Watchmen’s Pale Horse graffiti

There’s a lot going on in Watchmen which rewards anyone with a keen eye or those rereading it. Those details are part of what makes Watchmen so popular and are often found in the background of scenes or played out over several panels.

Like the 1980s New York of the real world, Moore’s and Gibbons‘ vision is covered in graffiti. Unlike those seemingly random tags and undecipherable script we are perhaps familiar with, there are some ominous and recurring phrases we can see throughout.

There is the obvious ‘Who watches the Watchmen?‘ phrase aimed at highlighting the need for oversight over the superheroes, but there is another piece of street art that is far more important though as we see the words ‘pale horse’ repeated throughout the series.

The end is nigh

In the Watchmen universe, Pale Horse are a band, whose fans dress in a punkish manner but with a top knot hair do. These fans represent an ever present youth movement in the series, who takes part in anti-social behaviour and violence. In a world of limited opportunity and where caped crusaders use violence without repercussion, then this movement is perhaps not a surprising outcome.

Of course, the Pale Horse also appears in the Bible, specifically in Revelations.

‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death.‘

For it refers to the apocalypse and it’s one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and, finally, Death.

Back to Watchmen though and this graffiti continues to appear until Ozymandias’s plan plays out, as his monstrous creature rips apart half of New York. Here, it is Ozymandias who plays the role of Death.

In the final issue, the opening two scenes are devoted to a devastated sold-out stadium. The yellow clock in the middle shows midnight. Corpses are everywhere, with blood filling the streets. The apocalypse has arrived.

The stadium names the acts performing who brought such a big crowd. The supporting group were called Kristalnacht [sic], the name of a night of terror and murder against Jewish people in Germany in 1933. The literal translation of which means broken glass, which is everywhere in these scenes.

The main act of course, was Pale Horse. Their name a portent to their grisly end as their coming fatefully coincided with the destruction and death of millions of people.