Watchmen, a graphic novel by Alan Moore, is something of a holy icon in comic book world. I have this on good authority, having asked a number of men (mostly in their mid-thirties) who maintain that when Watchmen was released, in the mid1980s, it was like a bomb going off. "We'd never seen anything like it before," is what most of their comments boiled down to.
Why do they love it so much? Let me sum up. A cold-war tale set in an alternate-history 1985, Watchmen is a peek behind the mask into the psychology of superheroes and heroines. The graphic novel and it is a novel is layered with multiple stories that cut back and forth, every frame jammed with inside jokes and visual puns. Running underneath each individual adventure is the gonzo hand of fate, like some great cosmic banana peel, popping up when you least expect it. (More than one critic has compared Moore to Orson Welles.) Watchmen is the only comic book to win a Hugo Award, and the coming film adaptation has already inspired wild speculation: will it be good or a terrible disappointment?
Certainly, the film adaptations of Moore's work have not served him well to date. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta were variously dreadful. In an interview with film-buff website spout.com, Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons said that Moore has disowned this film too, on account of his bad cinematic experiences.
In trying to deduce why, we can learn something from another comic book-***-film author: Frank Miller, who provides Moore with an odd kind of alter-anti-hero. The pair are contemporaries; Miller was born in 1957 and Moore a few year earlier in 1953. Miller is American, Moore is British. Watchmen should reach movie screens in March 2009 (although legal wrangling over the film rights may well delay the film's release, much to the screaming consternation of comic geeks everywhere). Meanwhile, Miller's film version of Will Eisner's seminal comic-book series, The Spirit, is planned for release in December 2008.
The pair also share a common link in Hollywood in the form of director Zack Snyder, who directed the film version of Miller's graphic novel 300, and is now directing Moore's Watchmen. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Moore expressed doubts about Snyder's ability to bring Watchmen to cinematic realization. "I didn't particularly like the book 300," he said. "I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid."
What Moore actually thinks of the finished version of Watchmen isn't known, since he won't talk about it and mostly appears to simply want to be left alone. But he has talked about Miller. "Miller's trapped in a teenage world of macho violence," he told The Word, a British magazine. "Look at Sin City. Every woman is a bloodthirsty, semi-naked ****e; every man is a indestructible killing machine. It's nasty, misogynist, Neanderthal Teenage, but it sells."
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