The Big Picture: There Will Never Be Another Watchmen

JoesshittyOs

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RoseArch said:
Comic watchmen's ending: Makes sense
Movie's ending: Doesn't make sense.

And that's all I can say without going in to spoiler territory.
No.

No, No, No. This type of nostalgia I simply will not allow.

I want you to try and picture the endings flipped. If the Comic had ended with the Doctor's ending, and the movie had decided to take the alien route, people would have flipped their shit. It would have been catastrophic in terms of geekdom. I can't even imagine what people would have done.

While I guess I can see people who were looking forward to seeing giant aliens getting disappointed, the movie ending not only is more logical and hypothetical, I think it's ultimately better. It gives the characters much more drive, and gives much better closure to Manhattan. People who had not read the comics would have been extremely confused. It would have doomed the movie right there.

If you wanna hate the movie, go for it. But the ending was one of the smartest decisions I've ever seen an adaptation make.
 

GiantRaven

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malestrithe said:
Alan Moore is not some visionary. He got lucky in the 80s and that was about it. Nothing he's done since he took his ball and ran back to England is a good as the stuff he made here. Yes that does include the "(Promethea, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Lost Girls or anything else). Nuff Said" rebuttal that I've gotten the last time I complained about Alan Moore. I do mean what I said: his work 90s onward are not only pretentious, but also boring to boot.

For a man that made a career taking already established creations and giving them his own unique spin of them, he sure does have an ego about it.
Top 10. Nuff said.

;-)
 

Roserari

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JoesshittyOs said:
RoseArch said:
Comic watchmen's ending: Makes sense
Movie's ending: Doesn't make sense.

And that's all I can say without going in to spoiler territory.
No.

No, No, No. This type of nostalgia I simply will not allow.


If you wanna hate the movie, go for it. But the ending was one of the smartest decisions I've ever seen an adaptation make.
1) I read the novel a month or two before the movie was released
2) - Comic's version offers a common enemy that forces the Earth's nations to come together and combine their forces.
- Movie's version offers a common enemy that basically is as powerful as God to which there is no defense whatsoever.
 

Shjade

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GloatingSwine said:
The in-fiction issue with the movie's ending is that the other thread of the story is cold war paranoia, and something that looks like a nuke would be responded to appropriately. Remember that at the height of the story the president is actually at NORAD, finger hovering over the big red button, because all out nuclear war is percieved as imminent.

The last shot of the movie should have been everyone's missiles in the air and we're all fucked, because someone just nuked a major city and no, they're not going to wait around to realise that it wasn't really a nuke it was a pretend nuke.
Also a fair point.
 

Tipsy Giant

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I thought the movie was great, but that the chump they hired to select the music picked every cliched track in the world, making important scenes seem comical, i'd love a version without them so I could edit in my own choices, couldn't be worse!
 

Greenstripe0

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RoseArch said:
Comic watchmen's ending: Makes sense
Movie's ending: Doesn't make sense.
Could not have said it better myself.


And on the topic of whether I will buy these or not, no. No, I will not. And I know a large portion of the people I know who have read it (comic nerds and non) are not going to buy it. You don't make a prequel to Watchmen. That's just unacceptable.
 

Mangue Surfer

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Being a non North America citizen I have to say, the end of the movie is pure garbage. It's simple not acceptable, in any level. The rest of the world simple don?t share the same vision of the North America that the north americans have.
 

Bluecho

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I find myself being more forgiving to adaptations overall, so I didn't have much of an issue with how the film version handled the ending.

As for the prequels, I'm not going to read them for two reasons: 1) I read more than enough series as it is, so piling on another entire slew of miniseries seems like too much. And 2) I'm positive they'll never be as good as the original. The writers and artists for them will probably do an admirable job, but at the end of the day it'll be a lot of superfluous fluff.

Do I think there'll never be another Watchmen? Depends on what you mean by "another". I don't think there ought to be something that's exactly the same as Watchmen, but I'm sure someone will end up making a book that challenges readers and conventions, that it can be comparable to Watchmen. Alan Moore, as great a genius as he is, can't be the last great comic writer ever. I refuse to believe that.
 

Richard Keohane

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unacomn said:
I agree with your opinion about the ending of Watchmen. To me it made more sense to do that, instead of the other thing. The other thing seemed a bit too dismissable, though, that's probably not important, considering how it ends with that thing that gets found by those guys.
I came here to say this. When I read Watchmen before seeing the movies, I was impressed. When I saw the movies, I felt like that was the definitive version. For my generation, the ending speaks to things we can relate to. Whoever wrote the script for the movie had nailed what the comic had tried to do for the cold war generation that I couldn't relate to.

I will always have a special place in my heart for the chthonian horror though.
 

Vegan_Doodler

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Artistically it is completely unnecessary, and I really don't like the way that Moore has been treated by the DC (though I am glad we got a movie out of it) but having said that, I will read these anyway. I was one of those people who just wanted more after finishing Watchmen and while these probably wont be worth to stand in its shadow I would like to see the characters in a modern art style and I would love to see more Rorschach.

Dude, I never even thought of that.
Falseprophet said:
So cities around the world are suddenly destroyed by power signatures identical to Dr. Manhattan's, who up until this point was known to be the USA's strategic defense system. President Nixon immediately gets on the phone to world leaders saying "we have to band together against this common threat". Well that's great, but notice how every other country lost their capital city, while the US didn't? And conveniently, the city at the heart of what Nixon in the film earlier denounced as the "east-coast liberal establishment", ie, his political opposition.

Isn't the rest of the world, mostly leaderless and in chaos, going to turn around and accuse the US of sacrificing one city full of political opposition to the government in the name of absolutely crippling everyone else? It's not like those kinds of Pyrrhic scorched-earth policies weren't commonly discussed in the Cold War era. At least when you fake an alien invasion, once you establish there is an alien, it's much easier to claim they're a common threat.
 

Wriggle Wyrm

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Bob?s rant about the comics industry is the main reason why I mostly read manga these days. Because manga series are almost always owned exclusively by their creators, you tend to get a lot more quality and original characters doing different (if sometimes weird) things. Even when American comics aren?t the same corporate superheroes doing the same things over and over again, a lot of comic series have different authors and artists playing a game of musical chairs. This more often than not creates jarring shifts in style, quality and tone. And don?t even get me started on series that get started and are never finished?
 

Shjade

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Revolutionaryloser said:
And the movies enemy is not as powerful as a God. That is a ridiculous exageration.
It really isn't. His actions are constrained by what is already going to occur, for whatever that's worth, but that's just a matter of what will happen. As for what he can do, there's no limit demonstrated in either the movie or the comic.

Other than demonstrating humanity, obviously.
 

Baresark

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Ugh, prequels. I have always hated the vast majority of prequels. Most of the time they are not any good. I think it has something to do with it being kind of the equivalent of reading the end of a book first. It's fun till you know how/when/why the end comes. But, as Bob stated, people who hate on them will buy them.

Also, I personally liked Kingdom Come much better than Watchmen. It was some of the highest quality writing in comics. It wasn't meant to, nor did it come off as and attempt to replicate or copy watchmen. It was so popular in fact that for an indeterminate amount of time it was turned into the DCU actual future. I mean, I'm glad that money maker didn't work out. Knowing the future sucks and is counter intuitive.
 

luckshot

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for me part of the interest of watchmen was the mysterious past, and mysteries revealed are rarely as interesting as our imaginations made them, but i can see how these books could be good (staying out of rights argument)



and bob i saw the movie then read the comics and found both to be very entertaining, even the alternate end force the movie took. but again for me it was less about the end and more about the characters and the flashes of their past. and to me the movie did a good job with the general atmosphere and characters
 

Calendor1

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I have a huge problem with the whole "if you won't buy comics from a corporation that screws creators over than there isn't much else" idea. I read tons of comics, none of which are from Marvel or DC. Image is my favorite company, and I read tons of comics from them, and other places like Dark Horse, IDW, Oni Press, and more. This makes me realize how shortsighted of a comic fan Bob seems to be, as I've noticed he rarely says anything good about comics, says nothing of non-Marvel/DC books, and just bitches about the dumb decisions Marvel and DC makes, like all of the more annoying comic fans, as opposed to using his outreach to actually promote good things about this bleeding industry.
 

pAtRiCk_beNetAR

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It seems many people don't really know of Miracleman, Moore had established many of these concepts within this series before Watchmen, and before The Dark Knight Returns as well. Before Ronin, before Moore's own genre redefining work on Swamp Thing, before almost anything else there was Miracleman (or Marvelman) in 1982. If people are going to discuss the point at which "superheroes" "grew up" or became serious works of literature, I cannot see any other candidate than Miracleman personally. TDKR & Watchmen also deserve massive credit, previous posters have summed up the extent of that credit very effectively.

I don't personally see any problem with these Watchmen prequels, if they are done well, but it remains to be seen if they will be or not. It is quite a gamble to be taking with such an epic & monumental book as Watchmen.

What I see as a real shame is that DC didn't take the opportunity with the resignation of one of Alan Moore's nemesii, Paul Levitz to try & extend an olive branch to Moore. Why not give him everything that he wants & try to make piece with him? Giving Moore rights to the original Watchmen does not have to exclude DC's options to expand on the Watchmen universe as they are doing now. It would give a much deserved ownership of a work to the single most important writer in the field of modern comics. Comparing the characters Moore created for Watchmen to the ones he revamped them from is completely laughable. Like comparing Luke Skywalker to Flash Gordon, who was part of Lucas' inspiration for Star Wars.

The greatest tragedy for me, bar none, that came out of this long running war between Moore & DC executives is that Moore refused to work for DC after it.

It is a tragedy to me personally that I cannot get to enjoy Moore's work on Superman or Batman, or even more importantly, Swamp thing, and one of his many incredible creations, the incomparable John Constantine.

While Moore "swore" never to work for DC again, he did publish The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen & other titles with his friend Jim Lee after DC had bought Wildstorm & ABC comics from them. Perhaps if DC were to treat Moore with the respect that he deserves, he may come back into the fold one day & we will all be better off.

Although not everything Alan Moore creates is incredible, he is certainly one of the most incredible writers & creators ever to work in comics.
 

Sylocat

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j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Firstly, TDKR came out before Watchmen. I don't understand how it can be considered in any way a 'knock-off' when Watchmen came out after TDKR did.
I'm aware that TDKR came out first. I said it was a precursor to the Watchmen knockoffs, because it suffers from the same flaws as those knockoffs: Trying to earn the label of "mature" by throwing Dark And Edgy setpieces in the reader's face.

Yes, yes, Miller managed to drag the mainstream American comics industry into the present day by employing techniques that European comics and even American indie comics had been using for decades. We owe him for forcing DC and subsequently Marvel to get with the program, though it probably would have happened before too long anyway.

Regardless of how you feel about how TDKR changed the way comics are percieved, there is absolutely no doubting that TDKR changed the way comics are made in absolutely fundamental ways, ways that Watchmen has never come close to achieving.
Because comics are only about technical specs and setpieces, who cares about that whole "storytelling" thing.