Watchmen

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?

Let’s get this out of the way; Yes, Rorschach is the coolest character in Watchmen. Now, I know a lot of people don’t like to hear that. Twitter leftist types mainly. “Oh, now can you say Rorschach is cool? He’s violent! He’s a bigot! He doesn’t support restorative justice and police abolition!” And to that I say…so what? None of that changes the fact that he’s the coolest dude in the book. Sure, Rorschach is a bigoted rape apologist who reads the 1980s equivalent of Brietbart, but Alan Moore still gave him all the coolest parts of the story. No one else erupts from a fridge. No one else kills a man by breaking a toilet. No one else says, “I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me,” which is possibly the coolest line ever written in comics. Being a good person has never been a requirement for being cool. The key to Rorschach’s coolness in Watchmen are two factors: his brilliantly crafted dialogue and the creativity of his violence.

Watchmen gives Rorschach a plethora of cool lines. The screaming “I’m not locked up in here with you.” The calm, couldn’t-care-less-about-your-threats delivery of “Tall order” and “Fat chance.” The sheer power of “I’ll look down and whisper No.” I may not personally care for the work of Alan Moore, but I will freely admit that the man is a dab hand at dialogue. Before Watchmen: Rorschach, conversely, doesn’t give Rorschach a single good line. His first line of spoken dialogue in this comic is “Bitch to be you right now.” This, to put it mildly, fucking sucks ass. This line is so bad I just had to google it to make sure it wasn’t a reference to a crime movie I haven’t seen. Alan Moore gave Rorschach a very deliberate way of speaking. He has an incredibly brisk manner of speaking that implies a calculated utilitarianism in what he chooses to say (comically at odds with the overwrought manner in which he journals). I would posit that Rorschach has one of the most defined character voices in all of comics, and Azzarello has ignored it on the first line to have Rorschach talk like a second rate Yoda.

[Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Rorschach

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?

The following article utilizes William S Burroughs influential “Cut-Up” technique, as Burroughs is one of the major influences of Ozymandias. The texts it uses are as follows: Last War in Albion Vol. 2 by Elizabeth Sandifer, Watchmen by Alan Moore, Pax Americana by Grant Morrison, Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs, Alien Covenant by John Logan & Dante Harper, The Architects of Fear by Meyer Dolinsky, The Book of Urizen by William Blake, The Great Red Dragon by Nick Antosca, Steve Lightfoot, & Bryan Fuller, and The Matrix Reloaded by Lana & Lily Wachowski. The specific methodology of Cut-Up utilized a nine panel grid. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Ozymandias

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’s a telling panel on the final page of Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill, at the funeral of our protagonist. “It all just seems so pointless somehow,” says one of his heroic colleagues. “Six months from now, who’s even going to remember Dollar Bill?” Great question.

[Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill

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)