As soon as I learned from the online edition of New York Times that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a cartoon about the tawdry life of superheroes that have fallen from grace from the late 1980s, which I feverishly followed from month to month in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while it was still coming out in regular installments, was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, I looked for the badge that I used to wear at the time. It is a smiley face with a difference—a shiny red splotch that spills across the left eye. I found it in no time on one of my crowded bookshelves, wiped the thick dust away, and pinned it on my North Face fleece with relish. That was a week or so ago. Ever since, people keep staring at it wherever I go. “Is that blood?” some of them ask with a twinkle in their eyes. “It’s only ketchup,” I grin back. When they want to learn more about the badge, I wave my hand nonchalantly: “You’re sure to figure it out in a month or two!” The movie will be a splash, I am quite sure. The cartoon surely was, while I was still slaving away at MIT.