But that’s what you get when you adapt any idea or story from one medium to another, from Titus Andronicus to No Country For Old Men to Sin City. All different works, some truer in spirit to the original than others, but still different works with the same names and some common characters. I think the purists are getting way too hung up on this with Watchmen because it’s sort of a “sacred cow.” At the end of the day, everyone’s precious trade paperback will still be on their shelves, their twelve issues will be nestled safely in mylar in their longboxes, and we’ll have an interesting (and possibly very good) movie as well, capturing the spirit of the original work in a whole new medium.
I agree with you for the most part. There are plenty of works of art that can have their essential spirit transferred over into a new work of art. But I maintain that Watchmen is one of the rare exceptions - in its case the medium itself is an essential part of its spirit so it can’t be transferred.
What’s funny about it? I agree with him 100%.
I haven’t read this thing. But why would it be wrong to think that the work is essentially about the notion of a superhero, without being essentially about the comic book medium? Certainly the notion of the superhero has much of its origin in that medium, but they are not essentially connected, are they?
-FrL-
You need to read it. It really is about the medium.
Well, yeah, it’s on my list. But can someone say something about why it’s essentially about the medium and not just about the idea of the superhero that evolved in that medium?
-FrL-
If the medium relies on the written word alone to get its message across then its a novel.
If most of the message is conveyed by pictures with just the dialogue and perhaps some scene setting put across as the written word then its a comic book.
A picture saves a thousand words but it doesn’t convey thoughts,emotions and history to the reader.
The reason why books haven’t be surplaced by T.V. and movies is because the two mediums can never give as much in depth information as litereature.
Larry Borgia, the Matrix isn’t entirely original. It was influenced heavily by gasp! a comic book! (According to my friend the comic book guru; I haven’t read more than the first trade)
Taken from Wiki The Matrix (franchise) - Wikipedia
(Because I know better than to post without a cite, honestly!)
So you’ve never heard of “Hidden Fortress”, or the “Demon with a Glass Hand” and “Soldier” Outer Limits episodes? And see freekalette’s link. I’d say “Alien” is the only original story in the lot. And I wouldn’t be surprised if even that wasn’t the case.
Just because the others weren’t ripped off from a source with the same title, doesn’t make them remotely “original”.
Which doesn’t have the plot of Star Wars by any stretch of the imagination. It has a princess and two comic-relief characters through whose eyes we see most of the action, and that’s pretty much it. Lucas liked the movie, liked how it was told through the most unimportant characters, and used that. The first scene is very similar to the “R2D2 and C3P0 in the desert” scene, but apart from that, there’s little. This is not to say that the Star Wars story is original, of course; it was created specifically to be unoriginal. But a Hidden Fortress ripoff it is not.
Which shares some storyline elements with Terminator, but the plot is entirely different.
I hear it’s pretty much ripped off from It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but I haven’t seen it.
Black Destroyer by A. E. van Vogt, published in 1939, if often cited as a source for Alien.
I’ve read Black Destroyer (and Discord in Scarlet and The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. van Vogt, and seen **It! The Terror from Beyond Space **many times. IMHO, Alien is a direct rip-off of It!, with bits thrown in from Mario Bava’s Planet of Vampires and Roger Corman’s Night of the Blood Beast. It’s the same damned plot, with the Creature picked up on the apparently deserted planet pickibng off members of the crew and skulking through the ventilation ducts, then getting offed at the end by the crew dionning space suits and opening the airlock.
The plot of Black destroyer et al. is completely different. Van Vogt’s story, AFAIK, was the first to feature the “Alien Creature Loose on a Space Ship”, but the creature in Black Destroyer is pretty intelligent (more than the xenomorph in Alien) and pilots off in an escape craft itself at the end. I’ve no doubt that Jerome Bixby read it before scripting It! (basic situation the same, and the way BD sucks the phosphorous out through his victim’s skins echoes the way It! sucks out water by osmosis. Alien is the barbarian i the bunch, ripping his victims up to no obvious purpose).
We’re using the word “original” in two different senses.
To give an example that’s already been mentioned there’s Tales of the Black Freighter, the comic book within the comic book. Moore used it to highlight the similarities and differences between the comic book in the characters’ world and the comic book the was the characters’ world. And there’s its context; in our world, genres like pirate comics were driven out of the market by the popularity of superhero comic books. In Moore’s world where real superheroes exist, nobody reads about them in comic books - making the points that comic books are an escapist artform and that reality can ruin the illusion that’s needed for popular fiction. Moore also had Carmine Infantino draw the pirates comic book as opposed to Dave Gibbons who drew the main portion of the series. Readers familiar with the genre would recognize Infantino as an artist from the Silver Age of comics and realize that Moore was seeking to invoke nostalgia for an earlier style of comic books.
This isn’t just me deconstructing Moore’s book. I’ve read his script for the book, along with his notes to the artists and editors. He really was consciously putting a multitude of subtle things like this into the series.
So you pretty much only care that the title is original?
I agree with the other poster who said that serialization does not denigrate something from graphic novel status anymore than it did to certain classics of literature. Clearly Watchmen (as well as most other maxi- and mini-series), which was conceptualized from the start as a 12 part story with a definitive structure and ending, cannot be put in the same category as simple collections of ongoing series.
I’ve heard this before, but I’ve seen the Matrix trilogy and read the entire Invisibles series, and other than a certain sensibility, they bare almost no resemblance to each other. I’m seriously shocked that Morrison himself would say such a thing. It’s paramount to calling Alien a plagiarism of Star Wars because they both have space ships and aliens. Actually, Matrix and Invisibles are even less alike than that.
But in any case, the “original” point of the poster was about direct adaptations, not lack of complete originality.
I for one look forward to the movie. I’ve weathered both great and crappy adaptations of works I love in the past, and neither has made me love the original any less. Whether the movie succeeds or fails, we still have the graphic novel - it’s not going anywhere. From the website it looks like they are trying to be fairly faithful, and it seems to me that Miller’s other stuff has been somewhat faithful (altho less complex), so I’m optimistic. I have a feeling, tho, that the lack of full frontal blueness will irk me.
Can you give an example of what you consider to be an original story? Because I can’t really think of anything, in any medium, that doesn’t borrow from it’s predecessors to a degree that would preclude calling it “original,” at least under the standard you’ve established here for that term.
Piece of tripe is what I say.
No, seriously, I think Watchmen is ridiculously oversold. Yes, sequential art can do this kind of thing. Thank you, johnny-come-latelies to reading the form, for finally getting the memo. Yes, Moore & Gibbons know how to tell a story visually. Moore actually understands both writing in English & writing in pictures, & that’s not true of everyone in “comics.”
But good grief, it’s a burlesque of super-heroes! Why anyone would try to sell a new reader of long-form cartooning on something that’s mainly trying to send up & rethink over twenty previous works, without any familiarity with the source material?
Fans of Watchmen occasionally are like people who think Star Wars was original.
edited to add: Oh, oh, & then there are the nuts who think that somehow, by populating his work with a cast the majority of which are unlikeable in some way, Moore “proved” that costumed adventurers are necessarily vile. Which is a curious opinion, considering the vanishingly small sample of real-world costumed adventurers. Perhaps it’s gained currency due to people tiring of the surfeit of “super-hero” comics. Mostly I think most people can’t do logic.
No. Obviously not. But I really don’t care to argue about it.