Who watches the Watchmen?

So... there's a new trailer out.



The Watchmen is one of my favorite all-time comic stories. I've got the massive hard bound Graffiti collected edition that was put out back around '88 or so on my bookshelf. I'm currently re-reading it, and have just gotten to the point where Dr. Manhattan departs for Mars and builds his clockwork palace in the red desert. Fantastic stuff. It's amazing how much of the story I'd forgotten since last reading it--so much subtle nuance and detail, it reminds me of Lord of the Rings in that regard, since it's very much like reading it again for the first time. And in all honesty, I'm amazed that Alan Moore (even given the fact that he's Alan Moore) was allowed by his corporate DC Overlords to tell such a measured, unhurried, deliberately paced story. Sure, it opens with a mysterious murder, but the first several issues are all about character work and flashback. And pirates, too, but those don't show up until several issues in. Sure, they print comics today that take a dozen issues or so to get to the point, but those feel stretched and padded for length. The Watchmen may be languid, but it's very dense as well. Moore knew what he was doing.

At my first (and thus far only) Wizard World that I attended in Dallas maybe five years back, I overheard some comics geeks going through one vendor's back issue boxes. One found a single issue of Watchmen. "Wow. I've heard about this one but I've never read it," says Geek No. 1. "Don't bother. It sucks. Worst super-hero comic ever," replied Geek No. 2. "It's waaaay overrated." At this point I couldn't keep my mouth shut. It's not a "super-hero" comic at all, I interrupted. It was a deconstruction of the archetypes and mythos, blowing up the conventions of the genre. You can't read it as a straight super-hero story. If anything, it's more straight science fiction than anything else. Geek No. 2 levels his slack-jawed stare at me, shrugs his shoulders and says, "That's the same thing."

No. It's not. Science fiction and "super-hero comics" are not the same thing, although they're related and super-hero comics often couch their scenarios in quasi-scientific hand-waving. The Watchmen engages in this mainly with the origins of Dr. Manhattan, but beyond that superficial beginning, the big blue embodiment of the Grand Unification Theory has much more in common with Michael Valentine Smith from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land than Superman or Green Lantern.

But that's neither here nor there. There's a movie version of the Watchmen coming out, from the director of the uber-violent 300 (which I've actually not seen yet), and from the looks of the trailer I fear what the end product will be. Yes, the costumes are fairly accurate translations from the comic. The Silk Spectre actually looks better than the comic version. Rorschach looks, well, awesome. There are scenes drawn directly from panels in the comic that are obviously recognizable in the trailer. Wow. But then the music kicks in. Smashing Pumpkins is... jarring for the tone and mood of the source material. And the hyper-stylized visuals fly in the face of the low-tech, gritty, diminished reality present in the book. The Watchmen, again, isn't a super-hero story. There's damn little action in it--as I said above, much of it is character and flashback. Yet action is front and center in this trailer. How can dramatic posture and intricately choreographed fisticuffs maintain the integrity of the quiet forlorn despair of the graphic novel? I fear for this movie--for ever right choice made on it (and there does seem to be a number of correct decisions made here) there seems to be an equal number that are very wrong-headed indeed.

Remember back when Tim Burton's Batman movie set the world on fire? For all its faults, that was still the very best Batman interpretation we'd ever gotten (at least until Batman Begins rolled into theaters). Sam Hamm, the scriptwriter, was riding high on that success. In the pages of the Batman comic books (or perhaps it was Detective Comics) he wrote a multi-part storyline called "Blind Justice," where Bruce Wayne's shifty corporate dealings were called into question, resulting in his being put on trial for the treasonous offense of selling technology to America's enemies. Of course, the missing tech was going to Batman's arsenal, but Wayne couldn't very well fess up to that, right? It was a great riff on an interesting idea, one that was revisited a decade later with the bloated "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive" storyline that took over DC Comics for the better part of a year. It didn't take Hamm 147 crossover tie-in issues to tell the damn story, though. Those were the days.

About this time--or just a little before, if my memory isn't too faulty--the great Denny O'Neil penned the one and only Watchmen crossover story with a regular DC Comic title. In the pages of The Question (issue 17, I believe), Vic Sage--the protagonist of the title--picks up a Watchmen comic to read on a plane flight. He's startled by the tone and sophistication of the book, but is drawn to the violent character of Rorschach in particular. When Vic later falls asleep on the flight, he dreams that he--in his alter-identity of the faceless Question--is actually Rorschach. Later, he tries to emulate Rorschach in a fight with some goons and gets his ass kicked in the process, at which point he opines "Rorschach sucks." This is, of course, brilliant on so many different levels. Or one level, if you want to pick nits. Alan Moore's original pitch for the Watchmen was for a miniseries utilizing all the Charlton Comics characters DC has recently acquired--the Question being one of them. DC balked at the idea, but suggested Moore create new characters for the story instead, and thus Phantom Lady became Silk Spectre, Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, Blue Beetle became Owl Man, Peacemaker became the Comedian, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt becomes Ozymandias and of course, the Question is Rorschach. Green Arrow makes an appearance in that issue as well, but that's a discussion for another time.

Anyhoo, after Burton's Batman became a monster hit, studios were casting about like crazy for comic book properties to turn into movies and Watchmen was one of those titles to enter the aptly-named "development hell." And Sam Hamm, wunderkind scribe of the Batman movie, was tapped to pen the adaptation. That version was never produced, obviously, but the script found its way online. And I downloaded it a while back. I realize some of you folks might appreciate this as well, what with the new movie coming out. The compare and contrast amongst the different versions is sure to be interesting. Be warned: It's not entirely faithful to the source material.

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