Oh good, we're doing Alan Moore.
Put me down in the list that thinks Watchmen is overrated. It's got a decent examination of several broken people as they stumble their way through costumed vigilantism, with a couple of good twists, but has it's head way too far up it's own ass for it's own good. Too much moany nihilism, which is the main thing that annoys me about Doctor Manhattan's 'superior detached perception', and meandering nonsense. Say what you like about Zach Snyder, but he was 100% right to cut that Black Freighter shit, and a lot of other crap, out of the film.
I read somewhere once that the big splash panel where Veight/Ozymandias clobbers the would-be assassin is the exact centre of the story, and after that, the second half is a mirror image of the first in some way. Panel structure, I think. At first I thought 'ooo, that's clever', but then I wondered why? Why is it clever? Who's going to notice? What difference does it make to the story? It's a hipster in-joke that only gets pointed out to the plebs so we can be in awe of what a galaxy-brain the writer is.
It's been said before, but Watchmen is only notable because most capeshit before it was as deep as a puddle. Most capeshit after it is as deep as a puddle too, but with an added veneer of Moorian pretentiousness.
The nihilism and even a strong streak of proto-SJWism - political correctness? - grates in some of his other work too. Killing Joke. Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was one of the first Alan Moore comics I read and I still look kindly on it, but parts of it are hard to stomach at this point. One issue that stands out in my mind is the woman who turns into a werewolf and kills herself because she's got PMT, because her husband is a male and slightly annoying, and because supermarkets and tupperware are marketed to women.
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On the theme of sci-fi writers, HG Wells. I don't know if he counts as an author of 'books people read to look smart' but he's a little overrated in my view. He gets credit for early genre-defining stories like War Of The Worlds or The Time Machine - and rightly so - but there's a streak of communist rhetoric through most of his work, which is more noticeable in some, and you can't unsee it in his more popular pieces once you're aware of it, or read a little about his personal life. I sat down with an omnibus of his complete works and had to stop partway through the semiautobiographical In The Days Of The Comet, before I even got to the 'sci' part. It was just his self-insert railing about the government, the upper classes, the church, his mother, the girl who wouldn't go out with him, the landowners son she did go out with, everything he could think of. A complete joke of a story.
