watchmen legacy

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Few creators agreeing to the Faustian Pact of DC’s 2013 “Before Watchmen” came out of the craven affair smelling particularly clean. In the aftermath of The New 52, DC was riding high on controversial yet conversation-dominating marketing, and before a book ever hit print, a series of prequels for Watchmen felt like a clear form of creative desecration in service of making a buck. This aura was cemented by a series of interviews with Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore, arguably the best comics writer of all time, in which Moore venomously denounced DC’s decision with scathing one-liners like, “I would hope that you wouldn’t want to buy a book knowing that its author actually had complete contempt for you.”

Nonetheless, celebrated writer and artist Darwyn Cooke signed up to write and draw Before Watchmen: Minutemen and co-write Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre with Amanda Conner. Although the experience and reaction was far from a party (Cooke described it as a “shit show”), Cooke’s legacy remains largely untarnished by his significant contributions to the debacle. At the time, I remember thinking of “Minutemen” as the series held in the highest regard (or at least as the one not held in contempt!). A near decade ago, I even spent an entire early Comic Book Herald review defending “Minutemen” as the lone success of “Before Watchmen,” but couldn’t muster much more passion than the repetition that the book’s “not a failure” (my highest praise!).

Looking back, I suppose that remains the question. Did “Minutemen” and Cooke succeed where the rest of “Before Watchmen” could not? [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Minutemen by Darwyn Cooke

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

There is an old saying: the film is never as good as the book.

In large part, this is because the quality of any given film adaptation is largely determined by how faithfully it recreates the original source material. Simone Murray observes that this has long been common in “film and television reviewing, in broader journalistic discourse, and in everyday evaluations by the film-going public.” It is a view which holds that film can “ultimately never be more than an adjunct to literature because literature came first and because literature was art whereas film was mass culture.”

But we live in a postmodern world of images, retrospection, and pastiche. Literature is no longer inherently superior to film based on any ‘imagined wealth of cultural capital”—we can approach a film “on its own terms, rather than as a mere supplement to a literary antecedent.”

In saying that we don’t have to judge a film adaptation based on its fidelity to the source material, I’m participating in what Murray calls “the ritual slaying of fidelity criticism at the outset.” After all, she points out that barely any academic criticism about adaptation buys into the idea that an adaptation is inherently inferior to the original just because it’s an adaptation.

But ritually slaying something sounds rather fun, so with the ritual performed let’s turn to Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of Watchmen. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009)

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Comedian is an odd character in the legacy of Watchmen. He doesn’t have the righteous, badassery of Rorschach or the intriguing indifference or memeability of Dr Manhattan; he’s just a really shitty dude. And unlike Rorschach, he doesn’t have the sense of honour that lets you ignore the really shitty parts so you can just enjoy the core you wish was there. It’s very easy to forget that Rorschach is a rape apologist; it’s impossible to forget that the Comedian is a rapist.

He’s also the only core character who doesn’t get a detailed backstory. Rorschach and Laurie Juspeczyk and Nite-Owl get big, juicy sequences about who they are and why they do what they do but the Comedian just shows up one day, fully formed like unto Athena (This is a very clever reference because Athena, much like Watchmen itself, features owls). So the prospect of a Watchmen prequel focusing on the Comedian, unlike most of the other Before Watchmen offerings, at least has the intriguing prospect of answering the question: what is this guy’s deal??? [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Comedian Review!