Both Alive And Dead: Dr. Manhattan #1 Review
EDITOR’S NOTE: All the atoms in the test chamber are screaming at once. The spoilers… the spoilers are taking me to pieces.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating: Adam Hughes’s Dr. Manhattan #1 cover looks like the Good Doctor is blasting Silk Spectre right in the shitter.
Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, we can talk about the issue itself. And a big part of me expected to not like this book. Writer J. Michael’ Straczynski’s work on fellow Before Watchmen title Nite Owl has been disappointing on a good day, and an irritating retcon of various elements of Watchmen continuity as a whole, on a bad one. Further, this book lives and dies based on Manhattan’s preoccupation on quantum theory, which is something that I can’t remember the character ever obsessing over in Watchmen, but which makes sense since Wikipedia’s article on quantum mechanics shows that not only was quantum theory viable in the mid 20th century, but that even in the early 21st century I am still too stupid to understand quantum theory.
With that said, this is an engaging book that captures the ADD nature of Dr. Manhattan’s inner dialogue in a manner that Watchmen fans will find familiar, fills out some of the backstory to the character that makes some sense, and closes on an intriguing mystery that makes me want to come back to see how it plays out. At the same time, it also somewhat overplays those character traits in ways that don’t make sense for a character who can see the totality of time, instills motivations on Manhattan that have never been mentioned before, and uses the word “box” more than an 1974 porno loop.
That’s the hell of quantum mechanics – all possibilities are real, and influenced by the observer.
The issue focuses on Dr. Manhattan, everywhere, at all times… which makes it the first comic book where I almost literally can’t tell you what’s happening, because everything is happening. We bounce from Manhattan on Mars as in Watchmen #4, to his childhood, to Gila Flats, back to Mars, back to college. In the process, we get a sense of what John Osterman was like as a child (spoiler alert! Timepiece-obsessed friendless dink), in college (spoiler alert! Timepiece-obsessed sexless dink), and his obsession with control through the whole span of it. That obsession leads Manhattan to travel back in time, to before he, as Osterman, was trapped in the Intrinsic Field Generator, to try and determine how he was trapped in it when he was so sure he had time to get out… with interesting and unexpected results. Oh – and he also alters quantum probability itself to chuck his Nathan’s Coney Island Blue Hot to Silk Spectre. But we’ll get back to that.
Manhattan’s perspective, as shown in the internal dialogue captions, is a pretty solid match to how Moore presented it in Watchmen #4. Straczynski presents Manhattan’s viewpoint as fluid in time, narrating what he’s thinking about while Hughes changes the visual to a different time period that still matches the narration. For example, he has a conversation with the original Nite Owl end on the phrase, “can’t control everything” as the panel switches to a view of clockwork, and a scene where it becomes apparent that young Jon Osterman couldn’t close the deal with a girl if he had a team of lawyers on his side. Moore was the master of this kind of storytelling, but Straczynski delivers it well enough that the flow feels like authentic Dr. Manhattan.
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