No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never Compromise.

Warning: If you have not read either Watchmen or Astro City: Confession and intend to do so, do not read this post unless you want all kinds of spoilers! You have been warned!

I just finished wading through the massive tome that is Watchmen, the only comic ever to make Time Magazine's list of 100 best novels. I can certainly see why the book made the list, but while the raw narrative talent of the two men who put this work together has earned my respect, I found the worldview that the work espouses to be one that I cannot agree with. It paints conservatives to be, by default, foaming hatemongers who despise anyone who isn't white and Christian utterly. This is demonstrably false; in fact, it's almost the opposite of the truth. I'm not going to go into a huge listing of prominent black conservatives, a lengthy discussion of just which side of the political spectrum support for Israel falls on, or the like. Suffice it to say that those on the left often have better P.R. than we on the right do. But even beyond what I consider to be an essential fallacy there, I also disagree with the bleak, hopeless painting of a world sliding inexorably towards a Godless oblivion. There were parts I liked; Rorschach's talionic punishments of some truly fiendish criminals were gratifying in a cathartic way, and the quote from him at the end that makes the title of this post was similarly cool, but the overall message and tone of the comic was depressingly nihilistic. The "savior" of the Watchmen story sacrifices his own morality and millions of innocent lives to achieve the "greater good," in this case, a unified world. In the end, he gives away that which does not belong to him to force the world to do what he believes is best. He kills millions of people "for their own good." And then, afterwards, he profits from the apocalypse.

Contrast this with a graphic novel that I really did like, the Busiek/Anderson collaboration of Astro City: Confession. In Confession, the hero also makes massive sacrifices; in this case, his own comfort, his public image and his own life. And he does so willingly and knowingly, because it is the right thing to do. He even does so under startlingly similar circumstances. The aliens in Confession had provided a very similar set of circumstances in Confession to the ones provided by Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen; people had turned on each other, and the innocent were in peril, but instead of taking the easy route, manipulating others to do what he feels is necessary to achieve peace, the Confessor takes the hard road. He sacrifices himself. He gives away things that actually belong to him; his life, his future, his reputation. Ozymandias, at the end of Watchmen is alive, thought of as a good man, and comfortable, yet millions of innocents are dead. The Confessor, at the end of Confession, is dead and reviled, yet by his selfless sacrifice, millions of innocents are saved. Sometimes, the greatest heroes are the ones who we never find out about.