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.
KEEP READING: With Great Power …
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With Great Power…
Moore and Gibbons swiftly moved past a mere pastiche of the Charlton characters to form a commentary on the very notion of superheroes and the effect they would have on the real world, incorporating elements of the most iconic iterations of comic book characters.
Dr. Manhattan drew from the all-powerful heroes like Superman; Batman influenced both the gadget-reliant Nite-Owl and the obsessive, street-level Rorschach; overtly sexualized depictions of heroines like Wonder Woman and Phantom Lady informed the Silk Spectres; brutal, violent vigilantes like The Punisher and Wolverine lent inspiration to The Comedian; and Ozymandias had roots in wealthy, hyper-intelligent heroes like Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man. Stan Lee had introduced personal neuroses into comics with Marvel characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men, and Moore pushed the envelope by layering even deeper, darker psychological issues into Watchmen.
An even more surprising influence: Mad Magazine’s 1953 parody story “Superduperman” by comedic genius Harvey Kurtzman, which hilariously tackled the absurdities of superheroics in the real world. Moore and Gibbons wanted the same effect but with a dramatic rather than absurdist flavor.
Moore later told Comic Book Artist: “The story was about superheroes, and it didn’t matter which superheroes it was about, as long as the characters had some kind of emotional resonance, that people would recognize them, so it would have the shock and surprise value when you saw what the reality of these characters was.”
Enter Sandman
Moore and Gibbons’ third key collaborator was color artist John Higgins, who eschewed the traditional bright primary hues of comic book heroes in favor of a moodier, more subtle European-style palette that gave the whole affair an even edgier tone. Higgins would go on to color Brian Bolland’s art on Moore’s seminal 1988 Batman/Joker story The Killing Joke.
Moore also tapped his friend and rising star Neil Gaiman to serve as a sort of human pre-Google, tracking down the sources of the famous quotations Moore scattered throughout the series’ end titles, and occasionally suggesting additional lines, such as Ozymandias’ reference to Ramses in issue #12.
Within a few short years, Gaiman became DC’s next Brit-genius-writer-in-residence with his groundbreaking Sandman series and would go on to author several acclaimed bestsellers like Anansi Boys and various works that would be later adapted into big-budget films, including Stardust and Coraline.
KEEP READING: Novel Graphics …
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Novel Graphics
Though today Watchmen is routinely referred to as a “graphic novel” – and indeed the collected edition helped pioneer and popularize the format among mainstream American booksellers – but it was originally published in comic book form as a 12-issue limited series from September 1986 through October 1987, with the creators often scrambling (and failing) to meet their deadlines.
The creators’ intentions included showcases the particular strengths of the comic book medium, and Gibbons’ visual storytelling relied on a once-traditional nine-panel grid layout (often employed by Mad’s Kurtzman and original Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko) with characters rendered in specifically chosen weighted lines, cinematic angles and repeating symbolic motifs (like the famed blood-spattered Smiley Face) to make the book look dramatically different from the then-standard superhero fare. The covers of each issue, which looked at a tiny detail in extreme close-up were also the first image appearing in the story
The methodical, meticulously planned nature of each individual issue is best exemplified by Watchmen #5. Titled “Fearful Symmetry,” the first half of the issue’s pages are mirror images, compositionally, of the second half – fitting, as the story focused on Rorschach, who ink-blot iconography derived from the famed symmetrical ink-blot psychology test.
Other innovations included the text pieces that appeared in the final pages. Initially conceived as early issue “extras,” space fillers until reader letters began to arrive, the effect of the text pieces like excerpts from original Nite-Owl Hollis Mason’s autobiography Under the Hood added even further depth and complexity to the Watchmen world, prompting the creators to continue them through the end of the series.
Another envelope-pushing touch was the comic-book-within-a-comic-book Tales From the Black Freighter, a pirate tale read by a minor character that provided thematic, subtextual and allegorical allusions to the main story and added a literary dimension to the entire project.
Take It to the ‘Limits’
As he neared the final conclusion of the story, Moore discovered that the big dénouement – known ironically in fan circles as “The Giant Squid ending” – bore a passing resemblance to the plotline of “The Architects of Fear,” a 1963 episode of short-lived, science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, which the writer realized may have subconsciously influenced him
His editor wanted to change the ending, but Moore persevered and paid tribute to the series with a subtle reference in the final issue. The Watchmen film adaptation has famously abandoned the “Giant Squid ending” in favor of a more streamlined conclusion, but the Outer Limits nod remains intact in the movie.
Highly Literate
From the moment of its publication, Watchmen was received with shock, awe and acclaim by the comic book audience and industry alike, almost immediately accepted as both a game-changer and standard bearer of what could be accomplished in the medium, earning the creators numerous industry awards named after comic book legends like Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman.
And it wasn’t long before the critical reception extended outside the sphere of the superhero and into pop culture: Time hailed it as “a superlative feat of imagination,” and in 2005 the magazine included it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to present; in 2008 Entertainment Weekly ranked it #13 among the 50 best novels of the past 50 years. The Hugo Awards, which honors the best science fiction and fantasy works of the year, created a special “Other Forms” category in 1988 to pay tribute to its significance, the only time the awards have done so since its inception in 1955.
“Alan and I both latched on to American comic books at an early age, were actually saturated in them, the lore and love of them” Gibbons told Hollywood.com, describing their unparalleled creative synergy. “Although we’re very different people…we’re very much on the same wavelength when it comes to comic books, and there’s almost a kind of telepathy going where the least reference would set the other guy off on something.”
KEEP READING: Under the Influence …
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Under the Influence
If there’s one thing that both Moore and Gibbons have found regrettable about Watchmen, it’s the effect that it – as well as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, also first published in 1986 – had on comic book publishers and creators who rushed to replicate the “grim-and-gritty” approach to superhero storytelling, saddling even C-list crime fighters with an overabundance of neuroses, psychoses, salacious secrets and paralyzing feet of clay. The result was a preponderance of dark, violent, joyless knock-offs for years to follow that greatly disturbed the creators.
“We were actually a little bit disappointed by the effect Watchmen had on comic books,” said Gibbons. “We’ve always loved superhero comics and what we were doing with Watchmen was to try and get to know them better, to look at them in a way they hadn’t been looked at before, which inevitably led us down some dark paths.”
“What happened in all comics was that all comics became very dark. ‘Ah! This is the new way to do comics!’ What they took from it was not the intense intellectual process that we’d applied to it. It was just ‘It’s dark! Everybody’s cynical. Everybody’s grim. That’s the way to do it.’”
Even the previously lighthearted and whimsical Captain Marvel (“Shazam!”) was given a gritty makeover. “One of the things Alan and I vaguely talked about was, after Watchmen, as an antidote doing something like Captain Marvel in a light, fantastic [tone], almost doing it for kids, to bring out those magical feelings we got from comic books when we were kids.”
Who Watched the Watchmen
On the positive side, Watchmen not only provided inspiration to a future comic book vangaurd that included Gaiman, Brian Michael Bendis, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Ed Brubaker, Brian K. Vaughn, Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and David Goyer (the latter who would go on to co-write Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), its influence arced even more profoundly into the pop culture.
“I learned at Alan Moore’s feet,” proclaimed Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, just one of a pack of current Hollywood creators who unabashedly absorbed Watchmen’s lessons – others include directors Darren Aronofsky, Kevin Smith and Richard Kelly, The Incredibles’ Brad Bird and his Pixar cohorts, Lost producer Damon Lindelof and, of course, Watchmen’s big-screen helmer Zack Snyder.
KEEP READING: Whatever Happened to the Watchmen of Tomorrow? …
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Whatever Happened to the Watchmen of Tomorrow?
Although turned off by the fan worship that his masterwork engendered to the point of a retreat from the public in his quiet English village, the intriguingly eccentric Moore (he’s recorded rock music and is a practicing magician) has continued to routinely produce work that towers in the comic book medium: The Killing Joke with Bolland; the Silver Age Superman farewell “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” with longtime Man of Steel artist Curt Swan; the intricately researched Jack the Ripper opus From Hell with Eddie Campbell; the Victorian pulp hero pastiche The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill; Lost Girls, an graphically erotic take on the grown-up Alice of Wonderland, Peter Pan’s Wendy and The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, illustrated by Moore’s wife Melinda Gebbie; and his own America’s Best Comics line featuring original characters whose adventures intentionally harken back to the days before comics lost their pre-Watchmen innocence yet are still told with sophistication and maturity.
Gibbons went on to collaborate with Frank Miller on the dystopian socio-political satire Give Me Liberty and its subsequent sequels starring a black female protagonist from the projects named Martha Washington. He also emerged from the drawing board as an effective writer of thoughtful, high-quality superhero fare, including a finely crafted World’s Finest miniseries starring Superman and Batman; and as the writer-artist of his own solo graphic novel The Originals.
A proposed Watchmen prequel featuring the 1940s Minutemen was never more than a vague and quickly dismissed notion, and Moore – who today refuses to work for DC or its competitor Marvel largely due to their mishandling of royalty and licensing issues – and Gibbons have reunited as a creative team only sporadically for special projects since, most notably in 1996 for an original adventure featuring their mutual idol Will Eisner’s fabled creation The Spirit.
They remain close, though they avoid discussing Watchmen –feeling burned by Hollywood’s treatment of his other works, Moore proclaimed his profound disinterest in the current film, to the point that he kept his name off the movie and voluntarily signed over all of his royalties to Gibbons, who served as a consultant.
But the duo WILL reconvene for at least one more team-up: Moore’s forthcoming The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. “We’ve got something coming up in the vague future,” Gibbons revealed. “Alan’s very interested in magic – not card tricks, but magic – and he’s going to be writing a book with his friend and collaborator Steve Moore (no relation), which is going to be a modern day introduction to magic. And I’m going to be doing some illustrations for that, but exactly what and exactly when I don’t know. Alan and I, despite his distance from Watchmen, are still friends and I’d always collaborate with Alan at the drop of a hat.”
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