Watchmen #5 page 17 Colour Guide
Purchased from Mark McDermott off of ebay during SDCC 2009. So while I couldn't be there, I managed to add something to the collection.
By no means is a Watchmen page a grail piece for me, but like many collectors it's a significant enough work that it's on the want list.
I personally want a 'pirate page' because these pages carry far more weight, to me; they are true examples of what Moore and Gibbons set out to do: write the ultimate superhero comic book. Of course, it's the superheroes that are the weak point of the book for me.
Watchmen's basic subtext are all the things that can only be done with comics. It's panel structure, the flash back sequences, the pacing, the entire way it's constructed is about COMICS. Then there are things like symbolism, comic within a comic, recurring images, these are the things that make it a wonderful comic. The scenes with major characters doing action-y things, those are the weak points of the series.
In most superhero OA collectin, having a page with 'all the characters' or 'action poses', 1/3 or 1/4 or 1/2 splashes or all the other nonsense that give superhero OA collectors a sense of glee, these are the weakest components of the story. So, basically, the things that superhero OA collectors love about superhero OA are the things that are weak about Watchmen, because at it's heart Watchmen is about all the great things that comics can/do/should represent and NOT about action scenes, or the things that make superhero comics, and by extension superhero OA, the ... unsatisfactory artistic product that it is.
Watchmen is a book filled with imagery and symbolism, things that are so unique to this particular art form, but for OA collectors this is typically not a draw. Watchmen is a book filled with talking head pages. Sure there are some great superhero talking pages where the juxtaposition of art and text provides layers, but for the most part you're paying huge money because the character is on the page, not the brilliance of the method.
Anyway, why this one? The layers. The Pirate story is analogous to Veidt's inner monologue, where he feels the crippling guilt of what he believes he must do, it also acts as a symbolic journey as he grows to madness.
Panel 2: as the characters sit upon ground zero, "The Deaths Head banner flies above us all"
Panel 3: Veidt, the mass murderer; "if somebodywants to off a saint like Veidt"
Panel 6: Rorschach walks by; "you never know what's bearing down on you" -- it hasn't been revealed that 'The End Is Nigh' guy is Rorschach
Panel 8: for the 3rd time on the page Rorschach appears, like a shark circling; "I bet there's all kinds of stuff we never notice."
Panel 9: Fins -- like the other shark on the page
