Apologies for "dumbing down" this new fourm, but I wanted to talk about something that I think really needs to be considered a work of serious literature: Watchmen, a 12-issue comic series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and published in 1986/7 and continuously in print as a collected edition ever since.



I needed a book to read on the train to London last week and it occurred to me that I hadn't read Alan Moore's Watchmen for a good few years. It's a three-hour trip to London. Watchmen is a 12-issue series. I can read one comic in 10-20 minutes. Should be just about right, I thought.

As the train pulled out of Newcastle, I opened the book.

As it pulled into Durham (that's at least 10 minutes), I was still looking at page 1.

It is a perfectly contructed comic-book page.

Honestly, everything on that page is pure genius. The interplay of text and pictures, the flow of the pictures, the two levels of textual meaning... everything about it is perfect. And that's just the first page.

By the time I got to London, I had just finished the second issue. (Each issue is four pages longer than a standard comic, and there is a text essay at the end of each one, but still...)

Watchmen is a work of genius. It's not just a clever story (of a style that had never really been done before in comics), it's clever story telling.

Alan Moore said he wrote it deliberately to exploit the storytelling ideas that were possible with (and unique to) the comic medium. As a novel, Watchmen would just have been a good story. As a film, it would just have been a good story.

As a comic, it's a work of genius. Greater than anything I've read in any medium.



I just had to get that off my chest 

Watchmen struck me, when I read it, as being enormously solid, but I didn't get into it as much as I have some other series (Daredevil had one or two rather extraordinary runs, and Ex Machina has really impressed me so far from an artistic perspective).  I'll read it again some time, no doubt.

The trailer for the upcoming (2010) film...erm...didn't fill me with hope that it is going to be too good at all (even without comparisons with the book).  Ah well, there are plenty of other films out there.  No big loss.

Though I quite enjoyed it at the time, the more I think about Maus, the less significant it feels to me as an artistic contribution to the world of sequential art.  The rational side of my head still has to give it some appreciation, but overall there's a lot of cognitive dissonance cause by it

McCloud's book is indeed extremely eye-opening, Martle. It says things that most comic readers will already know but have probably never thought about! I still need to read his follow-up, Reinventing Comics, which I expect to be every bit as good.

Cheers Martle - both recommendations noted.

Moore has argued that V for Vendetta was a social commentary on Thatcherite Britain, and could only be believeable within that context. Thus his objection to the film treatment, by American writers, which was totally divorced from the book's 1980s origins.

Disturbingly, I watched the film and found myself thinking, yes, I can see this happening under nu-Labour 

The film lost a lot of the book's depth and most of the social sub-text, but was still a very good film of its type. But the book was still 100 times better.

Opinions on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
I've read the first two volumes and have been considering buying The Black Dossier.
I enjoyed them. A lot. A very different universe to that of Watchmen in that it's full of possibilities arching outwards. I feel that there's an entire series (at least) of comics possible within the League's universe (and wouldn't it be wonderful to have the first League with Orlando and Christian) but Watchmen is almost circumscribed. You could produce a novel that detailed the first Watchmen, but I feel that would somehow detract from the experience of the second book.

I loved Watchmen (I really love the interstitial bits, in particular, the whole thing about pirate comics overtaking superhero comics).
I've been a fan of the X Men and of Batman for a long time (and I occasionally spend hours geekily browsing Wikipedia to discover back-stories and future-stories of superheroes (and you may remember that I adore the weird idea of canon)).

Haven't read V for Vendetta yet. But I will.