Did anyone really notice Watchmen when it came out? Was it highly anticipated? Did it come out of nowhere? How well known was Alan Moore? Did people think it would revolutionize comics the way it did?
So far as I remember, there were some people who eagerly anticipated each issue of Watchmen and it was considered ground-breaking at the time. I know that it came out around the same time as Dark Knight, but I don’t remember which was first or to what extent they overlapped, but there was quite a bit of excitement about both of them.
Among the comics-literate, Alan Moore was already well known for his critically successful work on Swamp Thing.
I had heard about “Watchmen” when it first came out - I think some monthly DC titles had adverts for it. But I was primarily a Marvel Comics nut (at least then I was, not so much anymore) and dismissed it. It was only a few years down the line that I’d heard some buzz about it. I borrowed copies of the monthly issues from a friend to read. I confess that the first time I read it, I didn’t like it - chiefly because it was so different from anything else I’d read. I’ve since changed my mind.
IIRC, “the Dark Knight Returns”, which came out in the same relative time period, got a lot more notice than “Watchmen.” Even “Camelot 3000” (which is not well remembered today ISTM) got more coverage than “Watchmen.”
I was aware of and eagerly anticipating Watchmen. It’s one of the few books of the era that I bought multiple copies of for investment purposes.
There was not only a good deal of coverage and anticipation, but it was considered important before an issue even hit the stands. It was well represented at cons, and received almost universal praise.
Apart from “Dark Knight Returns” it was probably the most important series of the decade and is likely one of the most repspected works in the history of comics.
The only thing really bigger was than these two was the DC Crisis which hasn’t stood the test of time nearly as well as DKR or Watchmen.
Camelot began with much promise and just fizzled to nothing, and ended with a whimpering chronically late last issue.
Yeah, Crisis, then Watchmen, the Dark Knight. Bang Bang Bang. Good times.
At least in my circle of college-attending geek friends Watchmen was one of those ‘must have’ items. We anticipated, read, and debated each issue with gusto. It was an event.
I knew of it vaguely, but didn’t read it until I borrowed a friend’s compilation copy some time later, soon after which I bought my own.
Actually, it was Crisis, then Dark Knight, then Watchmen, although there was overlap. I don’t know if there was buzz with general public, like there was with Dark Knight Returns, but it you a comic fan in the know and got your comics at a comic shop, it was anticipated, and interest grew exponentially after the reviews and word-of-mouth from the first issue.
Moore at the time was known as a talented newcomer (at least in America, since he had been writing comics in Britain for years, although his stuff wouldn’t get reprinted until after Watchmen), although he hand’t enjoyed wide readership. He started on Swamp Thing in (I think) '83, and won some awards for that. The only other work he had done was some inividual issues and annuals of a few DC titles (most notably “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, the last Pre-Crisis Superman story).
However, this was during an era when Marvel was seriously dominating DC sales-wise.
I heard no pre-release buzz, but the comic shop near my college did have a poster up, so I knew vaguely what it was when the first issue came out. I picked it up and was immediately hooked.
I’ll agree with the others calling it one of the most important works in superhero comics. I think Dark Knight eclipses it, but I’d put it ahead of Marvels.
I was still a kid–12, maybe. I looked at the 2nd issue & decided it wasn’t my cup of tea.
I had read some Alan Moore Swamp Thing before that, & I’d read a few other things he’d written without knowing who he was. While some of his stories are pretty cool, I wasn’t a fan. Bit grisly for me, really.
I only actually read Watchmen in the last couple of years. What a horrible work. I don’t mean that it’s poorly written. Rather, the reputation & sheer weight of that work has cast a shadow on the Charlton Action Hero trademarks that Moore ripped off. I’ve actually seen an ostensibly intelligent person contend that the Question should behave more like Rorschach. Uh, no.
I was too busy lapping up the New Universe.
It went nowhere.
Oh, yeah, um, it was advertised a fair bit, but not a lot more than Lords of the Ultra-Realm or Electric Warrior. Dick Giordano, IIRC, had a “Meanwhile…” page in which he explained how it came to be, including telling Moore to come up with his own characters.
That was a month or two into the project. For the first issue, readers had to figure out on their own that the Watchmen were, in fact, based on the Charlton Action Heroes. (I know they were intended to represent other existing characters, but I initially thought Dr. Manhattan was Superman and Rorshach and Nite-Owl were the Neal Adams and Adam West versions of Batman.)
The people who knew Moore from SWAMP THING and MARVELMAN really, really dug him, but there were only a few thousand of them until 1984-ish.
DC had a sort of promo comic they distributed free through comics shops in '82-'83, and these had one page apiece for the titles they wanted to promote heavily. It was in one of these that I first read Moore’s writing.
Oh, so you were the other one buying the NU titles.
Ahem. I bought the first three or four issues of almost all of the NU titles. So there were at least three of us.
Yes, even Kickers, Inc. Although I think I only got issue 1 of that.
Holy CRAP, they were terrible.
Oh, and this:
If your point is that, regardless of its own merits, Watchmen has had a deleterious effect on the Charlton heroes, then I’ll more or less agree with you. If it’s something else, please clarify.
Either way, I must disagree with your characterization of Moore as “ripping off” the Charlton heroes. He wanted to write the story with those heroes, was told he could not, so created analogues of them. I think of it more as an homage and re-telling than a ripoff.
Kickers Inc was horrifyingly bad, as was Mark Hazzard: Merc. Justice was pretty good once they drop kicked the alien/extra-dimensional elements of it. Nightmask was just sort of meh, Psi-Force was sort of meh, Spitfire was sort of meh, Star Brand was meh with a lot of really icky misogynistic elements mixed in. D.P. 7 I thought was the best of the lot, with the most interesting premise (and the premise closest to the originally stated purpose of the NU), interesting characters with generally pretty cool powers and decent story-telling.
I was too, but mostly just Star Brand. I really enjoyed that series, and I snapped up the Star Brand one-shot that was recently released.
Watchmen came out shortly after I started collecting comics, and I unfortunately skipped it. But then, I was new at the hobby so I didn’t know what was what. I was busy trying to be a Punisher completist.
It was huge at my college. People would plague the local Comic Book Guy demanding to know when the next issue was coming out
Can’t help you there. I wasn’t aware of it 'till issue four or so. I wasn’t a big comic reader.
As krokodil says, comic nerds knew him from Swamp Thing, which was amazing when he wrote it, IMO. I don’t know how well known he was outside the hard core comic fan-base.
There was definitely a feeling, inspired by DKR as much as Watchmen, that superhero comics had taken a giant step forward.
Note that this is my personal recollection from when I was a student at a small liberal arts college. I can’t speak for the world at large.
I remember the excitement of RONIN, DARK KNIGHT and WATCHMEN when they came out. At the time though, I was only sporatically collecting comics and had no easy access to a comics shop and had hit-and-miss success getting sequential issues at the local drug store, so while I remember individual issues on the shelves, I didn’t read any of these issues until they were collected in the very first trade paperbacks. Man, I still remember the weekend I bought and read WATCHMEN straight through. I was 16. HARRY POTTER? Feh. Kids these days…
Alan Moore’s name was fairly well known to ME, at least, because I started recognizing his name after reading “The Anatomy Lesson” in DC’s YEAR’S BEST COMICS STORIES in 1983, and catching his awesome SUPERMAN ANNUAL with Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin fighting Mongul in the Fortress of Solitude; collecting the SWAMP THING back issues and stumbling on back issues of WARRIOR with his Marvelman serial, and V for Vendetta, and once, a very rare copy of Moore’s Maxwell The Cat.
Well, yeah, there’s that. Then there’s the fact that the most influential superhero writer of the last twenty years is actually a horror writer; & that so many superhero fans tout Watchmen as if it were the introduction to the form. This irks me: First, Watchmen is less a superhero comic than a horror novel with masked mystery men characters; second, while it has some distinctive deconstructionist critiques of superheroes, it is not that unique or clever in its attempts to inject realism into that genre, & its most distinct critique is its dismissal of superhero fundamentals.
Really, if you want an anti-superhero book, Adam Warren’s Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone is shorter & thus less indulgent. If you want gritty superheroes, there were plenty running around before Watchmen came along.
Moore has written some great stuff, but he has what I’ve come to call the Led Zeppelin problem; being at the top, even for a little while, led him to be so hyped he can’t help but be overrated.
Well, I call it a ripoff. I call League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a ripoff (actually, that’s much nicer than what I call it, but this isn’t the Pit). In the public release about Watchmen, Giordano was very nice about it, but I imagine he was “noticeably upset” in private, considering what he must have gone through to get the rights to his old Action Heroes moved to DC, & to have this self-important punk come in & propose a project which would drain most of them of nobility, morality, & admirability.