Watchmen | Feature | Charged

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watchmen

atchmen is a bit of an irony, because it might be the best novel you’ve never heard of.

Comic aficinados will huff at this statement – of course they know what Watchmen is! But being a comic mini-series over 20 years old and the first of its kind, Watchmen sits in an odd place – a point between space and time where it changed everything, but not everyone saw it happening.

Before this landmark work from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, comic books felt (and largely were) juvenile, far removed from the intelligent, mature stuff released today. They were not complicated, they hardly asked deep questions and they certainly did not qualify as high literature.

There were definitely comics before Watchmen that bucked this trend, but this dark tale of the trappings of power and the war of principle versus ethics helped change everything. For its reward, it was named one of TIME Magazine’s top 100 novels and movie producers have been trying to whip it into a film ever since Of course, if you have already read the graphic novel, you can understand why this was no easy task. Watchmen is a dautning piece of work.

It’s not a matter of simply a complicated story full of characters with their own agendas (and weaknesses). It made fantastic use of the visual side of comics – that ability to create an idea simply by what you see. One of the reasons why Watchmen took so long to become a film is because of its dark subject matter – something that only became plausable after 2001 made the world a more serious place. But it also needed the right director to get the visual feel spot-on...

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t starts as and really is a murder mystery.

The Comedian, a masked vigilante who (like his peers) has retired from the caped crusader business, is assaulted and thrown out of his highrise penthouse’s window.

He was not a popular guy – in fact, he was quite a bastard and not everyone is sorry to see him go. All but the outlaw Rorschach, another vigilante whose principled drive to right society’s wrongs overshadows any dislike he held for the Comedian. He might not have liked the guy, but the Comedian didn’t slip through his window by accident. As Rorschach digs deeper and involves the other former vigilantes, the mystery gets more and more complicated, plus we come to learn about the vigilantes’ pasts and why they retired. It’s a deep and dark story – Empire Magazine called it the Citizen Kane of comics – and sacred to comic fans. This is why Zack Snyder, the director of 300 and Dawn of the Dead, is perfect for the job. And he knows how high the stakes are: apparently he took the job not because he thinks he can do it right, but he doesn’t want to risk someone else doing it wrong. Still, as Snyder told About.com, fitting a 338-page book into a movie script is tough: “My job is to try and distill the movie down. Like I say, we’re not inventing anything. We’re just trying to get the movie [to a decent length]. The script’s still 140 pages long. It’s not like a flimsy little document.

It’s not a brochure – it’s a fricking phonebook.”

Unlike previous stabs at making the movie, Snyder approached the trimming from a more personal approach. He broke it down to the parts

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The only hero in this story that has actual super powers, Dr. Manhattan is the result of a Quantum Physics accident. That might sound flimsy, but Alan Moore did a lot of research when creating the character.

The successor of the original Nite Owl, this character has reservations over the other heroes’ less ethical behaviour. But this also makes him the voice of sanity in the story. But will he do the right thing or stand back?

After the vigilantes were forced into retirement, Ozymandias became rich from his enterprises.

One of the smartest men on the planet, he is a bit aloof and has a habit of looking down on society.

Arguably the fan favourite, Rorschach get his name from the inkblot mask he wears. An outlaw vigilante, he refused to retire and is still active. His black-and-white view of the world causes a lot of trouble.

Moore added Silke Spectre because he felt he needed a female character in the story. But this hero, who followed in the footsteps of her mother, ends up playing a huge role in how things unfold.

It is his murder that sets events in motion at the start, but through flashbacks we learn more about this cynical and disliked hero that didn’t worry too much about ethics. He had a lot of dark insight to add.

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watchmen The Comedian got tired of kids painting on his walls, so he took a tough stance on vandals.

that really stuck out to him when he first read it many years ago, establishing the essence of what Watchmen is. Fans might reel at this, but the movie is aimed at more people than those who know the original.

Still, Snyder is confident that he hasn’t ruined it. When asked by PonderPop if he left anything out that he wanted in, Snyder responded that he felt “really good about what we chose and what we put it,” and mentioned that the Black Freighter stuff was the hardest to make decisions over.

The Black Freighter is a mini-comic that is

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told within Watchmen and considered a big part of the story. Big enough, in fact, that a spin-off animated movie voiced by Gerard Butler is being made, but unfortunately the tale won’t feature in Watchmen due to budget and time constraints.

Still, even with such cuts it looks like Watchmen will be a massive event for fans and newcomers alike. Prolific director and comic book geek Kevin Smith declared the movie excellent after seeing an early cut.

So who will be watching the Watchmen?

Come March, probably all of us...

In the comic book world, there are few names that stand as tall as those of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. As a writer there is little Moore hasn’t worked on, including Batman, Spawn and Superman. Amongst his most famous works: V For Vendetta and WildC.A.T.S. Gibbons is equally established, especially through his vast body of work with 2000 AD, which includes Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper. The duo have had several collaborations, but Watchmen remains the most famous. First published in 1986 as a mini series of single issues, the comic was a huge success.

For a brief while DC managed to overtake its rival Marvel comics in the sales war, despite the fact that delays hampered the rest of the issues in the series. After the success of the series, DC decided to release the collection as what it called a graphic novel. Although these books are very common today, in 1987 they were a novelty.

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was released as a graphic novel the previous year and DC wanted to replicate the same success. Unfortunately Moore had a falling out with DC in the late eighties and several anniversary editions have been blocked. He also does not endorse the movie adaptation.