Oh like 80s Cold War politics? I don’t think you have to know more than required for Rambo III. I don’t remember it getting too deep into contemporary politics because it gives you an alternative history with a pretty clear cut point of divergence. As long as you know that Reagan sucks and that he used to be an actor, you’re good to go.
Speaking of point of divergences, the movie changes some key plot points and the real magic of the comic is how it plays with the medium, something completely absent from the movie. So just soak it in and trust Al and Dave to give you everything you need as you go (even if you might not realize it yet).
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I remember after reading Watchmen some time ago (well after release, years before the movie) I went online to look something up about it and one of the sites at the time dedicated to the comic had an archived like newsgroup or irc discussion from when the book was being released and it was very neat to see it being read and reacted to in real time. I really wish I could find it again but it feels truly lost to time now.
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Dave Gibbons put out a hell of a companion piece to Watchmen in 2008 called Watching the Watchmen. It’s basically a big behind the scenes look at how the book came together with character sketches, thumbnail pages based on Alan Moore’s original script and a whole lot more. Great book if you can find it.
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Agree with the above that Watchmen deeply explored various things comics can do better than other media (along with exploring various other things related to superheroes, American values). Many of the issues are a specific formalistic exercise (issue 2 is visual methods to integrate flashbacks smoothly, issue 3 is ways text and images play off one another, issue 4 is the famous manipulating time with comics exercise, etc). Obviously a lot of these exercises are now commonly used, but watchmen does it very well and with lots of confidence.
Its influence stretches beyond comics, its had a huge effect on serialized television in particular. Lost/Damon Lindelof lifted a lot from Watchmen, naturally he then moved ahead with making his own watchmen fanfic tv series.
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Except not in Doomsday Clock from what I saw.
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So beautiful to watch the whole community come together to talk about how great Watchmen is.
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The part that’s rubbing against me right now is the cut away to where Nite Owl 2 and Comedian are trying to quell a riot and the riot itself just felt formless and there just because the world need to be in a heated state of unrest for comic stuff to happen. My memory of the movie is there being enough set dressing subconsciously priming me for it where on paper i just feel like i missed something or not fully drawn into the setting yet. Admittedly I havent read the prose sections as I’ve been reading in 20 minute sessions between tasks and I tell myself I’ll come back to them. Transitioning into pure prose is a gear change to steep for me personally in that context. I had to skip some of the short stories in Lost Odyssey a few times because I was to geared into the current story to want to take a break.
Personal History, I never really grew up with comics much. It was the animated adaptions of Batman and Spider-man that did the heavy lifting of getting me into cape stuff. I never really had a LCS growing up nor a walkable community to have access to one so I always felt like I’ve had little to no stake in the “Have comics matured?” discussions. I’m largely a child of the 90s. Give me a better than average toy commercial where cool stuff happens and I’ll usually be satisfied.
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You gotta engage with the work. But Watchmen isn’t an easy read, so I also get it. I didn’t appreciate all of Watchmen in my first read. Reading other comics helped and so did going slower and accepting the supplemental prose sections aren’t actually supplemental.
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I wish the Dr. Manhattan book was a whole damn book. The implied academic field that springs up around him is too fascinating
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I was first introduced to watchmen alongside dark knight returns and Elektra assassin by an older neighbor just before the big X book relaunch, and of the three watchmen was definitely the one that clicked with me least despite it being the creative team behind those Doctor Who reprints that Marvel was bringing to the us and were among my first comics ever.
Wasn’t til high school that I did a serious reread and got it.
A couple years later when the movie was actually announced, I did a Rorschach Halloween costume because I knew we were on the precipice of that never being a cool thing to do again.
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Yep. Encountering more conventional Superhero comics and things like Black Hole and then some of Moore’s other work (Swamp Thing) helped me to grasp onto Watchmen years after my first read of it around the time the movie came out too.
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I first read watchmen in my high school library when I was 14 and I didn’t really get it because I didn’t have that much context for what a normal superhero comic was like. Was mostly only familiar with the concept of superheroes from watching the excellent DC cartoons of the era. I thought it was only okay and didn’t really get why it was so celebrated.
A few years later, I was more familiar with capes comics and reread it and it all clicked into place. Especially Dave Gibbons’ masterful demonstration of comics layout and pacing. The multipage symmetries he uses, the match cuts, and so much more. It really impressed me, and that was all invisible to me on my first reading. I had to read enough comics where all those techniques were absent to get what he was doing.
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I re-read it last year…and it was so fuckin’ bad ass…
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I can’t remember when I read Watchmen. It was before the movie came out. I may have picked it up to see what all the fuss was about before the movie. I thought it was really well made and a great story. A lot of what Dave Gibbons was accomplishing with that book went over my head at the time as well. The whole premise of “what if masked vigilante super heroes were actually a thing in the real world” was really clever and the kind of trope I like to see in fictional media.
I love how Dr. Manhattan is the only character with actual super powers and even then Alan Moore attempts to keep his powers and abilities grounded in the albeit most cutting edge for the time understanding of how physical reality works with a good dose of practically applied philosophy of time. If you read up on the Block Theory of time you start to grasp how he’s imagining Dr. Manhattan as a being that can perceive the past, present and future simultaneously. It’s a theme Moore returns to in Neonomicon and Providence. It’s the kind of idea that once you get it it blows your view of things wide open due to the implications. A real brain worm.
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I gotta finally read Providence. I loved The Courtyard, liked everything but the actual main narrative of Neonomicon (the Lovecraft puns in the sex shop were A+), and wanted to see where else he’d go with that world. I think you were telling me Providence finally pays off on those weird domes that kept popping up in establishing panels.
I might have a near full run from grabbing issues as I find them? I should probably organize my stuff and find out.
I’ve also been on the hunt for all the stuff Moore did for Extreme since Liefeld lost control of those characters and those will probably not be reprinted any time soon.
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I don’t remember if that was me or not but yeah it certainly does. I really enjoyed Providence. Jacen Burrows is a master draftsman.
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I really warmed up to his art. He sure does some stuff in Crossed.
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EC Epitaphs From the Abyss #2: Overall better I suppose, but only if I torture myself to issue a number of qualifications. Which I will.
“Pattern Recognition” done by the writer who did Mind MGMT, which interests me. This, if I am being generous, is a meditative sort of car crash into the inevitable conclusions that racism and patriarchy lead to. But it’s, in effect, a pretty sleepy and confusingly rendered story about someone accepting some poisonous ideas that cause them to hurt not just the other they invent but themselves as well. Another disappointingly contemporary horror story, in a style which I think will prove less enduring or truthful feeling years down the line as like EC’s most horrified and negative sci-fi comics I think still have. The art in this one is alright I think. Some really cool colors and lines.
“Grey Green Memories” is the first of what seem to be this new EC’s version of the small prose interlude stories you’d find in the 50s comics. It’s a really nice and atmospheric story that ends right when it should, and still manages to touch you a little I think. Good art in this one as well. I like the dull colors, the dusky tones and shadow and light.
“Sound & Haptics” annoyed me enough to actually make me come around on it. You can summarize this one with that picture of Kojima on stage that’s captioned “it’s cause you be on that phone!” As this is the story of someone who crashes their car into a family while he was obsessively harassing a woman online and sending her hateful tweets. The only survivor in the car he hits is a doctor, who kidnaps him and amputates parts of his body to excise the “infection” that causes him to need to use his phone so badly. It has ugly art and is really cheap and stupid, but I can accept that it was sort of funny to watch him find his phone before realizing he has no hands left to pick it up with.
EC Cruel Universe #2: There were some bad ones in this one, just like the first. But, also like the first, there is at least one really enjoyable story in here. Overall nowhere as frustrating or boring as Epitaphs is.
“ORGAN1C” did not really stand up enough to feel like a story, just a little visual joke I guess. There are a couple really beautiful pages in this, but the others are kind of a bright smeary mess that didn’t appeal to me.
“Brilliant… and Deceived!” signals in one of its first panels that it is a Frankenstein story, which annoyed me for the same reason that the way these books work in contemporary parables so obviously and without subtlety. But I guess there’s sort of a twist to this one that made me think the Bride of Frankenstein poster was sort of a disorientation trick. Either way, the art in this one was sort of decent except for a couple weird panels. Not a good story however. It’s one of those short pieces, like “Grey Green Memories” from Epitaphs #2, but without much to hold onto in the end.
“And the Profit Said…” was very classic EC in my opinion, for better or worse. A decent sci-fi premise and conflict played out in a generic kind of way. It gets a bit too grim for me in the end. Like the tension of the whole thing is suddenly pumped up, and I just wasn’t with it by the end. I read a comic about assassinating politicians a long time ago, and it felt like the way some people were screaming or bleeding that I had flipped to that book all the sudden somehow. The art in this one was also murky and undefined I think due to the color and linework.
“Ray Gun” is the best of the bunch. Really great art with clean lines and excellent depth in color range, with plenty of cool panels. It’s a story about a rodeo cowboy who breaks his leg, gets stuck in a low wage job that depresses him, and one day discovers a ray gun in the desert at an alien crash. Very exciting with some decent emotional heft to hang onto.
With more stories like “Ray Gun” or Cruel Universe #1’s very excellent opening story “The Champion” I think this series may actually remain worth reading and recommending.
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