SOURCE: Fishbaugh, Brent. “Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen: Exact Personifications of Science.” Extrapolation 39, no. 3 (fall 1998): 189-98.

In the following essay, Fishbaugh analyzes how Alan Moore portrays the social and humanistic impact of scientific development in Watchmen through the evolution of his characters, commenting that Moore is “quick to illustrate the need for emotion and humanity in decisions concerning the morality of [the potential uses of science and the weaknesses these same human traits bring to any such implementation.”]

Comic books seem to be eternally stigmatized as garbage for children's minds and sources of potential revenue for the toy market; however, every decade or so a comic book or visionary creator enters the medium, taking the comic world in a different, more adult direction. In the fifties, in his book Seduction of the Innocent and in his testimony before Congress, Fredric Wertham, a child psychologist, made people aware of the...