Fearful symmetry: Using William Blake to contextualize Alan Moore’s Watchmen

Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen redefined the superhero genre,
elevating comics from entertainment to literature. Though published over
twenty-five years ago, Watchmen tells a story of human corruption that still
resonates today. While he has inspired many modern graphic novelists, he
owes a literary debt to his forefathers; in this case, Romanticist poet William
Blake. Blake’s themes of duality and the symmetrical nature of innocence
and experience are revisited and reinterpreted in Moore’s work. By
interpreting Watchmen through the lens of Blake’s poems and engravings,
both author’s vision of humanity comes into focus. Blake sees human nature
as a duality, a living contradiction that could use its two sides to become
whole. Moore complicates this, suggesting that humanity is corrupt and if it
is double-sided, it is more akin to a two-way mirror, where there is always a
side we cannot see because we are blinded by our own flaws.