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That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic

Evan Narcisse Avatar
Evan Narcisse
That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic

I am tired of meme. These tweets. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lies.

It’s been a weird year, full of large and small horrors, hasn’t it? If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you may have seen people using a picture of omnipotent superhero Dr Manhattan with a dialogue box to express how much they want to disengage with the mania. Here’s the thing: That panel doesn’t actually appear in Watchmen.

I read Watchmen A LOT in university, to the point where it feels like certain sequences are still seared into my brain some 20-odd years later. Every time I saw that “tired of Earth” panel come down my timeline, it gave me red arse. Something about it — mainly the lettering — didn’t smell right. I know I’m getting old but, damn it, I also know that I know Watchmen. Could I be remembering it wrong?

When my co-worker James Whitbrook dropped the image in group chat, I couldn’t hold it in any more:

That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic
That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic

Thankfully, Katharine Trendacosta happened to have a copy of the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins close at hand. And, sure enough, there isn’t any dialogue in the panels where the former Jon Osterman is looking at the stars or sitting on a rock.

That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic
Image: DC Comics

Image: DC Comics

That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic

However, lines very similar to the ones in the popular meme image do appear in the original comics, just not when Dr Manhattan is on Mars:

That Famous Watchmen Panel You Keep Seeing This Year Isn’t Actually From The Comic

The altered text in the internet-remixed image actually comes from the Watchmen movie:

This has been — for me, at least — a weird phenomenon, because it’s been one of those instances where a crowd-driven usage scenario made me doubt my own memory over and over again. The tides of social media wash over us all so much every day that it threatens to replace folks’ own experience. But, for now, I can still trust my own brain. Not time for adult nappies yet!

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