Hurm.
:: breaks Bryan Ekers’s right index finger ::
Manners.
Alan Moore must be rolling over in his grave
I wouldn’t say it’s the basic premise. An important plot point, certainly, but just one of many.
He definitely was familiar with it. It’s name-checked in the comic itself.
IIRC, Moore claims he wasn’t familiar with it when scripting WATCHMEN – but had it brought to his attention late in the game and said, well, shucks, let’s name-check that episode in this final issue as if to make a point of acknowledging it, though for the record I truly hadn’t seen it or even heard of it when I thought up the idea.
Can “Watchmen Babies: V For Vacation” be far behind?
I’ll reserve my judgment on this idea until some of the material comes out. The time is right, more or less, since the movie raised public awareness of Watchmen a few years back, and I always felt like there were more stories to be told in the Watchmen universe. It’ll be up to the creative team whether it becomes the biggest trainwreck since the Dune prequels.
DC owns these characters, but they’re not supposed to make money on them?
I am a Watchman fan, that is to say a fanatic.
The original already did a lot of background exposition.
What the heck else is there to write about?
How Rorschach got crazy?
The early adventures of Dr. Osterman? Hey, look I’m going to the lab just like I did last week and will do next week.
What was NiteOwl like before he got a paunch?
Come on, y’all. Totally lame.
But, at least it isn’t a sequel.
That is the only saving grace here.
Hey, it could always be worse: Saturday Morning Watchmen - YouTube
Prediction: people will bitch and moan but every one of these will sell a huge number of copies.
I enjoyed watchmen a lot but it isn’t the be all end all of comics. Hell to this day I have never completely read the Pirate parts because I found it tedious and I have read the book at least three or four times.
I always found the world it was set it fascinating and think a prequel exploring that, done well, could be really good.
You said what I wanted to say, but better.
No! This just encourages them.
They actually seem pretty much identical to the feelings expressed by, well, virtually every poster in this thread, and for reasons that are radically different than what one supposed would be the reaction of Carroll et. al. to Moore’s Lost Girls - namely, it’s not simply that his characters are being repurposed, but instead, that they are being repurposed in aid of a cheesy cash in that’s highly unlikely to say anything new and/or interesting.
On the other hand, I imagine Moore would be genuinely amused by an actual Tijuana Bible featuring his characters.
Not exactly a prequel, but do you have a problem with the existence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?
Not that this will be anything like that level, by all indications quite the opposite. But DC own the characters, they can do what they like with them. They can’t make me read them, though, so we’re all good.
Ekers. Don’t make me k-
:: hands Malacandra a handkerchief ::
Here’s CNN.com’s Geek Out! on the new comics: http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/03/prequel-to-a-classic-before-watchmen/?hpt=hp_t3
Right, like I need CNN to tell me about comics. But I suppose some do.
The real issue as I see isn’t that they’re doing it. It’s that I strongly doubt most people realize the true point of Watchmen. How do they show them in prequel? Do they show them being heroic? Or do they show them as the bizarre fetishists that each of them are.
There’s not a single one of the main characters (including Ozymandias) who is not deeply broken. I mean broken at a level where they shouldn’t be out on the street. Just because some have a certain level of control doesn’t mean they can’t relapse.
Hell, the most normal one is Laurie. She was forced to be a hero and it still broke her, in the end. “The costumes made it better, didn’t they?” All Rorschach is about is that he’s the most honest about what drives him. Even before he went truly mad he had real issues.
To show them in prequels as normal, happy heroes in the traditional mode is to betray the essential characters. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done. But the character focus needs to remain Moore’s “What drives people to DO this insane thing?”
But it would be amusingly ironic to take the characters who had such a big part in starting the darker “edgier” reboot trend and give them a happy sunny reboot.
Still, we’re talking about a Rorschach who holds down a regular job in between fighting crime without resorting to lethal force, all while speaking in a perfectly normal tone of voice; that’s how Moore wrote him, as someone who for a decade was quiet and grim but decidedly rational – and working alongside an upbeat do-gooder with six-pack abs, since Nite Owl was still in his young and optimistic days.
(Heck, isn’t the whole point that Moore was ready and willing to write 'em as the Question and the Blue Beetle twenty years after their silver-age adventures? That the story would’ve worked just fine had Moore simply plugged in the actual stories and characterization from back when – all of which he was supposedly extrapolating to its logical conclusion, even if nothing of the sort could actually be seen in the original?)