Add one more name to the list of comic industry luminaries attached to the upcoming film version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen - Adam Hughes.
Though rumors were circling earlier this week, the artist has confirmed for Newsarama that he will be designing the costumes for the film version of the seminal comic work, to be directed by Zack Snyder.
In an age when there’s a tremendous amount of crossover between comics and Hollywood, his work on Watchmen (“Assuming they like what I sketch,” Hughes joked), this will be his first movie gig.
So how did Snyder and the film producers find him?
“I’d like to say that my work spoke for itself, and my draftsmanship and Dave Gibbons-lie clean lines just called to them…or something…but I really have no idea,” Hughes said with a chuckle. “Maybe the movie guys walked through a comic shop looking for somebody - anybody to design their costumes, and some boobs called out to them from the rack. That’s a pun, by the way…
“But seriously – I have no idea. Maybe they just liked my stuff. Zack Snyder is working on 300 [based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller], so obviously he reads the occasional comic or two, one could deduce; but all in all, they got in touch with us, and it was all very causal.”
While the story - the words of Watchmen - is virtual scripture in the world of comics, in the eyes of many fans, so are the costumes. So just what will Hughes be designing, or doing, even?
“When you get on the other side of the fence, you sort of understand that there are certain things that wouldn’t survive a direct translation from comic to screen,” Hughes explained. “Superman and Spider-Man look virtually identical to their comic book counterparts. Batman doesn’t, but yet he still has Batman’s silhouette, and that seems to be enough for most people. But continuing, the X-Men hardly resemble themselves at all – but they still work.
“In doing something like this, I find that I end up thinking about two completely different groups within the movie’s audience at the same time: the die-hard comic book fans who will not permit even an iota of alteration; and then you’ve got your non-comics readers who will be turned off the minute somebody walks out in a leotard. You have to come up with something that allures and entices them and their debit cards and their dollars without being so radical that it turns off the die-hard fan. It’s actually pretty hard work.”
In short, Hughes isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel, or throw out Gibbons’ designs. What he is trying to do is take the original costumes, and make them…easier to swallow as something you'd see - and believe - on screen.
“In a comic book, because it’s all graphic abstraction, it’s easier to accept something that’s completely insane,” Hughes said. “But in a movie, you can make stuff that’s slightly insane – something that, if you saw someone walking down the street in it, you’d think, ‘No,’ but there’s something about the context of a movie that allows the slightly bizarre to become acceptable, just like where comics allow the amazingly bizarre to become acceptable. So now it’s a matter of, ‘Okay, how do we take the Silk Spectre from the amazingly bizarre to the slightly bizarre?’ After all, she wears an outfit that you could pull right out of Victoria’s Secret…”
Hughes is keeping mum on who exactly he’s been asked to sketch – although, as one might be able to guess, he was working on design elements of the Silk Spectre while speaking with Newsarama. “I haven’t been asked to do sketches of all the Watchmen, just a few of them,” Hughes said. “I think, the message at least I’m taking from that is that with some of them, there’s nothing that needs to be tweaked for the 21st century.
“But yeah – the ones that you can imagine might need some help to make them a little easier to swallow…the ones that you look at and think… ‘Uh…yeah.’ Those are the ones.”
And is he working on Dr. Manhattan designs?
“There’s only so much you can do with a blue ____,” Hughes deadpanned.
At the very least, Hughes said, the job with the movie allows him the opportunity to re-read Watchmen, and also – he’s found an invaluable reference. “One of the things that’s really helping is having the big hardcover Graphitti Designs Watchmen edition from…however many decades ago,” Hughes said. “It’s the same as the Absolute Edition, but it’s comic-sized.
“It’s got Alan Moore’s notes to Dave Gibbons in it, and he talks to Dave about the concept of the character, which helps in getting me thinking a little more about not what they’d be wearing, but why they’d be wearing it.”
And finally, as for how his movie work will affect his regular workload, Hughes said that he’s got a pretty good rotation thing going.
“I do a little writing on All-Star Wonder Woman, and when my typing fingers get tired, I move over to the drawing table and do a little more on Silk Spectre and try to make her work as well as some other sketches, and oh yeah, crap – I’ve got a Catwoman cover due. It’s a little schizophrenic right now, but fun.”
