You think you’re primed and ready for Watchmen. You love the story, got all the characters down. But thanks to Watchmen’s intense acclaim beyond comic book circles and into the popular culture over the 23 years since its debut, you may also be far from conversant in the fanboy lore that surrounds its creation.
Here, then, is your Watchmen 101 – a primer on the creation of a comic book masterpiece, just in case you want to strike up a conversation with the cute moviegoer sitting next to you in the blood-stained Smiley Face t-shirt after the film is over.
The Watchmakers
By 1985 comic book writer Alan Moore had already tipped the comic book world on its collective ear. Moore, then 32, was already a star in the British comic book industry, noted especially for the anarchy-minded V for Vendetta and his early superhero deconstruction of the forgotten ‘50s UK hero Marvelman (later re-titled Miracleman in the U.S). He’d entered American comics with a revisionist take both transcendental and terrifying on DC Comics’ monster comic Saga of the Swamp Thing. Injecting the series with as much social commentary and mature characterizations as genuine horror, Moore demonstrated a flair for the macabre, the moody and even the moving, and his imaginative work became the talk of the industry. To no one’s surprise, DC quickly moved to give Moore a crack at its bread-and-butter properties: superheroes.
Artist Dave Gibbons, then 36, was another Brit who’d made a name for himself in UK comics, most notably in the pages of 2000 AD and its feature Rogue Trooper, as well as Dr. Who. His U.S. work was equally auspicious, graduating from drawing a back-up feature in DC’s Green Lantern series to taking on the title character, but he found himself growing a bit bored with the straight storytelling required when handling one of the company’s core characters, and was mulling a jump to Swamp Thing to work with an old mate but found his art style unsuited to the character.
Both based in Britain, Moore and Gibbons were friendly colleagues and mutual admirers of the others’ work, having collaborated on a handful of 2000 AD tales in the early ‘80s. By 1985, they’d also just shared credit on one of that year’s most critically praised stories, “For the Man Who Has Everything” in Superman Annual #11. That assignment came as a bit of a tit-for-tat arrangement: Gibbons had recommended Moore for the writing chores, while Moore had endorsed Gibbons as the artist for a still-gestating project that would eventually be called Watchmen.
Secret Identities
The now unforgettable Watchmen characters began life as superheroes by any other name. While working out his premise, Moore hoped to play in a sandbox outside of the established DC Universe, in a self-contained reality populated by pre-existing heroes that he would re-imagine in a way similar to his Marvelman work. His initital idea was to use Archie Comics’ defunct '60s-era Mighty Crusaders characters – The Shield, The Fly, the Jaguar, The Comet, etc. – but they weren’t available.
DC had acquired another assembly of colorful crime fighters from the Silver Age, Charlton Comics’ “Action Heroes,” and Moore wrote his treatment featuring those characters in the lead roles. However, when DC editorial expressed concern that the storyline would, for all intents and purposes, render the Charlton heroes unusable elsewhere after Moore’s conclusion, the writer simply morphed their archetypes into the now-familiar Watchmen, with Gibbons’ fresh character designs: Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, The Question became Rorschach, the Blue Beetles became the Nite-Owls, The Peacemaker became The Comedian, Nightshade became the Silk Spectre and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt became Ozymandias.
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