Sounds like 1986
It ocurred to me this morning that it's been twenty years (give or take a couple of weeks) since I first encountered WATCHMEN. A long time. Yeesh, a really long time. Half a lifetime (or close enough that I can see it from here.)
I remember that I really couldn't deal with it at first reading. I scanned the first issue and I knew stuff was going on, but the narrative unfolded in what was best described as an alien way, when compared to what mainstream comics were doing at the time. There wasn't an omniscient narrator serving to glue the haphazard bits of story together, explaining what was going on in between the panels. I couldn't read it on autopilot, which is how I read comics back then (and approach a lot of comics now, truth be told.) I had to actually READ the damn thing, and put together things like Rorschach measuring the closet in Comedian's apartment to deduce the presence of a hidden chamber instead of having it spoonfed to me by way of cottony thought balloons.
Instead of the tyranny of the BIG YELLOW BOX EXPLAINING IT ALL, I had to work at things. Instead of a single voice, I was treated to what would become a chorus of diverse voices that ultimately joined together in a single song (that took more than two years to complete when all was said and done.) Instead of relatively simple character motivations, I was presented with a cast each driven by their own peculiarities, and adult ones at that. It was one of the first times that I actually looked at these people as people, rather than characters acting out a script. Sure, I devoured Claremont's run of UNCANNY mercilessly at the time, and in the years previous. But it was always an entertainment, never feeling like much more than a really well-crafted adventure story.
WATCHMEN was something else altogether. But, like I said, I wasn't really into it when it first came out. That first issue frazzled me something fierce, or perhaps it was just the fact that I was a freshman in college and I was doing what freshmen did that frazzled me. I didn't really get it until I was able to read all three of the first issues in a single sitting. Which I finally did on a Sunday morning at a friend's place after he urged me to saying "They're really, really good," when I said the first issue didn't do all that much for me.
So I sat. I read. I even read the text bits in the back (though now I cringe away from 'em unless they're written by a choice handful of authors -- mostly they're just dreadful these days; self-important attempts to add depth where it isn't needed or isn't achievable.) And I was blown away by the world that was unfolding before me. Dave Gibbons' art, which I hadn't really appreciated at first glance ("Kinda plain and not so inspiring" was probably my first thought) immediately served to reinforce the documentary nature of the work. By rendering the exotic in a "mundane" (for lack of a better word) manner, his art grounded the work and made it all the more believable. This wasn't rippling muscles and demons from another world bent on the destruction of EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND LOVE. These demons were even more frightening because they were largely real.
Sure, as a kid growing up in the 80s, the possibility of nuclear annihilation was out there, but somehow I always figured that rational minds would prevail (ha!). But in WATCHMEN, doom was a palpable thing. Whether it was Kovacs' literal enactment of the doomsayer or the cancer being suffered by Doctor Manhattan's comrades or the death of the Comedian at the opening of the story, impending judgement was seated right next to me. These stakes were very high and very real. After all, we know that Superman's not gonna die, or he's not gonna stay dead. But with books like WATCHMEN, things could actually happen and have permanent repercussions that wouldn't be whimsically undone by the next writer/artist on board. Dead meant dead in WATCHMEN, to modify a phrase.
And the narrative flowed in such a way that there wasn't a wasted panel, a wasted snatch of text. Scenes intertwined into one another and were paid off, though some took a very long time to get there. WATCHMEN is still an impressive display of how to structure a story, particularly a comic story, even twenty years later when all the surface gimmicks have been appropriated and run into the ground and lots of creators have proven that they missed the point, cramming darkness and despair into their spandex works. Nine panel grids of psycopaths might be WATCHMEN's immediate legacy (that's an exaggeration, folks), but all it proves is that the copycats weren't really reading the work. Sure, there's gloom and snakes' nests of deviancy, but there's also genuinely uplifting moments such as Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre's conversation on the surface of Mars. For Adrian's dark victory, there's the simple act of the newsman trying to shield the once-hated comics leech. For Comedian's atrocities, there's the birth of his daughter to counterbalance it.
Did one side win? Is evil vanquished? Goodness triumphs? Not exactly. The story concludes and yet we can see it continuing (though that will never happen in this universe.) There's enough character, enough fuel to continue the story, though Moore and Gibbons will never do it. And yet, it came to an end, albeit an imperfect one, after having waited more than a year for it.
And because I embraced WATCHMEN, I embraced Alan Moore's work, and my reading of comics has been immeasurably enriched by it. There's a great many books that are described as seminal works, but never so true has that been of a work than it has been of WATCHMEN.
For good and for ill.