Dork Adore » Charles

Before Watchmen: the comic book prequel no one wants

Charles — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:50 +0000

It’s always a bad sign when your press release launching a new project includes an apology for the existence of the project.

DC Comics’ announcement that it plans to publish 35 new Watchmen comics this year, 25 years after the original 12-issue series blew the doors off the entire super-hero genre, has a number of implied apologies in it.

It probably needs to. The original Watchmen is an untouchable work of brilliance. Its level of influence cannot be over-stated. From my point of view, and of many other comic fans who’ve responded vocally to the news, any new Watchmen material cannot possibly be as good as the original, especially with no involvement from original writer Alan Moore.

So, with no obvious artistic reason to tell new stories, the assumption, which is implicitly confirmed in the announcement’s talk of DC’s “responsibility as publishers”, is that this is a naked cash-grab driven by purely commercial concerns.

For me, it’s the nature of the new story DC plans to tell that leaves a sour taste and confirms that the project is exactly what its detractors say it is.

Because Before Watchmen is a prequel, offering additional background and filling in the blanks left in the original series. This may sound reasonable enough, but only if you haven’t read Watchmen.

Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’ original graphic novel has the legendary status it does for many reasons – its redefinition of a genre, its memorable characters and its laser-targeted Cold War commentary. But another reason is its clockwork-like plot – each character’s background is meticulously set out, intersecting with one another at key points and adding up to a multi-layered, satisfying story.

In other words, there is no meaningful extra background to be offered, and there are no blanks to fill in. Even Gibbons says in the press release:

“the original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell”.

Rorschach not working hard enough

I understand DC’s dilemma, commercially. They can’t publish a sequel to the story, because it would be so radically different to the original. It would have to be – characters’ trajectories are hugely altered by the end of Watchmen, some terminally. So you’d have to come up with a whole new story, including new characters, and a new creative vision of what the world of Watchmen might be like 25 years on.

But if you do that you don’t have Rorschach, Dr Manhattan, Nite Owl and the rest in their familiar milieu, with their familiar costumes, which casual fans are familiar with from the film and might be interested in paying money for.

And that’s the problem – this isn’t about someone having a great idea for a Watchmen story and being allowed to tell it. It’s about sweating properties. “We own this Rorschach character; what’s he done for us lately? How have we developed him as a going concern? Where are the new merchandising opportunities for him?”

(All of which would be less galling were it not for the fact that the original Watchmen contains a lengthy text piece skewering development and marketing of super-hero properties).

DC’s argument (implied apologetically in that triumph of a press release) is: how is that different from all our other characters? How many people have written Batman over the years? We own the characters! This is how this industry works!

And the answer is: because no Batman comic has ever been on TIME‘s 100 greatest novels of the 20^th century list (that’s novels, not graphic novels), or equivalent.

Watchmen’s achievement was that it transcended comics. Many people who’ve never read another super-hero comic have read it and admired it for the towering literary achievement it is. And I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that different rules come into play. Sometimes, something is just special and should be allowed to stand alone, without being watered down and re-hashed. Frankly, Watchmen‘s been re-hashed enough in the last 25 years’ worth of super-hero comics as it is.

I’m sure Before Watchmen (which will be three times as long as the series it is acting as a prequel to) will be nicely written and drawn. DC has enlisted top creators to work on it. If someone had to write a new Rorschach series, better that it’s Brian Azzarello than someone with no talent.

But its existence highlights how little chance there is of DC ever getting another graphic novel into any sort of mainstream literary Top 100 list – because it shows, yet again, that they regard the intellectual property as everything, the actual creative work and the creator as unimportant.

Alan Moore scoffs

Watchmen is work of genius because Alan Moore is a maverick genius. There are no other reasons. His scornful response to the news of the prequel was that DC is “still apparently dependent on ideas I had 25 years ago”. And, in typical style, he’s got the heart of my negative feelings about Before Watchmen.

Because they aren’t based on any kind of outrage on behalf of Moore. The original Watchmen was work for hire; he’s never owned it or the characters. DC has offered him many opportunities to write a prequel, or sequel, or whatever he wanted, which he’s turned down.

The problem, as Moore articulates so pitilessly, is that DC’s approach is regressive, about protecting commercial assets, rather than about fostering new creativity or attempting to produce something else as game-changing for the industry as Watchmen was 25 years ago.

DC’s investment in Before Watchmen would be better used in taking a chance on some other genius with an unrelated project to pitch. But what we’ll get instead is diminishing returns that leave a massive doubt over the company’s remaining ability or desire to push its medium forward creatively.

Further Reading:

DC Comics announces Before Watchmen

Brett White: In defence of Before Watchmen

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Confess your embarrassingly nerdy obsessions here

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:00:25 +0000

Watching Mastermind this week, I realised that basically all of my options for specialist subjects relate to pointless things I’m sad and obsessive about and none involve classical music, politics, literature or anything important.

My plan now is to feel better about myself by a) confessing my sins and b) encouraging the rest of you to tell me how much geekier than me you are in the comments.

I would like to confess the following embarrassing obsessions:

Marvel Comics

A large part of my parents’ garage is devoted to my superhero comic collection. It will remain there until it dissolves into mulch as I have no room for it and I refuse to throw it away. I can tell you anything about Marvel characters. It’s dreadful. I could be using the part of my brain that contains the secret identities of all the Avengers for information about the French Revolution or how to change a fuse or something.

Mythology

Probably the least pointless thing I know sizable amounts about, but even so, sitting on the Tube reading large books marked Russian Folklore isn’t cool (what I learned: if you encounter a hut with the legs of a chicken, avoid it). If you have ever been at a dinner party with people you don’t really know, and found yourself trying to explain that the Norse believed that the giants’ main weapon against the gods come Ragnarok was a ship made of dead men’s finger- and toe-nails, you will understand what I mean.

Social death and prolonged silence will be the only things that come of it.

Championship/Football Manager

Look, I’m not proud. After ten years of this game, I may now be up to proper, literal months of my life spent playing it. If you’re not familiar with it, you manage one of hundreds of football teams, with the aid of reams of statistics and tactical information on thousands of real-life footballers in leagues across the world. If you like football, it’s essentially crack.

Purists were unhappy when recent versions of the game included some animation of the football matches, rather than just lines of text reporting on the outcome. My friends and I have actual anecdotes that we tell each other in the pub of things that have happened to us in the game.

No, seriously. Now make me feel better. What stupid things are you a total loser about?

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Castle and Breaking Bad: TV made by geeks, for geeks

Charles — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:38 +0000

Last week, I watched possibly the geekiest ten minutes of television ever. In the Hallowe’en episode of Castle, Nathan Fillion’s breezy detective series, Fillion spent the first act dressed as his much-missed Firefly/Serenity character, Mal Reynolds. “Didn’t you wear that five years ago?” his character’s daughter asked. “What? I like it!”, he replied.

He then proceeded to mention Buffy (in which he also appeared) and used the word “internets”. Cue massive amount of high-pitched “OMGs!” from people. Well, from me. God, I’m a loser.

There are lots of types of TV that are clearly made by geeks, for geeks. Castle, in which Fillion’s narcissistic mystery writer follows around a hot female homicide detective (the awesome Stana Katic) trying to a) get inspiration for novels and b) flirt with her, is the kind that’s just really, really fun. It delights in shameless meta-textual references, trips along on the considerable charm and chemistry of its two lead actors and kills an hour pretty much perfectly.

Breaking Bad, on the other hand, isn’t fun at all. Being fun, at least the way Castle does it, is easy. Being truly great, which Breaking Bad undoubtedly is, is hard.

It is still very geeky, though. It loves science so much that the lettering for its credits is done like the periodic table. But it’s really about what happens if you take a science nerd and make him live in a gritty crime drama.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a high-school chemistry teacher with a pregnant wife and a disabled son, discovers he’s dying from lung cancer. Desperate to get enough cash together to provide for his family when he’s gone, he decides to use his mad chemistry skills to start cooking and dealing meth.

Cranston is unrecognisable from when he played the spineless, manic dad in Malcolm in the Middle. He gets progressively more gaunt and dead-eyed as the series goes on, both as the cancer takes its toll and his choices start eroding his upright, family man persona.

The best thing about it (and another sign it’s made by geeks) is that it attacks its subject matter so methodically. It stays with Cranston through every excruciating step of his journey into moral hell. In a lot of TV, when the lead character needs to dispose of some bodies, it’s done off-camera and next scene the plot continues. In Breaking Bad, something seemingly simple like that can take up three episodes. Nothing’s easy, whether it’s getting the right ingredients for the meth, setting up distribution networks or taking care of rival dealers.

And every tiny decision takes Cranston from a moral man to an amoral one to… by the end of the second series, it’s not really clear what he is any more or what his real goals are. It’s a stunning, terrifying performance, facilitated by a meticulous, merciless plot.

Breaking Bad started its first series this month on Tuesdays on Five USA (it was previously shown on FX), so start watching now!

Castle isn’t on in the UK at the moment, so I guess you should do what I did, i.e. fly to America and watch it there in the most legal fashion possible. Obviously.

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Six things about modern-day vampires that are better than Twilight

Charles — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:00:04 +0000

Twilight is not a good vampire story. This is mainly because it doesn’t have any vampires in it. They can go outside in the daytime. They glitter in sunlight. What you have there, people, is more of a murderous, blood-drinking pixie.

Here are six shows and films that are better than Twilight…

Ultraviolet (1998)

It only ran for six episodes on Channel 4, but Ultraviolet is still a definitive take on the modern vampire. Downbeat, menacing and claustrophobic, it starred Jack Davenport as a London police detective recruited by a shady group of vampire-hunters (including The Wire’s Idris Elba) with ties to both the government and the Catholic Church.

The clever, logical way the series thought through how vampires, with their traditional strengths and limitations, would operate in contemporary London, remains impressive ten years on. Not to mention their hunters – why use stakes when you can use assault rifles and carbon bullets? But its best trick was to make you think the vampires kind of had a point. A hated minority being hunted down by a Vatican-funded death squad, just trying to survive? They must be the good guys, right?

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)

Businessman Nicolas Cage gets bitten by a Jennifer Beals-shaped vampire and starts going a little unhinged, in this little-known, alternately funny and disturbing film. He thinks he’s becoming one of the undead, starts avoiding sunlight and gets special ceramic fangs made so he can bite women in nightclubs. I find Nicolas Cage creepy and uncomfortable in most roles, but this part plays directly to those, uh, strengths.

Angel (1999-2004)

Look, I preferred it to Buffy, okay? Angel spent most of its time snarkily undermining the heroics of its central character, had a nice line in moody philosophising and its middle three years essentially made up one massive, crazily apocalyptic storyline. Unexpectedly cancelled after five series, it went out with a rain-drenched, Blakes 7-style ending born of angry defiance.

Blade (1998)

After three films and a TV series, still nothing in the Blade oeuvre matches the first ten minutes of the first film, in which Wesley Snipes, armed with a shotgun, a sword and a black leather trenchcoat, slaughters an entire nightclub full of techno-loving vampires. Cheap thrills, yes, but they did make my 18-year-old boy-self think he was about to see the most kick-ass film of all time. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but the rest of the film does offer some great fight scenes, some nice mythology-building (sadly abandoned in favour of over-the-top insanity in later instalments) and the most surreal action hero one-liner ever. Apropos of nothing – “some motherfucker’s always trying to ice-skate uphill”.

The Lost Boys (1987)

Dude, it’s The Lost Boys. I don’t need to explain this. Although when checking Wikipedia to see when it was released, I discovered that a sequel has been greenlit, with the Kiefer Sutherland role taken by his brother, Angus Sutherland. I am not making this up, but I really hope Wikipedia is. [Update: Looks like Lost Boys: The Tribe is already out on DVD with a third one on the way]

…and True Blood?

I’m watching at Channel 4 speed, so it’s early days, but so far I’m frustrated. It takes a great concept (vampires have revealed themselves to the world) and spends all its time in a small, cut-off town where the locals would probably be equally awestruck and intrigued if there was a sudden influx of Belgians. I mean, show me Chicago or New York now we all know the living dead are among us. Because things are probably kicking off. Well, maybe later in the series.

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Book tickets to see Twilight The New Moon

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Is FlashForward actually any good?

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:00:43 +0000

You used to be able to dip in and out of TV shows. Soaps aside, television writers were usually happy to helpfully navigate characters back to where they started by the end of an episode. And if you missed one, unless it was a two-parter, it made no difference whatsoever.

Now if you watch a programme, it’s like a relationship. There’s commitment involved. Lost and I split up after about six months because I didn’t think it had a clear life plan and was basically winging it. Heroes and I are still together, but we’re really just going through the motions at this point, with dead, dead eyes.

All of which is to say: will FlashForward betray you and break your heart?

Ideally, I’d now trigger a vision of myself six months in the future watching the finale to check whether or not I’m smacking myself repeatedly in the head in lieu of putting the remote through the telly. What with physics and all, that’s not really feasible.

So make your own mind up:

The good

The premise is brilliant. Loosely based on a 1999 Robert J. Sawyer novel, the action kicks off when the entire human race blacks out for two minutes. During the blackout, everyone on Earth experiences two minutes of their own life, six months in the future. Then they wake back up. There’s mass death and global devastation, because cars and planes can’t drive themselves for two minutes. And everyone wants to know – will the visions come true? How do I get to where I saw myself – with a different partner, unexpectedly pregnant or just dead? And most importantly for our FBI protagonists: how did it happen and could it happen again?

The execution of the premise is brilliant. Every episode so far has had some memorable apocalyptic visual, like an airport full of broken planes, a playground full of blacked-out children or hundreds of crows crashing earthwards at the same time. Basically, if they start floundering, they just need to get back to the central concept of the show – there’s so much potential depth there.

Joseph Fiennes, Jack Davenport, John Cho and Courtney B. Vance, among other great regular cast members, can sell even the lousiest dialogue, of which there is much. And even the tiniest roles are filled by good, classy actors, like Alex Kingston, Gina Torres or Shoreh Aghdashloo.

I think there’s actually a plan. The fact they’ve seeded actors like Kingston in meaningless roles early on suggests they’ll have key parts to play later, and that these have been thought through in advance. The creators have also said they’ll catch up to the flashforwards by the end of the first season, which helps keep the plot tight and contained, unlike Lost’s multi-season sprawl.

The bad

I still know almost nothing about any of the characters. It’s like they took some actors they liked and assigned character traits and jobs to them. “Hi, Joseph Fiennes, you can be an FBI agent who’s a recovering alcoholic.” “Oh, okay. What drove me to drink?” “That’s not relevant. Just look pained when anyone offers you a beer.”

Three episodes in, the investigation seems to be going pretty well. Bit concerned this will leave it susceptible to artificial, unlikely obstacles inserted to spin things out. Prison Break was particularly bad at this (“oh no, I’ve sustained third degree burns to the part of my breakout-plan tattoo that we need next – and I can’t remember what it said!!!”).

I know they’ve said they’ll wrap things up this season, but let’s be realistic – if it’s a hit, there will be more seasons. Which means more flashforwards. Which means I suspect this season, and future ones, will end with them solving the case only to find it part of a much wider conspiracy. At some point someone will probably say “it’s just like peeling an onion”. Beyond one season, this might get a bit tiring.

FlashForward is on Five on Monday night

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Dork Adore » Charles

Before Watchmen: the comic book prequel no one wants

Rorschach not working hard enough

Alan Moore scoffs

More stories like this

Confess your embarrassingly nerdy obsessions here

More stories like this

Castle and Breaking Bad: TV made by geeks, for geeks

More stories like this

Six things about modern-day vampires that are better than Twilight

More stories like this

Is FlashForward actually any good?

More stories like this