I saw it and it was good.
I first read Watchmen when I was in high school, 14 or 15 years old, and getting books delivered to me via the Science Fiction Book Club. I still have that same copy – though who knows what happened to the dust cover – it sort of disintegrated over the years, was laminated in a last ditch effort at preservation, and then went *poof* somewhere along the way. The pages are now yellow, it smells weird, and some of the colors are fading. I have found it endlessly entertaining. I never thought it could be made into a movie.
And I am so glad it was. It’s a great story and now people who would never pick up a comic book, or a graphic novel with text passages and weird collages, will get to know the story. Such a good story!
So often people refer to Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns in the same breath and how they reflected a darker aesthetic that had never been seen in comics before… and I think that really undersells how complex Watchmen is. How complex the characters are! Alan Moore and David Gibbons created a world that doesn’t try to explain everything (Hooded Justice! So many questions!) but let’s us experience the end of it. Miller’s TDKR is less complex – he plays with DC’s archetypes, but only a few – and it appears that he has been unable to move beyond it in his other creative work. Better comparisons to Watchmen, I think, would be Marvels or Kingdom Come. Or Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.
But nothing really compares and, almost immediately, everything was influenced by Watchmen. It showed the possibilities and made the medium’s mainstream open up to new kinds of stories. The 90s “alt-comics” and adult-oriented imprints, for example. Alan Moore insured his own continued career by creating something so outsized.
And the movie, it can never be the book, but it does a great job trying! I will see it again.
