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3 March 2009
[comics] Alan Moore, the man with a graphic vision … the Observer profiles Alan Moore …‘As novelist and Watchmen fan Susanna Clarke puts it: “He took something very American – the superhero comic – reinvented it [more than once] and sold it back to them.” And, one might add, didn’t even want to keep the profit he made on the deal.’
2 March 2009
[comics] Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic … ‘I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It’s like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you.’
27 February 2009
[watchmen] The Visceral Horrors of ‘Watchmen’ Movie Merchandise … On a Comedian Costume: ‘So, how many people are going to wear this without realizing that they’re dressed as a serial rapist who shot a pregnant woman in the face?’
23 February 2009
[comics] Reading The Watchmen: Ten Entrance Points Into The Esteemed Graphic Novel … Tom Spurgeon on Watchmen … ‘One thing the film trailers have reminded us is how gob-smackingly weird and lurid and intense Dave Gibbons’ visual interpretation of Moore’s script was in the original graphic novel. All those oranges and browns and yellows set against mostly somber grays and blues. And then the squid shows up.’
22 February 2009
[smile] A design for Life … Jon Savage on the Smiley Face symbol … ‘It may seem weird that such a bland symbol should be used to convey emotion, in such a way that creates as much distance as real empathy. But then there is something powerfully archetypal about an image of a happy face that resembles the sun. Infantilisation or greater communication, joy or horror: the Smiley can encompass everything.’
20 February 2009
[comics] BeaucoupKevin(dot)com: Why I will not be seeing Watchmen … ‘The more I see of the film version of Watchmen, the less I like it, and perhaps more importantly, the more I dislike what it represents: the dumbing-down of something greater for the sake of a false “authenticity” that’s apparent only to those shallowest of readers of the source material.’
10 February 2009
[comics] Todd Klein on Dave Gibbons Cover and Logo Design for Watchmen … ‘To begin with, Dave (and all the design work here was by Dave Gibbons, with some help from DC’s Richard Bruning at the final stages) decided to use a simple, very bold sans-serif font for the logo, and run it up the side of the cover rather than across the top. This allowed the logo to be large and striking, while still leaving lots of room for the art…’ [via Neilalien]
10 January 2009
[comics] Watching Dave Gibbons … one more interview with Gibbons on Watching the Watchmen. ‘… there was a misguided idea where we might do Rorschach’s Journal or The Comedian’s Vietnam War Diary, but I don’t think you need to see that. It’s much better if it’s hinted at.’
26 December 2008
[comics] Archaeologizing Watchmen … Dave Gibbons interviewed on his new book Watching the Watchmen … ‘The second time around, I am amazed by how much thought we put into Watchmen, how hard we labored over every detail. But I think that is one of the reasons for its longevity. In comics, there are depths that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about Watching the Watchmen — like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air — might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it. But those who do will note the consistency, the reality behind it all that exists in great depth. It gives it a more magical quality, which it wouldn’t have had if we just made things up as we went along or changed it to suit the latest continuity. It does give it a feeling of authority.’
9 December 2008
[comics] What If… Matt Groening had done the art on Watchmen instead of Dave Gibbons? … from Springfield Punx … [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]
 4 December 2008
[comics] Watchmen Unmasked … Occult symbolism in an Alan Moore comic. Really?! … ‘On the morning of September 11th, 2001 A.D., I was not working. On my day off, my mother phones me at 7:00 PST to wake me up: “Something incredible is happening”. When the first tower came down, I saw the beast more clearly than I have ever seen it, and yes, for a moment it looked just like a giant octopus driving this giant building straight down DIRECTLY THROUGH THE PATH OF GREATEST RESISTANCE LIKE A NAIL. And I thought, “It’s Chapter Twelve of Watchmen. It’s a stunt, a gag, a hoax. Someone has done this thing to fool us all again. Who? WHO HAS DONE THIS THING TO ME?’ [via BeaucoupKevin]
20 October 2008
[comics] Jonathan Ross on Watchmen … ‘But what makes this a genre-transcending bona fide masterpiece is that, alongside the pulse-pounding action and suspense, the soap-opera style romantic dilemmas and the story of some good but misguided people trying to apply simple remedies to complex maladies, Moore and Gibbons also manage to deliver a devastating critique that cuts to the very heart of the pitiful, timid male fantasy that is the superhero genre at its purest and worst: muscular men and busty women in tight costumes solving all the world’s problems with a well-placed punch or a blast of super-breath.’ [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]
3 September 2008
[comics] How would you answer if asked what Watchmen is about? … interesting question posed by Tom Spurgeon …‘Watchmen is the ultimate mid-life crisis: like Fight Club, but with giant blue balls.’
14 August 2008
[comics] Watchmen Movie Poster Comparison … compare the recent movie posters with Dave Gibbon’s original posters for the comic … ‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’
14 March 2008
[comics] “…He sure as hell is angry, but he does have moves.” … Progressive Ruin looks at the issue of Denny O’Neil’s The Question where he teams up with Rorschach … ‘Moore and Gibbons aren’t credited at the beginning of the comic with anything in this issue, but they are given a special “thank you.” I wonder if either of them were even aware Rorschach went walkies into this book, and out of their control.
Anyway, Vic and his ’80s hair start reading, and it’s apparently compelling reading since he immediately nods off.’
1 December 2007
[comics] Watchmen Movie Blog — a blog of the film production of Moore and Gibbon’s classic comic series.
19 November 2007
[comics] League of Extraordinary Freelancers – Activate! — Screencaps from Alan Moore’s Appearance on the Simpsons … ‘Milhouse asks [Alan Moore] to sign his DVD of “Watchmen Babies” and asks which of the babies is his favorite.’
10 July 2007
[movies] The Veidt Method — viral marketing campaign for the Watchmen movie … ‘Latest News: President and C.E.O. Adrian Veidt interviewed in latest edition of Nova Express – on newsstands now!’ [via plasticbag.org]
13 April 2007
[comics] The Connections between Lost and Watchmen — interesting Wikipedia-style article … ‘In Watchmen there are a character named Bernard, who opened a magazine store to meet people after his wife, Rose, died. In lost Rose and Bernard are two minor characters…’ [via Pete Ashton]
10 March 2007
[movies] Tom Cruise’s Starring Role in Watchmen Narrowly Averted … ‘I asked him point blank about Cruise, and he confirmed that he and Tom had been talking about it. A lot. But that now it looked like Cruise would not be appearing in the film. “He was interested,” Snyder confirmed to me. “I did talk to him about it for a while.” And would the role he wanted be Ozymandias? “That would be the role,” Snyder said.’
11 September 2006
[comics] Brendan McCarthy on Solo #12: ‘My initial pitch was for a humorous story featuring Dr. Manhattan’s massive blue penis and balls from The Watchmen… I liked that when he became a giant, his privates also grew enormously huge. I could imagine being inside a tall apartment block and being astonished as a giant blue monster sausage swayed by outside the window… Of course I wondered if it would now be OK to view The Martian Manhunter’s green J’onn Thomas, for example… But this was a case of only highbrow ‘arthouse’ nudity being allowed (“Glenda Jackson’s tits syndrome”) and it was rejected straight away. So I was getting an education in getting to know the boundaries of what is permissible in a DC Comic these days…’
24 August 2006
[comics] Tales of the Black Freighter: Marooned — a reconstruction of the Pirate Comic from Watchmen … ‘Waking from nightmare, I found myself upon a dismal beach-head, amongst dead men and the pieces of dead men. Bosun Ridley lay nearby. Birds were eating his thoughts and memories. Reader take comfort from this: In Hell, at least the gulls are contented.’
12 July 2006
[comics] Long Roundtable Watchmen Interview with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons soon after Watchmen was released …
Alan Moore: ‘…if we have any optimism in [Watchmen] it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands” – that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.’ 19 September 2005
[comics] On eBay: Watchmen Original Art – Page 24, Issue 6 … bidding is currently at £1,850. [thanks Stuart]
21 May 2005
[film] Watchmen – Will we be watching it after all in 2006? — Filmrot on the problem of bringing Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen to the screen … ‘Unlike Alan Moore’s other notable ‘superhero’ comic The Extraordinary League of Gentlemen, Watchmen is not a romp. It is rich in the superhero tradition and has a sense of humour that happily makes fun of the genre but just as the iconic cover image is a smiley face, it is a smiley face with the blood of a hero smeared across it.’ [thanks Stuart]
23 April 2005
[comics] Warren Ellis: ‘I fully expect the film version of WATCHMEN to be a fucking musical.’
16 August 2004
25 July 2004
[comics] ‘Watchmen’ unmasked for Par, Aronofsky — details from Hollywoodreporter.com … ‘”Watchmen,” the seminal DC Comics limited series, has landed at Paramount Pictures. Darren Aronofsky will develop and direct the project, which is being written by David Hayter.’
19 December 2001
[comics] Moore and Hayter Talk About Watchmen — brief mention of discussion regarding a proposed Watchmen Film … Moore: ‘Watchmen was designed as a showcase of things that comics are capable of but aren’t so easy to achieve in any other medium. […] With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there.You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.’
12 October 2001
 [comics] Excerpts from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen courtesy of Amazon … [via Haddock]Rorschach: ‘Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it’s true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper, “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a days work for a days pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers… and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.’ 1 October 2001
[comics] David Hayter and The Watchmen Movie [Link #1 | Link #2] … A Watchmen film looks more like a possibility… maybe. ‘The mood of Hollywood execs right now is to go on “retreats” so basically all these suits are at these spa retreats, hanging out and discussing how they’re going to be dealing with all of this. According to Hayter what appears to be happening is that a lot of feel-good romances and comedies are getting optioned right now as a direct result so in two years we’ll be seeing a massive wave of these happy films at a time when the US will very likely be fighting. He went on to compare this intensity in mood to the 70s and the Vietnam war where some incredibly dark and gritty movies were made, the good thing from this tragedy, if it can be called as such, is that we may see some amazing new things out of Hollywood in a few more years reflective of the country’s mood.’ [via I Love Everything]
23 June 2001
[quote] ‘…Phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence. Transient and elusive these must be grasped quickly: Computer animations imbue even breakfast cereals with an hallucinogenic futurity; Music channels process information-blips, avoiding linear presentation, implying limitless personal choice… These reference points established , an emergent worldview becomes gradually discernable amidst the media’s white noise. This jigsaw-fragment model of tomorrow aligns itself piece by piece, specific areas necessarily obscured by indeterminacy. However, broad assumptions regarding this postulated future may be drawn. We can imagine its ambience. We can hypothesize its psychology. In conjunction with massive forecasted technological acceleration approaching the millennium, this oblique and shifting cathode mosaic uncovers an era of new sensations and possibilities. An era of the conceivable made concrete… and of the casually miraculous.’
27 December 2000
[comics] Kathleen reads Watchmen for the first time… ‘On Christmas Day 2000 I finally read Watchmen for the first time. I tried to stretch out the book over several days but I found I couldn’t put it down for more than an hour at a time. I became anxious and snappy whenever anybody interrupted me from my reading for matters as inconsequential as eating. That’s because ten years late I have learned what everyone else in the world already knew: Watchmen is fucking good.’ I was lucky (old) enough to pick up the original issues. There was the longest delay between issue 11 and 12. Waiting for that last issue almost killed me…
21 November 2000
[comics] Media Nugget of the Day covers Watchmen. ‘In this bleak vision of America, the influence of costumed crime-fighters has kept Nixon in office, whipped Vietnam into shape easily, and brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Writer Alan Moore began this novel as a reworking of the Charlton Comics heroes of his childhood, transformed it into an operatic dark-comedy of super-hero archetypes, and ended up with a chilling commentary on cold-war America.’ [Related Links: Alan Moore Fan Site]
18 November 2000
[comics] The full script of Sam Hamm’s Watchmen movie adaptation is online. ‘EXT. LIBERTY ISLAND – THAT MOMENT – DAY — as a LUMINOUS BLUE-SKINNED GIANT, SIXTY FEET TALL, wades through the harbor and steps up onto the island. He stares in dismay at the demolished statue . . . like a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes wondering what the hell happened to his date. Meet the last — and most powerful — member of our happy band: DR. MANHATTAN. Down below, THE COMEDIAN and SILK SPECTRE — battered but intact — are crawling out of the wreckage. The COMEDIAN looks up at the huge blue figure looming over them, and shakes a gnat-sized fist. COMEDIAN: ASSHOLE! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!?’ [via Haddock]
19 August 2000
 [[comics] Fandom reports that there is no sign of any detente between Alan Moore and DC Comics in the light of a 15th Anniversary edition of Watchmen. ‘”Regarding the Watchmen products, any renewed relationship with DC is not anything that people should be placing any hope in at all,” Moore told Newsarama. “I can tell you that right now, I’m having nothing to do with the Watchmen project – I completely disown it. I’m not at all interested if there are any more toys or anything at all comes out, and I shall not be cooperating with the project in any way.’
10 April 2000
[WE] New column from Warren Ellis. He recommends you go read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I agree… one of the best comics ever…
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