More Watchmen linkage
For someone who has forsworn the movie, Alan Moore sure is getting a lot of coverage out it! And he’s selling lots of comics too. Here’s some of the more interesting Watchmen links I’ve seen in the last couple of days:
Salon.com have run an interesting, intelligent interview with Moore (you’ll have to get a site pass) – he’s in pretty good form right now! Despite promising to ‘spit venom‘ all over the film last year, he’s been pretty even-handed in his discussions in the interviews he’s been doing.
The webcomic PvPonline has been running a Watchmen parody called The Ombudsmen (that’s part one of 5). It’s pretty funny, if you like PvP’s sense of humour, and uses characters from the newspaper comic pages to riff on the ideas in Watchmen.
Saturday Morning Watchmen is a flash movie about what Watchmen would have been like as an old school Saturday morning cartoon. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I will!
Finally, on slightly different note, is Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the movie but also the comic, Alan Moore, his fans and comics in general (with a few black and white exceptions) and it’s safe to say he doesn’t like any of them. It’s an incredible exercise of missing the point and letting your pre-conceptions colour your published work. For example:
The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
I haven’t seen the film (yet) but lots of reviews are leveling similar criticism at it – that it revels in the violence of the story. But as AVClub‘s ‘Book vs. Film‘ feature on Watchmen points out, Moore doesn’t revel in the violence of the story. The violence in Watchmen isn’t supposed to be all ‘kick ass cool’. It’s supposed to show how de-humanised these people have become. Lots of readers have seemed to think that some of the more violent characters in the comic are pretty cool (much as skinheads adopted A Clockwork Orange) but Moore certainly doesn’t and the fact that Lane thinks he does demonstrates how poorly he understood not just Watchmen but Moore’s entire body of work. Best of all he basically says ‘of course the fans will disagree with me on this’ in his opening paragraph saying that
Fans of [comics] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match.
Whatever dude – when you’re wrong you’re wrong and on this, you’re really wrong.