Whispers in the middle of the night. Rumors of strange things afoot. Phantom messages coming and going. Names that you’ve seen before appearing in locations that you wouldn’t expect. Promises broken. Something that was so sacred, reduced to nothing in an instant.
I’m talking, of course, of DC Comics announcement of Before Watchmen.
To get to where we are, I feel it necessary to spend just a few moments setting out for you the details of where we were. I was 14. It was the summer of 1991. I had just ‘graduated’ from the 8th grade, still amazed that I survived Catholic middle-school, and was awaiting the trail-that-was Catholic High School. I was apprehensive enough to be going to the same school that my mother, her sister and brother had all attended in their formative years, and wasn’t really looking to add my name to the list. It was, however, a reprieve from the anarchy that was the local Public High School, but still….
Not to mention the fact that I was still reeling from my first sense of wounded heart, courtesy of the fairer sex. Weird to think about that now, especially for anyone that really knows me, but I was crushing on her, hard. Unfortunately, at the time, the wrong person heard the wrong conversation, and alas, I was snickered and scoffed at for the remaining few months that we shared classes together. For any of the readers out there are familiar with the 2nd Pilot that Star Trek gave us, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, there’s a small group sitting around a conference table where Kirk is gaining information and opinions from those around him. As we turn to Mr. Sulu, he explains that Gary Mitchell’s increasing abilities, was as if you started with a penny, and doubled it every day, in a month you would be a millionaire. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but you get the meaning. Well, in my case, the class size was 22-24 kids, and if you start with one person knowing, and thanks to three-way calling they could accelerate Sulu’s math, it didn’t take a month for people to know who I had a crush on. It took by first bell the next day. Realistically, it took from the time last bell rang to before I probably went to sleep that night.
Following the embarrassment, of course I did what any awkward, clumsy, teenage boy would do. I turned to my growing interest of comics to escape. Back then, McFarlane was still doing Spider-Man, Jim Lee and Chris Claremont had unleashed upon the world X-Men Volume 2, Rob Liefeld was driving me bat-shit crazy with his pencils on X-Force, and so on. I was born into comics a Marvel child, I didn’t grow out of love with the House of Ideas for quite some time. While I have since converted to a follower of Marvel’s “Distinguished Competitor”, back then I really only cared about Green Lantern and Batman. Green Lantern, more because of that brilliant ring limited only by imagination and will, and Batman, well, because, he’s Batman. That all changed when out of left field I received a copy of Watchmen…
Watchmen was the same, but yet…not. In the years since, I’ve come to understand some of the drama that has unfolded between the book’s creators, particularly Alan Moore, and DC. That saga was all the more detailed with the release of the movie a couple of years back. But that book…it was the first Graphic Novel that had made its introduction to me, courtesy of my local comic shop, and it changed me. I’ve read the book enough times, and the two of us share such a complicated history, that I am actually on my 3rd copy of the damn thing. The first copy managed to get left behind when we moved from California to Oklahoma during the summer of 1992. The second copy was in the back of my first car, when my then-roommate took my car to work his security guard gig, left the rear window wing opened, and managed to ruin it AND my copy of The Crow. This third copy I have had since spring of 2007, when I attended my first MegaCon in Orlando. It now holds a place of honor among such other tomes as The Dark Knight Returns and Kingdom Come, as well as other books of Moore’s fare.
There is darkness and light. Love and loss. The depths of human depravity and sacrifice, and all of it is contained in the premise of a comic. Heroes could be flawed. Villains could have their monologue of justification just before the climax, and it could be logical. Costumed vigilantes can have damaged psyches, be a moral, have performance issues (I’m not explaining, go read the damn thing), and the characters proved that the “good guy” is often anything but. It wasn’t just a book, it was an event, and I could only imagine back then what it would have been like to read it as a monthly title, had I had the opportunity when it first ran. When everyone around me was racing out to pick up the latest foil-embossed, hologram-stamped, variant cover edition on whatever was the Soupe du jour, I wanted to know more about this alternative reality that Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons brought to life. That, however, was twenty years ago.
I read the book probably one or two times a year nowadays. In 2009, when the movie was unleashed upon the world, I approached it with equal parts excitement and trepidation. By then, I was no longer that awkward teenager who was as introverted as my younger self. I was almost twenty years older at this point, I had found and married the REAL girl of my dreams, and we’re raising two wonderful kids. I didn’t need to know what happened before or after Watchmen. I saw what the respective Powers-That-Be had done to the “Before” part of the Star Wars saga, and I’ve seen what happened in the “After” coda of the Matrix movie, Indiana Jones saga, Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In this day and age, I’ve seen them re-boot, re-imagine, re-construct several works of fiction, but never thought those Powers-That-Be were capable of this.
I’ve seen the names, I know most of them on the list at this point of my comic-reading life, but none of them are the names that matter. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are nowhere to be found on the list of authors and artists that I have seen released. In reading the article published online by the New York times, one of the new collaborators, Brian Azzarello who is writing the mini-series for the Watchmen characters Rorschach and the Comedian, said he expected an initial wave of resistance because “a lot of comic readers don’t like new things.” I respectfully disagree. Comic readers don’t dislike new things, they need to be made aware of them. Rehashing characters that were never yours to serve the purpose of publishers who are looking to capitalize on the curiosity factor are what the comic readers don’t like. Even at that, however, we are willing to forgive certain “new” things, look at the sales numbers when DC launched their New 52 campaign, and the numbers on those. I think comic readers very much like new things. Mr. Azzarello certainly has a challenge before him, apparently he drew the straws that read “sociopath” and “rapist” and thinks he has something new to bring to these characters.
While Mr. Gibbons, who has not disassociated himself over these new works appears to be somewhat flattered serving as an inspiration to these new events, Alan More has been quoted as saying “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The original asks of its reader. “Who watches the watchmen?” Apparently, not enough people, thinks DC Comics. The world doesn’t need more Watchmen…
It needs more footage from The Dark Knight Rises. Because if DC thinks the fanboys are pissed about messing with The Watchmen, God help us if they fuck up Nolan/Bale’s final run with the Caped Crusader…
This is NOT right...
TALKIN' GEEK 