Another Early WATCHMEN Review!

"Watchmen" has been part of my life for most of what I consider my adulthood. I still remember holding the book for the first time, looking at that striking smiley face graphic, flipping through and being confused by what I was seeing. At that point, in 1988, I was still flirting with getting back into comics. I had a pretty serious collection when I was a kid, and during one of our many moves, an entire refrigerator box full of comic books and Fangorias and Mad magazine and even a few contraband Playboys went "missing," vanishing into thin air. Broke my heart, and it convinced me to grow up and stop collecting comic books.

So my first year at college, there was this sort of flea market every Wednesday afternoon at the student union, and one guy had a book stall where he always featured a number of graphic novels. And sure enough, my geek DNA reasserted itself and I started buying them occasionally. One of the first ones I fell in love with was a "Swamp Thing" trade paperback I bought written by Alan Moore. I was so impressed with the way he took this potentially silly character and invested it with real soul and made it about something. I decided to keep my eye out for anything else the guy had for sale that had Alan Moore's name on it, and so when I picked up that one especially thick graphic novel, and I flipped through and saw the weird naked blue guy and the pages and pages of text and the pirate stuff and, sure enough, Alan Moore's name on the cover, I knew "Watchmen" was heading home with me.

[more after the jump]


And there is no way the me I was at 18 could have imagined that 21 years later, I'd be standing at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, ten feet from a row of costumes worn by Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II and Ozymandias, playing a "Watchmen" video game set before the book, waiting to talk to Dave Gibbons. Even if you'd tried to explain it to me, I would have laughed at you. Because the first time I read that book, it was like someone turned a key in my head and I suddenly saw graphic storytelling as something with far more potential than I ever realized. "Watchmen" was the moment I realized that comics, like films, are limitless in definition. They can be about anything. They can address any subject. They can express any emotion, any idea. The only limitations have to do with the writers and artists themselves. I know that may seem blindingly obvious, but when you grow up reading comics and everything is always exactly the same, you start to accept that maybe that's all there is, maybe that's all comics can be. You believe in the limitations because everyone else seems to accept them so readily.

I felt so strongly about "Watchmen" that the first time I heard rumors about them trying to make a film from the book, I was angry. Keep in mind, "Brazil" is one of my two favorite films, but even so, I felt like any film version, even one directed by Terry Gilliam, was just going to savage everything that was great and beautiful about the book, and I hoped that the whole thing would flame out in development. And over the years, I watched them get close to making the film repeatedly, and even once I started to warm to the idea, I still felt like compromise was going to have to be a major ingredient in whatever version was eventually going to happen. And then, back in 2002, I read David Hayter's script for the film.

And the strange thing about was just how much it actually felt like "Watchmen