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.
