Watchmen

I want to refrain from posting about comics on here, since whatever I write will virtually be a retread of what I read on Daniel's blog, but in this one specific instance, I'm going to make an exception.

The upcoming Watchmen film has thrust the book itself back into the limelight, and with it hardcore fans are scrambling in their attempt to explain why the film is a bad idea. One of the main sticking points here is that it is impossible to maintain both the purity of the work and the spirit behind it. History suggests Zack Snyder will go for the former; it is easier to shoot Fearful Symmetry frame by frame than it is to riff on genre deconstruction and Reaganomics. A Watchmen movie that followed the spirit of the book would be a very odd thing indeed. Ironically the renewed aggressions of Mother Russia and the housing/banking crisis have done such a job of twisting the political landscape into a familiar old shape, that the viral marketing gurus at Warner Brothers are scratching their heads and wondering if they don't have superpowers themselves. Still, by all rights, shouldn't a Watchmen movie rip apart the superhero film genre? Of course this is Hollywood so instead of a follow up to Unbreakable "deconstructing the genre" gives us Hancock. Be careful what you wish for.

I've got to be honest here. From a modern perspective, the supposed subversion and deconstruction of the hero genre really is a quaint silver-age conceit. (By the way Green Lantern Green Arrow was doing the "real world problems" thing fifteen years earlier.) We read comics in a post Watchmen, post Crisis, post Dark Knight Returns world. Hell if it comes to that, we read comics in a post Sandman, post Bone, post Maus world. We live in a time when Penny Arcade has more readers than Spiderman, when you can go to any chain bookstore and pick up copies of Flight Vol. 1, Pride of Baghdad, and Transmetropolitan and put them in the same basket. Where you can go online and debate which 1995 debut: JtHM, Astro City, or Preacher affected the industry the most, while comparing top 200 sales figures for June, July, and August, and watching youtube videos of a guy making fun of The Dark Knight with his action figures.

Watchmen is a great book, but in the way Citizen Kane is a great movie. It is the pinnacle of the genre, but completely lost on everyone but the history students.