Back in the late 80's, mostly in grad school I guess, I became enamored of a few absurdist comic books and strips like "The Flaming Carrot," "Zippy the Pinhead," and--to a lesser degree--"Cerebus the Aardvark." They appealed to my love of the offbeat and the iconoclastic, and in a conservative place like Waco, Texas, allowed me to maintain a highly inaccurate self-image as an ahead-of-the-curve hipster, too cool to be held back by my temporary dalliance in such a cultural backwater. The very fact that these comics were actually available in a Waco comic book store should have clued me in to the highly relative nature of my hipness, but that observation escaped me at the time.
At any rate, my periodic searches for back issues of Flaming Carrot eventually led me to the works of Alan Moore, including "V for Vendetta" (see the cool, cloak-rippling action image to the right) and then "Watchmen" (1986-87). Along with writers like Frank Miller ("The Dark Knight Returns") and Art Spiegelman ("Maus"), Moore helped legitimize comic books as a forum for serious issues and launched an era of comics during which--for better or worse--most of the tired old superheroes were re-invented as brooding, conflicted neurotics, struggling to reconcile their physical superiority with their sometimes dubious moral codes.
"Watchmen" is interesting partially because with a single exception, none of the main characters has any superhuman powers at all. They dress up and fight crime in an alternate version of the 1980's in which the U.S. rapidly approaches all-out war with the Soviet Union, but they're not superheroes, merely "costumed adventurers," or as other characters bluntly point out, vigilantes. At least two of them, "Rohrschach" and "The Comedian," can easily be viewed as sociopaths. They make the citizenry nervous enough to enact laws specifically aimed at curbing the activities of costumed adventurers, and throughout the twelve chapters a recurring graffiti tag appears, "Who watches the Watchmen?"--a quote from one of Juvenal's Satires.
The quote got me thinking--who will watch Watchmen when director Zack Snyder (300, Dawn of the Dead) finally brings it to the big screen in 2009? I recently re-read "Watchmen" in its omnibus edition, complete with a cover blurb from Time magazine declaring it one of the top 100 novels since 1928 (Since a very cursory look at novels from 1987 alone quickly produces three that are better--Beloved, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Black Dahlia--that declaration sounds pretty ridiculous). It has many strengths, but will they translate to film? Overlapping dialogues help move the action along and counterpoint different plot elements; inter-textual material between the chapters in the form of diary entries, book excerpts, newspaper clippings and such offer important exposition without resorting to endless static panels of talking heads; a meta-fictional subplot in which a boy reads a comic book obliquely parallels the story arc of a main character. All of these integral elements work very well on the page, but can Snyder find a way to incorporate them into a 90-minute comic book blockbuster? Will he even try?
Obviously the fanboys will turn out no matter what he produces; "Watchmen" enjoys legendary status in the world of comics and graphic novels, and the blogosphere has been following every tiniest development in the movie's production with bated breath since it was first green-lighted. But after the opening weekend, will anybody else be interested in a superhero movie with no superheroes? The primary demographic for the movie probably has only the vaguest notion about the cold-war nuclear fears that lie behind the original. However, in today's political climate, a story that hangs on one character's drastic, Machiavellian, and unilateral solution to avoiding World War III should provide a filmmaker plenty of grist for his creative mill and a chance to widen Watchmen's appeal beyond its fanboy fanbase. If he doesn't spend too much time reading the fansites, that is.
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