By Scott Huver, Special to Hollywood.com
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Thursday, March 05, 2009
Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Also being released on DVD/Blu-Ray is Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic, a two-disc collection of the 12 30-minute animated sequences previously available only on iTunes, which painstakingly depicts the complete Watchmen storyline chapter by chapter, bringing Alan Moore's scripts and Dave Gibbons' artwork to life with limited animation, sound effects, music and voiceover narration.
The ultimate effect is an even more faithful and immersive experience that complements Synder's feature film adaptation. “That does have nearly every line and nearly every scene and that does come in at around about six and a half hours,” said artist Gibbons, who served as a consultant on the project. “That is the actual running time of a literal translation of Watchmen.”
Gibbons admits he wasn't easily swayed by the idea when he was first approached with a prototype version. “Paul Levitz at DC showed it to me to see what I thought about it,” he said. “I thought 'Well, I don't think we really need this. So I said 'If I really don't like it, is it likely to get made anyway?" And he said 'Probably.' So I went away to think about it.”
But it wasn't consulting his colleagues in the comic book, animation and video game fields that ultimately turned Gibbons around. “I showed it to my teenage stepdaughters and they went crazy. They said, "This is great! This is fantastic! Can we see some more of it?'” The artist realized the format just might be embraced by audiences who grew up on iPods and Mac screens. “I kind of changed my mind about it, really, just on their enthusiasm.”
Consulting on the Motion Comics execution, Gibbons became fully converted. “It's a tremendous feat of cutting all the foregrounds out and extending the backgrounds and resizing it, but on an iPod it looks brilliant,” he said. “The panels are kind of exactly the same size as in the comic, so it's like isolating a panel and watching it move. And it kind of works as an audio book, which is one voice, [narrator Tom Stechschulte]. It must have been a funny day in the audio booth the day that he made love to himself.”
Gibbons said DC plans to continue to experiment with the Motion Comic format with other tales in its decades-old inventory. “They're going to do Mad Love, which is that fantastic Bruce Timm-drawn [Batman story] which is in kind of an animated style anyway, which I recon will transfer very well,” he said. “They're also doing a Batman: Black & White story that I did.”
“I do think it's a prototype of possibly a new form of entertainment - I could see there is something almost struggling to be born,” Gibbons said. “I'm just really interested to see what happens. I don't think we're going to get it right immediately, but I think there's something there that's worth playing with.”
Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray on March 3, while Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter debuts on March 24.
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