Amazon.com Review: Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since.
The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the finepace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite
A Q&A with Dave Gibbons on the Making of Watchmen
Question: You were tasked with drawing new illustrations of key shots from the new Watchmen film. Was it a difficult challenge to re-imagine your work in this movie format?
Dave Gibbons: I don’t think that I actually did many key shots from the film. I had to actually imagine them rather than exactly recreate what was going to be in the movie. But as far as the drawings I did for the licensing purposes, accuracy was the real key so that they looked exactly like the movie. Whereas doing the graphic novel was creating stuff afresh and being very creative, this was more the case of interpreting something that already existed. So it was rather more a commercial art job than a creative thing.
Q: How many scenes from the original graphic novel did you redraw in the new "movie" format?
DG: I kind of did them piecemeal, these licensing drawings. I did do a section of storyboarding for Zack Snyder. There is a part of the movie that isn’t in the graphic novel and he wanted to see how I would have drawn it, if it had been in the graphic novel. So I redid the storyboards as three pages of comic on the nine-panel grid, also getting it coloured by John Higgins so it looked authentic. But I think there were probably only 3 or 4 scenes that I drew, which were from the movie.
Q: What was your working method for producing these new illustrations from the film? And how has it changed from when you originally illustrated Watchmen?
DG: When you’re producing things from existing material, you have to look at and assemble the references... you know, keep looking backwards and forwards to make sure what you’re drawing is accurate to what’s in the photos. I did have lots of photos from the movie and in some cases I had more or less the illustration I was going to do in photo form, which made it a lot easier. On others I had to construct it from various references: really just the usual illustrator’s job of drawing something to reference. And on the original illustrations of Watchmen, I was free to come up with exactly the angles and exactly the costumes and everything that I wanted to. When you’ve designed a costume and drawn it a few times, you actually internalize it and you find you can draw it without having to refer to reference at all. So in some ways it’s more creative and in some ways it’s easier!
Q: In Watchmen: The Art of the Film, there are concept designs by other artists of their visions of your iconic characters. What do you think of their versions and did you offer any guidance while they were working on these?
DG: It’s always really interesting to see versions of your characters drawn by other artists. You tend to see things in them that you hadn’t noticed before. So I really enjoyed looking at those. I certainly didn’t offer them any guidance. The purpose of getting those kinds of drawings done is to get a fresh perspective on what exists. I noticed actually that they really stuck more closely to my original designs than those, but I really enjoyed seeing them.
Q:Watchmen: Portraits is Clay Enos’s stunning black and white collection of photos of each character from the Watchmen movie. What was it like looking through this book at all the characters you had conceived years ago now being brought to life by actors?
DG: It’s rather interesting; you know if you look at the Watching the Watchmen book you can see these characters as fairly sketchy rough conceptual versions. Then when you look at Clay’s book you can actually see them right down to counting the number of pores on the skin on the end of their noses! It’s incredible high focus! It’s like zooming in through space and time to look at the surface of some moon of Saturn or something. I thoroughly enjoyed his book... it had a real artistic quality to it that was really so good. And of course to see these actors who so much are the embodiment of what I drew, that it’s a tremendous thrill to see them made flesh!
Q:Watchmen: The Film Companion features some stills from the animated version of The Black Freighter. What do you think of the look and design of this animated feature?
DG: It looks really interesting! Although I drew my version in the comic book in a kind of horror-comic style, these are very much in a savage manga style. I think they work really well... they’ve got the kind of manic intensity, which I think that work should have and I really can’t wait to see the whole feature. I’ve seen the trailer for it and that looks great and again they’ve used a lot of the compositions that I came up with but just translated them to this kind of very modern drawn animation.
Q: How much time did you spend on the set of Watchmen? Was it a surreal experience to see your work recreated like this?
DG: I was on the set of Watchmen for a couple of days and it really was surreal to walk through a door and then suddenly be in the presence of all these people in living breathing flesh! I was there for what you would call the Crimebusters meeting where they were all there in costume in the same room, which was incredible. They had obviously planned that so I would get to see everyone. It was surreal though quite a wonderful experience to see it come to life.
Product Description: "Watchmen" redefined superhero conventions and re-introduced comics to an adult audience with a gripping, labyrinthine piece of comic art. Rorschach, a half-psychotic vigilante must convince his ex team-mates, now middle-aged and retired, that he has uncovered a plot to murder the remaining superheroes - along with millions of innocent civilians...Even reunited, will the remnants of the 'Watchmen' be enough to avert a global apocalypse? With a powerful storyline masterfully told by comics supremo Alan Moore and beautifully rendered artwork by the talented Dave Gibbons - this is the one that started the graphic novel revolution and is definitely not one to miss!
Fine Characters, Flawed Reasoning ^ Alan Moore, whenever he is creating characters is brilliant. It's what he does best. Like any great writer, Moore's characters have more life and depth to them than some flesh and blood people you'll meet in everyday life. His ability to create a world for them to live and interact with is equally outstanding. I was, however, annoyed with Dr. Manhattan's description of his understanding of time. His explanation of which can be torn apart by a freshman physics major. More frustrating was Mr. Moore's conclusion, which I have been told he wrote under the stress of D.C. demanding that he just finish. But I believe that in the way he kills of his most interesting character in the most anticlimactic fashion, misread what a world and American response to a massive and horrifying loss of life, and elevates his least developed character to the position of the most important character of the conclusion to be unsatisfying. I recommend this book, nevertheless, as I think for all its faults, the Watchmen is perhaps at its best the most intelligent graphic novel I have read and at its worse it is no worse than much else that can be found in any comic book.
Great Artwork ^ The story line and the artwork in this book is someone who is interested in comics needs to check out. This graphic novel was very good and was let down in my opinion by the movie.
A Masterpiece! ^ This is the first comic book/graphic novel that I have ever read. And I was not disappointed. The storytelling of Alan Moore and artwork of Dave Gibbons make for an amazing piece of art. I am very much a "visual" learner and the added visual stimulation, as opposed to the traditional written story-telling, helped me enjoy it all the more.
This is a complex, inter-woven story covering the many different lives, perspectives, and relationships of the Crimebusters, a group of costumed do-gooders who are in search of a mask-killer. There is an ominous presence looming overhead throughout the book. What really made this present was the foreshadowing, used to describe the flaws of a hopeless society through hatred, war, and fighting in the streets. Then there are also moments of promise for the world, when small characters go out of their way to do the right thing by just caring for others around them. By the end of the book, we see that people are forced to come together as a result of a tragedy (think post-9/11).
If you loved the movie, you will love the book even more!
Spiderman it sure aint... ^ --for crissakes it's so cold in my office. You'd think we were living back in the days of Dickens. I swear I'm going to put my scarf and gloves on in about ten minutes.
Just finished reading Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" and it far exceeded my expectations, even the lavish praised heaped upon it by the most intelligent people I know, who've urged me to read it for years. One wonders what the world of "literature" is coming to when you've got to turn to comic books to read something truly edgy, intellectually challenging, and creatively uncompromising. As publishers fill up every inch of available shelf space hoping to make millions with Dan Brown knock-offs--when Dan Brown himself was never worth reading--and an unchecked infestation of paranormal vampire romances spawned by the long-ago success of Laurell Hamilton, it's left to the geeks who write comic books to actually write stuff worth reading.
Maybe its because comic books are written (and largely read) by misfits like myself who see the world from the margins, being ourselves only marginal. Well, whatever the reason, "The Watchmen" is simply a terrific book, a summation, in some ways, of the last half of the 20th century in which concepts such as heroism, patriotism, good and evil, the sanctity and meaning of human life were tossed into the blender and turned into a viscous, stinking goo.
Moore does a kind of post-modern critical analysis of the comic-ethos even as he's writing a comic-book. His superheroes are deeply flawed--sometimes downright criminally insane human beings--but they also embarrasedly aware of the absurdity of running around the city at night in cape and underwear catching bad guys. This is just one example of Moore's genius: "The Watchmen" becomes all the more realistic because the charaters themselves realize how ludicrous it is to truly believe any of it.
To say the heroes in "The Watchmen" are more anti-heroes is true, but it doesn't go quite far enough. They aren't anti-heroes in the same fashion that the updated and more morally ambiguous Batman is an anti-hero. Moore's "heroes" often lack not only goodness, but grandeur. They're petty, mean-spirited, greedy, opportunistic, and, in one instance, they even smell bad. But not-so-oddly enough, they are trying to do good in their own often wrong-headed way.
That, too, is what makes them so real.
They are more like the old Olympian gods of Greek mythology in that sense, bickering and scheming, as caught up with their own in-fighting as they are with the human world they are supposedly overseeing.
All that aside, Moore's storytelling technique is impressively innovative, as is the layout of Dave Gibbons' visuals. This is graphic storytelling at its finest...well, the finest I can remember seeing. And Moore is obviously a really intelligent guy. His references are broad and his influences eclectic. This is a substantial piece of work that gave me several days of real pleasure--well worth the $19.99 I paid for it.
I think I'm going to go outside and warm up. I see it's 35 degrees out there, which must be about ten degrees warmer than it is inside this building. I'm going to buy some soup. I'm going to think about things. I'm going to come back here and eat my soup and think about some more things. I'm going to try to get warm. I'm going to look foward to five o'clock.
Sheer genius that only improves with age. ^ Like so many people, I first read Watchmen when it dropped on the unsuspecting public so many years ago. At the time, I was more enamored with Miller's "Dark Knight Returns;" however, (with no slight to 'Dark Knight, which is, in itself a classic) I have found that as time passes, the brilliance of Alan Moore's superheroic deconstruction stands alone in the pantheon of graphic novel greatness. The storyline remains, sad to say, vigilant and pertinent - and the characters are classic archetypes that even the most discerning literati must appreciate. Watchmen is a disturbing look inside all of us, and the novel's message refuses to die, [despite being made into a crappy movie.] I TEACH Watchmen to my 10th grade gifted/talented class every year and they are, without fail, blown away. You will be, too.Why Are All the Good Teachers Crazy?
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