Anthony Lane has, much like Alan Moore, always loved Nabokov; and his recent misreading of Watchmen (the book, not the probably meretricious film) reminds me a lot of Nabokov’s misreading of Don Quixote.

Both books, Cervantes’s and Moore’s, parody the genre of heroic romance, and both use violence in a particular way to do so: medieval romance before Cervantes and super-hero comics before Moore were violent, but in a cleaned-up way that would not disturb the binary sentiments the genre existed to inspire. Moore and Cervantes restore to the types of events these genres describe the sheer ugliness, sordidness and horror that would naturally attend them. The gore and brutality are necessary to reframe the heroic romance, to make it seem as distorting an idealization as it is.

But both works also feed on heroic romance to lend some of its idealistic colors to the oft-contemned everyday. The fat and vulgar country squire and the fat washed-up old super-hero, like those met on the Spanish road and at the corner New York newsstand, participate in a drama which really does bring ideals into conflict with what would thwart them. Neither Moore nor Cervantes are at all cynical; they merely suspect that some idealizations, closely related to murderous ideologies (the Inquisition for Cervantes, capitalism and communism for Moore), can potentially do great harm if they’re not brought into some humanizing contact with the earthly, the secular, the quotidian and plebeian. Both texts become novels in the Bakhtinian sense when they turn the romance inside out.

Lane’s worst misreading comes when he implies, possibly taking his cues from that idiot Zack Snyder’s movie, that the violence which ends the book is gratuitous—a foolish claim, since Moore and Gibbons carefully acquaint us with so many of the people who will die at the end, and this as much as anything else stands as an indictment of Ozymandias’s plan.

I can see how Watchmen would appear to someone who isn’t familiar with the state of the genre in which it intervened in 1986; to look back, after grim and gritty comics, after Fight Club and Kill Bill and Saw and everything else, might be simply to perceive to origin of mass-marketed squalor. But that’s no excuse not to read it, and I suppose I don’t understand how anyone who really read it could fail to see how humane it is, how great an effort it makes to drag its subject matter into the orbit of a humanistic dignity.

Anyway, a good feminist critique of Moore waits to be made. Lane hints at it, but not very cleverly. I think it would have to be fairly psychoanalytic, and would start here: the squid monster, edited out of the film, is the socially/industrially-constructed but still primal force that everyone in the book wants to control, starting with Moore and Gibbons and their rigid nine-panel grid and their tight recursive plot. It’s said that fans always refer to this creature as “the squid monster,” but when I was a teenager, my friends and I referred to it as “the vagina monster.” Now that’s how a feminist critique of Watchmen would begin; I suppose it would be a bit racy for The New Yorker.