Geekitude

Counting backwards from midnight: Yes, the Watchmen prequels are a bad idea

dennisandjustin:

“This is going to generate a lot of a particular type of attention that’s really not my bag.”- DC Comics artist Darwyn Cooke, on his initial reluctance to sign on to the planned Watchmen prequels.

“Gee, you think?”- Dennis

Sigh…

Fine, lets get into this. 

DC Comics, once the four-color guardian/basis of my childhood imagination, now a cynical, slicky-boy despoiler of said childhood, has announced an impending scheme to launch at least seven ongoing miniseries detailing the pre-real book adventures of all of the main Watchmen characters, along with some assorted one-shots and fuffery.  Now, we know some of you might expect us to get all rant-y and geek rage-y, and, you know, that’s a distinct possibility.  But let us try to take a more rational tack, at least initially, in dissecting exactly why this is a lousy idea. 

1. Watchmen is.  Not to get too idolatrous or anything, but some things are just…complete.  They exist.  They are a whole in and of themselves, and any attempt to chip off a piece, or to mold on a piece, doesn’t enhance what already is.  All you get is a cloudy, ultimately-worthless shard of that whole, or some sloppy, dull clay glommed onto it, turning what had once been a crystal ball (or, more to the point, a crystal snow globe) into a lumpen, amorphous thing.  Watchmen’s like that. Alan Moore deconstructed everything about comics in one 12 issue mission statement; he turned it inside out, shook out its pockets, shone a light into all its dark, unspoken places, and yet still created something that, understanding all of the limitations and contradictions of the form, was still, for all of that, a distillation of all a comic book could be.  It was a comic book.  It was. - Dennis

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My Watchmen feels, but written by someone else and much more concise than I could ever hope for.