Never Judge a Comic By Its Cover... Watchmen #1 Cover

Here is what we see on the cover of Watchmen #1: in the main image there is most of a smiley face badge, occupying nearly all of the bottom half of the image. The badge is bright yellow, with two long black oval eyes, and a smile with a smaller long oval shape at the end of it, signifying a crease at the corner of the mouth, also all in black. Across the right eye (on the left-hand side as we look at it) is a splash of blood. The badge is lying at an angle of about 45 degrees, so that the blood splash across the eye is very nearly vertical. Behind the badge, on the ground, we see a background of flowing diluted blood that is being washed from the sidewalk, a small portion of which we can see at the top right-hand corner of the image. 

Down the left-hand side of the cover is the title, and assorted pieces of relevant information, including issue number, date of publication, company logo. These are: the word WATCHMEN written vertically in a large blocky unornamented font, starting about an inch above the bottom of the page, and ending about the same distance from the top. Appended to the end of this, which is to say right at the bottom right-hand corner of the final N, there are the two letters TM, indicating trademark. Above the title we see, first, the word WATCHMEN in the same font, at a much smaller size, this time horizontally. Below that is the text No. 1 of 12   $1.50   $2.10/CAN. Below this again is the DC Comics Bullet Logo, beside which is a tiny R in a circle, the registered trademark symbol. Below the title, which is to say just under the letter W of WATCHMEN, there is a clock face with its hands pointing to 11 minutes to midnight. Just under that is September 1986, the cover date of this issue. All of these details are in a sort of a lime green colour, set against a black background, with a few exceptions, which I shall get to below.

Pretty much everything about this cover is, at the very least, unusual and ground-breaking. So I’m now going to go back over it all again, in much greater detail. 

First, the cover illustration: there are four elements to this. There’s the ground, the blood and water washing over that ground, the badge sitting atop that blood and water, and the very sharply delineated splash of blood on the front of the badge. The blood belongs to Edward Blake, as does the badge, and indeed the drop of blood thereon. The reason there’s so much of it is that he hit the pavement with considerable speed, having been thrown out of an apartment window in the adjacent building. It could be argued that the ground represents the real world, that the watered down blood represents the result of violence as we see it in the real world, that the badge represents the simplified world of comics, and that the beautifully stylised splash of blood on it represents the violence this comic is about to wreak upon that world, dropping it from the rarefied world of our fantasies onto the mundane world below. 

Many other explanations are possible. Spilt blood represents chaos, whereas the manufactured badge represents order. Blood itself is highly organised, and has many useful functions inside the body, but once you spill it on the ground, all you can do is wash it away, down the nearest gutter. But one drop of Blake’s blood remains undiluted, and is a shape that we see repeated multiple times throughout this comic. And it could be argued that in another context, later on, that Blake’s blood is saved. Or at least his bloodline. 

The simplified three-part face on the badge—two eyes and a mouth—also appears through the entire work in various forms and disguises. More specifically the image of an injured, occluded, or otherwise partially covered eye, particularly the left-hand eye of a pair as we look at them, is salted throughout. More specifically, we see Edward Blake bleed a number of times, often creating a splash of blood just like this one, usually falling onto the same part of his chest, whether there’s a badge there for it to fall on or not.

Much has been written about the significance of the smiley face badge, and what it might symbolise. One Reddit user, Murmur322, says that 

It's been stated very publicly by Moore that his use of the smiley face was based on some scientific study. The study basically stated that the yellow smiley face is the purest symbol of good that humanity has ever created, even infants have a positive reaction to the image. So Moore sought to corrupt the symbol, making it the emblem of one of the most despicable heroes the medium of comic books have ever seen.

And it is true to say that Alan Moore, talking to George Khoury in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (TwoMorrows Publishing, USA, September 2003), does mention a study, but not quite as forcefully as Murmur322 does:

It wasn't until further on in the series that we actually started to understand the history of the smiley badge and why it made such an effective image with that little blood splash over it. Apparently, from what we heard, there were some tests that were done upon babies—if you lean over a baby's cot and smile, the baby will respond. If you hold a photograph of you smiling over the baby's cot, the baby will smile back. If you hold a drawing of you smiling over the baby's cot, the baby will smile back. It doesn't even have to be a very detailed drawing; they tried simplifying it as much as possible and they found out that a yellow circle with two black dots for eyes and a black smile drawn in was the simplest design that will elicit a response from a newborn baby. 

So in some ways you could say that image is the ultimate scientifically tested image of innocence. I think it came about during the '60s... So by putting that splash of blood over the eye, yeah, it's sort of saying, the age of innocence is over. If you like, the good times are over. That is not the world we're living in now. Wake up and smell the brimstone! 

Superheroes are also an image of innocence that young people respond to. There's a similarity there. Just as the smiley badge gets bloodied up, it's a symbol of innocence that has been bloodied up—then the same is true of these innocent, simple nostalgic kinds of superheroes in Watchmen. That their image is bloodied up. That innocence is no longer possible.

And not only is it true that Moore mentioned a study, but it is also true that such a study did take place. In the 25 April 1974 issue of British science magazine New Scientist there was an article called If a smile is so important..., written by Dr Aidan Macfarlane, a research officer in the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Oxford. And it is even true that this article mentions babies and smiling. Unfortunately, it does not mention them in the context that both the above quotes suggest it does. If anything, it is about how adults respond to newborn babies smiling, whilst the babies seem to be specifically smiling in response to human eyes. Here’s the relevant bit:

Wolff also found that smiling could be elicited in the first week of life by a variety of noises, including a high pitched voice. The first clear indication of a social smile appeared during the third week when a human voice became a better elicitor than mechanical noises, and in the fourth week when eye to eye contact became an effective elicitor by itself. This observation was further strengthened by the finding that a plain cut out cardboard face with ring and large dots for eyes would at this stage elicit smiling. 

There is also some inference in the article to the effect that new-born babies can affect the behaviour of their mothers, a finding that readers of Alan Moore’s Miracleman might find of significance.

Another Redditor, Deergoose, suggests that the distinctive blood stain on the badge is similar in shape to a mushroom cloud, that is to say the distinctive mushroom-shaped pyrocumulus cloud of debris, smoke, and condensed water vapour resulting from a large explosion, most usually used in referring to a nuclear explosion. I had not noticed this before, but I definitely recognise that it has some merit as a suggestion. Certainly the shadow of nuclear war hangs heavy over Watchmen, so there is undoubtedly contextual reasons that it could be the case. The blood stain can also be seen as an arrow, and as the minute hand of a clock, pointing to 11 minutes to midnight, the same as the clock face at the bottom of the left-hand side column. 

On to the smiley face badge itself. In its simplest form, as two dots and a curved line, the smiley face has been around for at least four thousand years, and probably far longer. It is, after all, about the simplest readily identifiable image there is, bar none. But it is now generally accepted that the original version of this one, with the two oval eyes and the smile with the creases at both ends, seen in black against a yellow background, was designed by a graphic artist named Harvey Ross Ball in 1963 for State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, who asked him to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45. However, neither Ball nor State Mutual Life Assurance Company copyrighted the design, which left it open to commercial exploitation by others, which is exactly what happened. In 1972, a Frenchman called Franklin Loufrani became the first person to legally trademark use of a smiley face, and launched The Smiley Company. Bizarre as it may seem, this copyright has legal status, and these days collected editions of Watchmen include the text Smiley logo TM Smileyworld, Ltd on the copyright page.

And, finally, back to the vertical title column, before the final wrap-up: comics traditionally have their titles horizontally across the top of the front cover. Not only that, but if a comic has a team name as the title, as seems to be the case here, we can usually reasonably expect that a team of that name will appear within the pages of that comic. But at no point in this issue, or indeed in any issue of Watchmen, do we either see a team of that name, or even have any group of characters collectively referred to as that. The Watchmen, who should be the superhero team of the title, are notable mostly for not existing. This is not to say that he word Watchmen doesn’t appear in the pages of the book—quite the contrary. But I’ll deal with that when I get to it. And the vertical-rather-than-horizontal title and the non-existent title team aren’t the only unusual things about the contents of this column. 

Firstly, there’s that No. 1 of 12. Common and all as they are now, miniseries, and particularly maxiseries, as is the case here, were virtually unknown terms to the average comics fan. The whole idea that the entire story of a comic title could be told in a finite number of issues was a mind-blowing concept, back then. There was also that price, $1.50 because, at the time, most comics were around 75c. And there’s the DC Comics Bullet Logo. This was designed by Milton Glaser for DC Comics in 1976. It was usually presented at a tilt, pointing in the general direction of north-northwest, or thereabouts. But here it is presented straightened up, which puts it at odds with other cover elements that are tilted, perhaps to highlight the fact that it isn’t one of the continually changing elements of the cover design. And on the subject of those continually changing elements, there’s that small clockface at the bottom of the column, here pointing to 11 minutes to midnight. As the issues progress the minute hand moves forward a minute per issue, with issue #12, the last issue, having the clock reading 12 midnight. 

The cover is composed largely of three colours—red, yellow, and green. Red blood, the yellow badge, and the green lettering. This colour scheme is repeated pretty much exactly on the cover of Watchmen #12, as well as on the last panel of Watchmen.

Is there anything else left to say about this cover? There’s the fact that the cover image is a close-up of the first image on page one of this issue, which I’ll be addressing more fully when I get to that. But this at the very least is a sign of the story inside the covers obtruding into the real world. There’s also the fact that the image really doesn’t tell us anything about what happens in the comic, nor does it show us any of the characters or the action we can expect to see within, which should have been commercial suicide, but wasn’t. 

And there is the fact that, like many a classic murder mystery, the first victim is dead before the first page. Even before the cover, actually...