WatchmenComicMovie.com Forum

I figure Nova Express to be the Rolling Stone of Watchmen's world.

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i always saw it as "Time"

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We're all actors, Laurie. I'm just an actor who read the script.

Well it's named after a book Veidt makes reference to later (first pages of Ch11)

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interestingly the Cultural Ref's part of that article fails to mention Watchmen

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We're all actors, Laurie. I'm just an actor who read the script.

But they had Time Magazine in the movie.

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hmm, then i guess i've always been wrong. it never seemed quite as trendy as Rolling Stone though, perhaps it should be seen as an amalgam of a few of the glossy news magazines,

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We're all actors, Laurie. I'm just an actor who read the script.

TIME magazine features in the comic too (Ch4p24)

But there are some discrepancies with regards alternate reality names. In the same chapter (p3), the New York Times is shown whereas throughout the rest of the comic it appears as the New York Gazette.

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It was the October 14 1938 edition of the New York Gazette which reported the appearance of "The Hooded Vigilante" whereas we then get to see an issue of the New York Times printed some years later on August 07 1945. Rather than being a discrepancy on the part of the creators, I think the switch is more likely yet another deliberate device actually intended to subtly highlight the differences between the realities of the WATCHMEN world and our own. Over the years, one publication has clearly superceded the other in terms of popularity and visible readership: after all, The Times They Are A'Changing...

As for the moniker New Frontiersman, it is interesting to note the irony inherent in the fact that JFK referred to his own administration and its policies as being the New Frontier.

Right-wingers of the mould typified by the character of Hector Godrey consider themselves to be the rightful (pun intended) successors of the explorers and settlers that opened America's western frontier; that they are literally new frontiersmen who are the true American patriots just like their forefathers who had nothing but the log cabins they built with their own two hands, a flag, and a gun to defend freedom from Redcoats, injuns, or Mexicans. The same mentality persists in the modern age: that the federal government has gotten lazy and corrupt and is run by Jews, the Vatican, etc. but the proud New Frontiersmen stand watch, ready to fight any threat to liberty. Names that harken back to early American history are a common staple of such rightist conservative publications - and nowadays blogs - almost as if the publishers/writers are fearful that people might mistake them for being unpatriotic otherwise. New Frontiersman is a simple continuation of this pattern.

On a final note, the title seems especially evocative of that renowned British journalistic organ of distinctly leftist leaning The New Statesman, of which Moore was surely aware circa 1985. In a deliberate twist, the politics of the fictional and factual publications are inverted just as the very concepts of state and frontier are nearly opposites in themselves.