DC Comics Announces WATCHMEN Crossover Series

As expected, Alan Moore isn't happy about it (not that I blame him). I can't say I'm too excited, but I'll check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/books/dc-comics-plans-prequels-to-watchmen-series.html

 

Funny article. A movie taking $185m at box office is "disappointing"; Alan Moore comparing Watchmen to Moby Dick!

I like Moore, and Watchmen is a good piece of work, but it's naive to work for DC and not expect them to exploit the characters you create for them: that's their whole business model. I'm just surprised its taken them so long.

 

When a movie costs $130M to make, and only makes $185M worldwide, trust me -- that's a huge, huge problem. You literally have to gross at least double the negative ($260M) just to break even, and a lot more than that to make a real profit. And don't forget they probably spent at least $40M on advertising.

If it had done Spiderman-type business, it would've done fine. I think they were expecting at least twice as much money, but it was too narrow an audience, plus I think the plot was too convoluted and downbeat to strike a chord with a mass audience. I enjoyed quite a bit of it, but it's a weird, quirky film.

 

It was good for Alan Moore that he established himself in comics. He never would have been a novelist, his prose is hopelessly dense and unfocused and he never would have made it in a collaborative medium like movies or TV. Comic books gave him a format and a history that channeled his brainwaves to gave us an inside-out magical look and our fantasies and ourselves. He was also lucky that DC took a chance him in the first place and look how they've kept his work in print all this time. Forget Marvel and self-publishing turned out to be a lot harder than he thought. There have been some bumps with DC but on balance he's had a pretty enviable career.

But amazingly for someone obsessed with the yin and the yang of it all his view of the biz has no balance. DC is evil but the guy who given wider berth in their playground than almost anyone, the pervert poet who explored the dark sex fantasies of three famous fictional young ladies in Lost Girls, his work shall not be touched, like unto a sacred icon. Wrong biz Al.

These are good characters and good stories can be written with them so we'll see.

 

I guess the issue here is that the budget was much to high for a non-mainstream movie.

 

"Watchmen" was a very good movie with an actual plot and good actors, I liked it much better than the mainstream crap that "Thor" and "Captain America" was .......

 

Moore was already successful as a comic book writer when DC let him try a revival of Swamp Thing. They were lucky to get him, IMO.
Do you believe that DC keeps anything in print that isn't selling and making them a profit? They don't do it to honor the creators.

 

The problem with comics is that they just try to exploit any angle they can find.

I was reading through some of the ABC Warrior (my fave strip as a 2000AD reader from age 6/prog 13) volumes in the local library when my GF came up to me and looked at some of the graphic novels and said she couldnt believe some of the titles and the match ups.

She said "Is there one with Batman v Popeye?"

"Give it time!" I said.

 

I know it came off that way, but he might have just been trying to say that WATCHMEN was a standalone work, like Moby Dick.

 

I do agree that fictional creations should be left alone by other writers or at least not reworked without the original author's agreement.

Imagine how awful it would be if someone came along and used, say, Edward Hyde, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, The Invisible Man and so on, in their own work without permission.

 

Please define "pervert" and how it applies to Mr. Moore.

 

Um, back to the series... I'm down for basically anything with Darwyn Cooke's name on it, and probably Brian Azzarello too, but the rest? Eh, not really interested.

 

Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls is a grotesquely illustrated repurposing of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan as pornography. I wonder what Baum and Barrie would have thought about the repurposing of their characters that Moore engaged in? (Carroll was pretty freaky himself, so he may have appreciated it).

 

No he wasn't. Please understand the era before you judge Victorian figures with a 21st century mindset.

 

Drug references are drug references, regardless of the era.

 

Did he borrow the characters and do something new with them in his own world, yes. He didn't just take them and create a prequel. I don't think you can draw a comparison there.

DC is simply taking the back story he already created and cashing in on it. Not saying they don't have the right to, but I'm also not going to compare what they are doing to any Moore work that includes other peoples characters.

 

Howabout Miracleman?




Now playing on Ariel Stream: Julia Fordham - Manhattan Skyline

 

Meh. I'm completely fine with Watchmen as a standalone story and have no interest in additional stories. I get that it makes good business sense for DC but it's stuff like this (as well as the "New 52" that started last year) that's completely driven me away from mainstream superhero comics, at least in single-issue format.

 

The other issue is Watchmen is notable as a complete whole work. The characters are not really icons and they were never meant to be.

 

Opium was used by nurses to soothe babies to sleep in the Victorian era. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was a legal medicinal remedy, available through the pharamicist. What other drug references are there, pray tell?

 

So there are also a ton of legal drugs today that people use to get high.

If I write a story about a guy who hasn't slept for 3 days because he is popping Ritalin, is that not a drug reference?

 

seed_drill said "Carroll was pretty freaky" and I said he was not. There is no evidence he ever took drugs, and in fact the sharp wit and mathematical and linguistic puzzles in his books require a mind much sharper than that of someone high on opium.

There are no drug references in the Alice books, aside from a Caterpillar smoking a hookah, which was a commentary on the popularity of the pastime. The idea that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is full of coded drug references is entirely a product of the 1960s American counter-culture and has no basis in fact whatsoever.

 

Yes but that has nothing to do with what you said in previous posts, and the argument you put forth still makes no sense to me. If you think there are no drug references say that, not sure why you made some weird argument about what was considered legitimate drug use in the Victorian era.

 

Didn't Carroll have the hots for the daughter of the Headmaster of the school that he was teaching at? I thought that he wrote Alice for her or based on her.

 

I said you can't understand Victorian figures using a 21st century mindset. Those taking laudanum in 1890 were not "freaky" by their standards, they were taking what they believed was a legitimate remedy for anxiety or insomnia. Carroll was not "pretty freaky" for including a hookah in his story, when he was simply portraying what was considered normal behavior at the time. I'm baffled that this makes no sense to you.

He was the private tutor of the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one of whom was a little girl named Alice. He did suggest to her parents a marriage when she turned 18, which was incredibly common in the era.