The Complexity of Watchmen

Thus far I have been really impressed by what I have read in Watchmen. I think that Watchmen requires a level of investment and attention from the reader that exceeds that required for most of the other comic books that we have read this year. I found some other comics that have demanded a similar level of engagement to be frustrating (keeping track of the mustachioed men in Adele Blanc-Sec) but instead of frustrating I find Watchmen refreshing. We now have a range of well developed characters whose motive and actions are consistent with and built upon background information that we as readers are not given all at once but rather in a trickle, helping us to fill in the puzzle of the nuanced relationships between characters. We got something close to this from Frank Miller  but I think the fact that I already knew a lot about Batman when I started reading made it less striking. However, as someone who entered Watchmen with no concept of the story, characters, or universe in which they exist, the rich detail and more complex weaving of narratives is extremely compelling.