The timepiece that serves as the inspiration for all these watches belongs to the Doomsday Clock, a measure of how close humanity is to a global catastrophe of its own making, including nuclear war. When we see a Time cover commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing it’s the image of a watch that’s stopped at the moment of the bomb’s impact. Manhattan, begins life as Jon Osterman, who plans to focus on repairing watches (a nod to the “watchmaker God” formulated by the scientific revolution) only to become nuclear scientist then a godlike superbeing. The story’s seemingly invincible superman, Dr. Moore loves wordplay, however, and it’s no accident that watches and clocks figure prominently into the story. “Watchmen” most obviously means “those who keep watch,” a translation of “custodes” in “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” That phrase translates to “Who watches the watchmen?,” a question asked in graffiti throughout the book. That sense looms large over Watchmen, often embodied by timepieces themselves. The end of the world seemed to have been postponed.īut for a while leading up to 1985, the years in which Moore and Gibbons conceived and created Watchmen, it felt like we were almost out of time. Gorbachev’s choices in the months and years to come - calling a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, meeting Ronald Reagan for a summit in Geneva, implementing the Perestroika reform movement - opened what would ultimately prove to be the Cold War’s final chapter. That dread didn’t end in March of 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Through newspaper headlines, feature films, TV movies, and hit pop songs, the threat of nuclear annihilation loomed over everyday life. Yet while the series’ version of 1985 unfolds in a world refracted by the introduction of superheroes, it also bears a striking resemblance to the 1985 of our universe, and a dangerous moment in our then-recent past: the culmination of a half-decade of Cold War tension. The landmark limited series comic, written by Alan Moore, with art by Dave Gibbons, takes place in an alternate universe freighted with parallels to ours with a story set between Oct. Watchmen already felt like the product of another time when it arrived in July 1986.

Watchmen book