Before Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan: A review

Dr. Manhattan, part of the Before Watchmen comic book series, is J. Michael Straczynski and Adam Hughes’s prequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ incredibly successful Watchmen comic book series (DC Comics, 1986, 1987). But don’t tell this to Dr Manhattan himself. The notions of before and after are of little use to a character who experiences time nonlinearly and who can only make sense of those experiences in terms of possibilities and probabilities.

As originally conceived by Moore, Dr. Manhattan—formerly the atomic physicist Jonathan Osterman—is a product of Cold War experimental physics. Literally. In 1959, just one year out of graduate school, Osterman finds himself working in the fictional Gila Flats particle-physics test facility. There, the young physicist is accidentally trapped in the reaction chamber of an intrinsic field experiment, where his physical existence was, as Straczynski has the character explain it, ‘broken down into an infinity of quantum possibilities, with each subsequent choice creating yet another possibility, another me.’

In his new superhuman form—which is not quite a part of the physical world but which he is able to manipulate on a subatomic level—Osterman becomes a cold war tool to be used both politically and militarily by the US government against the Soviet threat.

Moore’s Watchmen is counterfactual history at its most playful. Partly because of the existence and cooperation of Dr. Manhattan and other ‘heroes’ (mostly non-superhuman), the US prevails in the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon manages to maintain the presidency up through the mid 1980s.

In the first number of the Dr. Manhattan series, Straczynski is less concerned with the cold war—perhaps sensing that his younger readers aren’t likely to remember much of it—and more interested in playing with the observer effect in quantum physics. Because of his transformation, Dr. Manhattan experiences all moments of his life simultaneously. Straczynski takes advantage of this aspect of Dr. Manhattan’s powers to allow the character to jump as a quantum observer between disconnected moments in his own timeline. Asking the question, ‘If I am a quantum effect, what was the quantum cause?’ Manhattan travels to the moments just before his own accidental creation to observe its cause for the first time. What he finds there is, well, not what he remembers.

The Dr. Manhattan series will contain four comics and its narrative will form part of seven interconnected mini-series, each devoted to a separate character from the original Watchmen. The entire series will be completed in January 2013.

Matthew Shindell is a historian of science and an ethnographer. He is currently an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego.