The Big Picture: There Will Never Be Another Watchmen

Lieju

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I like Watchmen, although I don't hold it in such a high regard as most people, maybe because I read it just few years ago. As far as Alan Moore's work goes, V for Vendetta is my favourite.

In any case, I'll probably end up checking them out eventually, if just to see what they did.

But I'm not going to pay for them. I'll get them for free.


(from a library)
 

Tumedus

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Further note on the ending, the absurdity of the comic version is also more cohesive with the overall story arc of the Comedian. The ultimate joke if you will. The Manhattan version does not work as well in this context.

As for the whole prequel thing, beens said already, but there just isn't anything interesting to tell there. All the important character evolution has already been seen.
 

Axolotl

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j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
First things first, can we stop acting as if Watchmen is the only comic from the eighties that changed people's perceptions of superheroes? The Dark Knight Returns was every bit as important and revolutionary in it's impact, and considering it's (the goddam) Batman, I'm surprised it constantly gets overshadowed by its sibling. I know Frank Miller ain't cool anymore, but you have to give the man his due: TDKR was every bit as important as Watchmen in re-shaping the superhero landscape in the mid-80s.
Yes but they shaped it in very different ways, Watchmen made things smarter, more detailed with mutilayed narratives and more intellectual dialog, DKR just made thaning darker and more manly. Watchmen paved the way for Vertigo, the British invasion and ultimately Kingdom Come. DKR conversely set us up for Rob Liefled, Image and the Ultimate universe. Now not all of the former have been good and not all the latter have been bad but overall Watchmen did far more good than DKR did.
 

GiantRaven

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My opinion of 'Before Watchmen' is that I trust Azzarello will write two interesting stories that will be well worth reading even if they are needlessly expanding upon a story that had it's conclusive beginning, middle, and end. Definitely interested in reading his stuff. The others I can live without.

Aiddon said:
This just reinforces my stance on the comic industry being in one, big stagnant state ever since the post-Dark Age collapse.
Don't lump an entire medium into the superhero genre. There are some fantastic books coming out right now outside of the DC/Marvel sphere.
 

honeybakedham

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Is this really gonna be a thing? Of course it is... it's geek culture we are talking about. Everything is gonna be a thing.

Books, comics, movies, albums, TV series, magazines, even web sites... these things all mean something to us. I'm a movie nerd. A theater is a church to me and Martin Scorsese is the spiritual leader of my order. I get why people get protective of creative works they love. I understand why one's emotional attachment to Moore's Watchmen can be so strong it will color their opinion of the movie and make the proposed prequels seem like anathema to them.

But this is the thing. Those artists called upon to make those prequels... and a large support staff at DC... are gonna get paid because these aren't really treasured tomes handed down from gods... comics, movies, music, etc., is all product. It's product. It is made to sell. We buy it.

Those artists and support staff will buy groceries and clothing and pay a mortgage. They'll send their kids to school and buy medicine when they get the flu. And along with them, the people who make paper and ink and who run printing presses will also get paid. Truck drivers get a slice. Comic book shop owners as well as big box book store owners will see a share.

Comic book fans will buy the books and if they choose to read the books at night, they consume electricity and possibly need a lamp from a lamp-maker and a bulb from Westinghouse.

Do I see anything wrong at all with making these books? No. Nothing. And if your emotional attachment to the original is so strong that anything new will weaken your experience, then don't buy them. Moore's original will not change. It will remain available in the exact same form is always has for you to cuddle up with at night and devour over and over again.

Back to my priest, Martin Scorsese. I'd be pretty unlikely to go see a children's animated movie spun off of a Scorsese film... say Goodfella Babies or Casino Kids... and I'd probably not give a damn about a series of romantic short stories based on the younger days of the the psychologist from The Departed and her sexcapades in college... But nothing they did could ever change the fact that I love and enjoy and treasure Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, or any of the great man's work. In fact, if some truly ill-advised spin-offs lead new fans back to the source... bonus.
 

Diddy_Mao

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That's pretty much always been my viewpoint on Moore's moral outrage.

"How dare you desecrate my unique and glorious vision" has a significantly weaker punch when coming from the man who wrote a scene wherein Mr. Hyde sodomizes The Invisible Man.


Anyway. On the the whole movie ending vs comic ending.

I actually prefer the movie ending myself. Largely because the creation of the...thing that happens in the comics flies right in the face of the rest of the core concepts of the story.

One of the biggest or at least most obvious plot threads in Watchmen was the idea that Dr. Manhattan was the first "superhero." He's not just a guy in a costume punching thugs in the jaw, the dude has Super Powers and he's a complete and total game changer.

Lost story short. He is able to do things that regular humans can't and it's a really really big deal.

Enter Robert Deschaines, or at least his brain. More appropriately his 100% genuine, honest to god Psychic abilities.

If you're going to spend the greater part of the series hammering home the idea of the Neutering effect on humanity that a genuine Super Powers having Ubermensch would have, maybe it's not the best idea to pop in at the last minute and say "Oh Yeah and some other folks have powers too. But forget about them."
 

Crimson_Dragoon

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Jul 29, 2009
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Yeah, the new books are pretty unnecessary, but I can get behind the talent on them. I'll take any excuse to read a book by JMS.

I know its nitpicky, but is that how you pronounce "Waid?" I've always heard it pronounced like "Wade" and "weighed."
 

Ukomba

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This episode came off as boring and really uninteresting. Probably because Bob sounded bored and really uninterested in the topic.
 

newwiseman

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Slightly topic adjacent,

I kind of wish that the Japanese manga production had evolved here instead of the current model.

In Japan a publisher will put out what they think is good and will only let it run so long as the fans, ie those actually making purchases, think it's good.

The Japanese system has its downsides, many a great story have died well before their time, but at least I don't have to worry about Goku, Ichigo, or Naruto starting over or getting alternate stories once they've come to an end.

Unfortunately this means characters are only around as long as they are still popular and they won't live past their author regardless of where the story is when they die, or get sick (I really liked Beet the Vandal Buster).

I do appreciate how iconic the western characters are, but I'm also really tired of seeing what "they" are going to do with Superman, Batman, or Spiderman now...

*Edit I have to admit. I am interested in seeing what DC would do with a story like Sailor Moon as the decades pass by (for better or worse) but I'm very glad I don't have to worry about that happening.
 

McMarbles

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I'm not going to go into detail on the prequels (other than that I'm more-or-less okay with them; frankly, I've always thought Moore was kind of overrated anyway). I just wanna know: is Mark Waid's last name really ponounced "Wide"?
 

Sylocat

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Nov 13, 2007
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It's too bad the filmmakers didn't understand that there will never be another Watchmen, otherwise they might not have embarrassed themselves trying way too hard to be as "shocking" and "edgy" as the comics were. That slow-motion blood-spattering thing, which was so provocative in the up-until-then-heavily-sanitized comics of the day, now just comes off as corny in an age of cinema that has already seen the likes of Tarantino and Rodriguez.

The only people who are still shocked by gory violence in movies are the people who weren't going to see a film with this subject matter anyway. People are still shocked by SEX, but if you made the sex scenes too explicit, you get slapped with an NC-17 rating and no theater will carry the film.

And you know why the film would have worked without it? Because Watchmen wasn't about the gore. It was about what that gore represented. It was about what it meant.
Shjade said:
Personally, while I think the film's altered ending makes more narrative sense in tying the characters so tightly to the events, I think the comic's ending - as bizarre as this is going to sound, considering what that ending is - works better in terms of likeliness to succeed. As others have mentioned above, though he is definitively inhuman, Manhattan is definitely seen as a distinctly American figure.
"American powerhouse gone rogue" just doesn't have the same nation-binding impact as "Aliens invade Earth."
I wholeheartedly agree.
The squid thing may have been ridiculous, but that was the point... aside from the fact that (as Bob mentioned) it fits perfectly with the retro Silver Age aesthetic thing, the main point was that it had to be something that nobody involved in the political conflicts had ever considered or thought of. It had to be something so different, so unbelievable, so I-never-thought-of-that, that it would change the way the world was viewed.

The story of Dr. Manhattan going rogue is sufficiently sentimental, but they've already had a conflict with him. When they think he's gone psycho, they can squabble about whose fault it was. ESPECIALLY since the other change to the ending was that Ozymandias had FakeManhattan attack other cities around the world, instead of just the country who had run him out. Those countries are going to say, "This is your fault! You unleashed him upon us!"

Oh, and there was one more change to the movie that completely ruined it: It showed the politicians as eager for war. Nixon's line about "The last gasp of the Harvard establishment" or whatever, was ridiculous.

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a First Contact sci-fi thriller where, instead of crashlanding outside the suburbs of Anytown USA, the aliens crashland in war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan.

j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
First things first, can we stop acting as if Watchmen is the only comic from the eighties that changed people's perceptions of superheroes? The Dark Knight Returns was every bit as important and revolutionary in it's impact, and considering it's (the goddam) Batman, I'm surprised it constantly gets overshadowed by its sibling. I know Frank Miller ain't cool anymore, but you have to give the man his due: TDKR was every bit as important as Watchmen in re-shaping the superhero landscape in the mid-80s.
It may have been "important," but it didn't change nearly as much about the way comics are perceived, simply because TDKR didn't do nearly as much differently from the standard comic book fare. The setpieces were darker and gorier, and some of the narration mechanics were fairly (though not completely) unique, but the story itself? Just as juvenile and shallow as the comics it was supposed to be parodying, and the much-vaunted "social satire" was clunky and heavy-handed.

This became even more apparent with the sequel, TDKSA, which was criticized for not holding up well to its predecessor, even though it suffered from the exact same flaws, and the flaws that pervades all of Frank Miller's work: He's obsessed with the superficial trappings of "maturity" but has no interest in mature storytelling.

In that regard, TDKR wasn't so much a sibling to Watchmen as it was an ancestor to the endless slew of Watchmen knockoffs.
 

jessegeek

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Yes, there will never be another Watchmen, but why would we *want* another Watchmen?

Allow me to clarify; I love Watchmen, it's my favourite graphic novel- hell, book of all time- and I read a lot of both. However, I'm not saying the world shouldn't want another because of this, I'm saying that comics and graphic novels shouldn't try to make the same kind of lightning strike twice. When a brilliant piece of fiction is released in whatever form which defies convention and makes the entire collective of creators, audience and distributors rethink the way they function, the truly inspired take cues from the original to create something new. Fools try to create a carbon copy of the new work or declare the entire industry dead as nothing will ever be as good as X.

Neither of these approaches make any sense; the originality of artwork X was what made it special, copying it only devalues what you create. But by the same token, as someone's already made Citizen Kane, should people stop making films? Alice In Wonderland has been written, so I guess the world doesn't need any more children's literature. Hell, we have Beowulf, David Copperfield and 1984; let's just stop writing books altogether.

Post-great-fiction-X creators are inspired by X, but use that to create something which shows its influences but is brilliant in its own right. Eventually, as the ideas of X diffuse through the collective consciousness of the creators, they will fade into the artistic tradition until the next X comes along and shatters boundaries etc. We have already seen the first stage of this within the comic book industry; brilliant stories such as Justice, The Nail and Batman and Robin Must Die! take cues from their predecessor, without being copies, and generally the shift in tone of comics (after it settled down from the OTT 90s) post-Watchmen ushered in a slew of brilliant stories which allowed their characters to become much more complex. We are also seeing several 'next X' contenders emerge; from Mike Mignola's mythology influenced universe to the beautiful Persepolis. These take graphic novels in new and exciting directions in a completely different way to Watchmen.

All-in-all, comics are currently experiencing an unprecedented era of diversity, and this includes the major players. Despite the reboot, the comics industry is far from stagnating, now more than ever.
 

BlackWidower

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Okay, two things I need to say about Watchman. It's overrated and the movie was better.

I'm not saying Watchman is bad, I'm saying people give it more praise than it deserves. I personally did not like it. It seemed obtuse, and I felt like it thought too much of itself. If that makes any sense.

Oh, and I think I'm the only one who doesn't want a Watchman Prequel, but a Sequel. It ended with too much in the air!
 

Shjade

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Sylocat said:
You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a First Contact sci-fi thriller where, instead of crashlanding outside the suburbs of Anytown USA, the aliens crashland in war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan.
So something more District 9-ish with even less stability in the surrounding social structure, maybe?

j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
The Dark Knight Returns contributed a great deal to changing the way comics are made.

Watchmen contributed a great deal to changing what comics are about.

Honestly, if we're going to go on a tangent about Miller's additions to comics, I think Ronin is a more important example than TDKR overall.
 

malestrithe

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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.
 

GloatingSwine

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Shjade said:
Personally, while I think the film's altered ending makes more narrative sense in tying the characters so tightly to the events, I think the comic's ending - as bizarre as this is going to sound, considering what that ending is - works better in terms of likeliness to succeed. As others have mentioned above, though he is definitively inhuman, Manhattan is definitely seen as a distinctly American figure.
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, I disagree that there will "never be another Watchmen", because in the comics publishing world post Watchmen (and more significantly post Sandman) there are hundreds of them. There are really good comics that don't require you to have any continuity buy-in released all the time, they just don't have a DC or Marvel logo on the front.