Comics « Exit Music

If you want to read in detail about the literary depth of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel, or want to hear about it’s troubled transition to film, then this is not the place for you. The internets are filled with millions of words on these topics. This post is just a brief brain dump of my thoughts having seen the movie last night.

Watchmen is a great comic that I like very much.
Watchmen is a terrible movie that I struggled through.
Ignoring anything that I had read, I went in excited – but left disappointed.
I really didn’t miss those bits of the comic that were omitted, such as the comic in a comic.
The faithful recreation of panel to frame is impressive, but it just doesn’t work.
Some of the casting is great, the rest is just a waste.
At 2 hours and 40 minutes it was sooooo looonnnggg.
I see what they were trying to do with the soundtrack, situating the film in the 80s, but it was quite horrendous and incredibly jarring.
The film just didn’t work.
Which is a shame.

Back in the day I was definitely a Marvel kid. These days thanks to the combined powers of the Bat and the Ring, I’m definitely in camp DC. One of my favourite things that DC does is use great writers to bring together the entire DC universe in compelling world changing storylines.

The first I read was the intriguing murder mystery Identity Crisis. It was a great story and introduced me to a lot of DC’s characters. Then when I was in Boston I picked up Infinite Crisis – a second major event storyline to follow from 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was great read, and though you can go straight into it, I found out there were a few precursor storylines, including Identity Crisis.

So when I found out that the third major event – Final Crisis – was midway through it’s comic run I decided I’d look into some of the background reading. It seems DC put out a weekly comic Countdown to Final Crisis, which had been released in four volumes. Reading the reviews, however, it was clear that most people found it inferior to something called 52. I was intrigued, so imagine my surprise when on Christmas morning I opened a gift from Meemaw, and it contained all four volumes of 52 (I suspect that Amanda may have been involved in picking them out).

It turns out 52 was the preceding (and first) weekly comic that DC produced, chronicling the year AFTER Infinite Crisis. They’d already done One Year Later, but this comic was to explain what happened in the missing year – a year without the big three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, though not a year without heroes.

And what a great year it was. Definitely worth the time – I can’t wait to read it again in fact. The writers work together really well to weave some rip-roaring tales. One of the writers – Grant Morrison – a fellow Scot known for some great Batman stories, has created some awesome mini-series like We3 and has a history in 2000AD and Dan Dare. You just can’t get a finer pedigree than that!