R&R: Nos Qui Morituri

Features Bob Levin | August 6, 2026 Watchmen #1 (DC, September 1986) by Alan Moore, illustration by Dave Gibbons, color by John Higgins we are incapable of dealing with the problems caused by our existence. Caroline Fraser. NYRB April 23, 2026 human nature is incurably mad. Virginia Woolf. Ditto At some point in the late 1980s or early ‘90s, when I was working to establish cred with The Comics Journal, I told an editor that I considered Watchmen the best novel of the last decade. Oops, I later thought. I should have said Love and Rockets. Watchmen had been lauded at the time. It is taught, I see, in high schools today, which means it has been deemed no more troublesome than To Kill a Mockingbird. It does not excite Moms as do transsexuals and Toni Morrison. (Only in Missouri have school districts banned it.) Was it not the driven and demented work which had hooked me? It has fallen out of the conversations in my cafe – if it ever had been part of them. Perhaps the poorly received movie, which I didn’t see, or the highly lauded HBO series, which I’ve been unable to watch, had overwhelmed the knife’s edge I had sensed sheathed between its covers. When I told a friend I was writing ab...