Watchmen: Mainstream or Unpopular/Indie?

Watchmen would probably be considered more mainstream as far as I am concerned. I am in no way referring to the fact that it is a comic book, but rather, the content itself. To be honest, I had never even heard of Watchmen until this class, but upon reading it, there are many different mainstream themes running through it. Every novel I have ever read has some sort of criticism of society. One just kind of starts to expect that from novels. Also, the characters seem somewhat typical. The characters that kind of make you wonder what exactly drives them to make some of the choices they make usually had a difficult childhood. Take Rorschach for example, he is a loner and has and obvious temper and that seems to stem from his childhood trauma. Most of the characters just seem unoriginal as far as the way they are within the group. Sure, they all have their own personalities, but they seem to go along with a lot of other super hero movies. There usually seems to be one abnormal person that through some scientific misstep is super human. Usually there is a guy who just seems a little off. There is always a leader of the group who usually tends to have cool gadgets. There is also seemingly always one woman that is able to fight with the best of them. If you were analyzing this from the feminist lens, it would be pretty obvious that a male wrote Watchmen. There is only one woman that is still a part of the group and for some reason a decent amount of the scenes that involve the women are regarding their love interests or past exploits with men. Most of the women in the entire novel are also portrayed as emotional. The cab driver and her partner, Gloria (Mal's wife), Laurie, and several others end up flipping out on their significant others because they do not feel like they were given as much attention or that all of their needs were. Basically, women are presented as emotional. Sure, there are several unstable characters but those are presented with a crazy back story that gives them an excuse to do so. The women are also given some sort of back story to why they are mad, but it does not really make it seem like that big of a deal. It is also interesting that they have the concept of the teenagers who are following somewhat rebellious ways, just like in the Hebdige piece. The teenagers seem to be straying away from what is traditionally considered correct. There are some different plot twists that are unexpected, but that just makes it interesting. Watchmen does make an effort to try and be unique, but upon further analysis, it really is not that different at all.