the clock says that  it's “11:5_  – obviously PM.  and as Sally says in another panel, in an hour it’ll be November.

            In the comic, this speech balloon of Jon was mistakenly left white, not colored blue.

           In this scan of the bound versions of this page, the speech balloon has been recolored blue.  But as you’ll notice, it’s a different tinge of blue, and this blue doesn’t contain the comic-book dot-pixilation you can see in the balloon in the panel to the left, which was blue all along.

            On the last page of the story, the comic did not contain the epigraph, just a solid black bar with the clock face.

            But the bound editions include the lines from “Hallowe’en,” by Eleanor Farjeon.  By the way, Farjeon wrote many poems and children’s books.  You might be most familiar with her poem “Morning Has Broken,” popularized by Cat Stevens.

           On “page 3” of the paste-up of the New Frontiersman’s October 31^st edition, there’s another of those odd Briticism-date-things, when Hector Godfrey says, “Sunday 20^th October” instead of “Sunday, October 20^th.”



            Well, we’re two-thirds of the way through.  Only three chapters to go!

See you on Thursday.