While I was in Seattle, I spent a day hanging out with my brother, @nathanisthebest, his friend Kate, and Mike (@elbowsandknees). We went to the comic shop and I was looking at a rack of Wonder Woman trades and whatnot.

As I’m reviewing the materials, a person of a certain stereotypical comic book nerd persuasion stands next to me to look at the same rack. Or, as it turns out, my rack. He asks, “So, who’s your favorite superhero?”

As I am standing in front of the Wonder Woman display, holding an armload of Wonder Woman comics, I mumble, “Uh, Wonder Woman?” and figure that will be the end of it or he will ask me what I think of something specific about Wonder Woman, since that’s how these nerdy conversations usually go.

But then he says, “You usually don’t see girls in comic book shops, so I had to ask.”

I took a breath and replied, “You usually don’t see women my age being referred to as girls,” turned on my heel and walked away. I didn’t see his reaction. He’s lucky I was in a good mood, I guess.

Later on, as we were driving Mike back to the Lynnwood Park & Ride, I began to feel some regret about my brutal shutdown of the nerd and mentioned it to the car – which then exploded into laughter and full-on judgement of his poor-social skills and, apparently, bad personal grooming. I really didn’t get a good look at him, but I’ll take their word for it.

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.

My brother, Nathan, comments on the awesomeness that is Watchmen. and makes all other fanboys look like morons.

Do you ever look at the movie listings, or just at what’s playing at your favorite multi-plex, and think it all sounds good, so you just decide to wait until Watchmen comes out?

Yeah, me too.