Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, not the bending out of shape. I note that Andrew O’Hehir (and others, I’m sure), have recently referred to The Dark Knight as a “teenage boy’s idea of a serious film,” and have received plenty of ire (including creepy threats) from the rabid fanboy/fangirl contingent. So, sorry if this post offends, but I’ll be working through why the new film Watchmen — and its incessant hype — has been bugging me the last few days. (Oh, for the record, I liked Dark Knight just fine, but even as a long-time DC Comics fan, I have to admit that Iron Man was by far the better cinematic superhero experience in ‘08).

Watchmen’s hype is, alas, long-standing; it is now regularly afforded the title of “best comic ever” in the same lazy way people give Citizen Kane the “best movie ever” crown. I read Watchmen for the first time back in 1985, when the comic was first released — I was a teenager, and bought each issue on the day it came out, devoured it, and waited (sometimes for months and months) for the next installment. I had been a fan of Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing and Marvelman, so I loved Watchmen; it was a genuinely revolutionary superhero book and one which, along with Frank Miller, Dave Mazzuchelli, and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns marks a particularly innovative moment in mainstream comics history that’s undeniably significant.

Yet, it’s been the intervening years (and subsequent readings) which have given me pause in canonizing this particular book as the “best comic book ever.” During the early days of the comic’s inception, it was initially conceived as a way to re-use a number of characters that DC had acquired when it bought out the old Charlton Comics line, many of which have now been incorporated into the DC Universe.

But, since then-editor Dick Giordano was really enamored with some of these characters, Blue Bettle, Captain Atom, Nightshade, The Question, the Peacemaker and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt were all morphed into similar analogs (Night Owl, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, the Question, the Comedian, and Ozymandias, respectively). Moore took the basics of these characters (down to making multiple Night Owls, etc.), tweaked them into darker versions of the characters, and ran with it, inventing an alternate 1980s America where Nixon was still president, where superheroes were creepy fetishists more than moral paragons, and where “heroism” was relative.

It’s a great comic, one of the best superhero comic books ever. Moore’s writing was perfectly complemented by Dave Gibbons’s gritty art, and the unique (at least at that time) mix of comic book storyline, comic-within-a-comic (Tales of the Black Freighter), and prose (the text appendices at the end of each issue, e.g. Hollis Mason’s Behind the Mask) all combine to make it a work unlike any other seen to that point. I personally think other comics hang together better than this or are generally more interesting (in Moore’s work alone, I enjoy his run on Supreme quite a bit, and think From Hell is the greatest long-form comic to date), but I acknowledge that Watchmen was certainly great for its time.

One thing which shaped my enjoyment was the specific activity of reading this comic. As each issue was published, I’d talk about it with my friends, trade issues, and when we had access to it, we’d hop on the nascent internet of the era — basically, USENET newsgroups, such as rec.arts.comics — where other fans picked it apart, trying to understand the symbolism Moore and Gibbons were dropping, as well as the larger configurations of this alternate world. On USENET, the collaborative work of smarter dudes than me figured out who Rorschach was two or three issues ahead of the big reveal, discovered significant foreshadowing in the backgrounds of various panels, and made the practice of reading a wholly different sort than reading a “graphic novel” version is typically like today.

It’s this sort of social, knowledge-building activity that, to me, is what made Watchmen really fantastic as a comic book reading experience. Making sense of all the different kinds of storytelling in the book was a lot of fun — looking at the inclusion of the Black Freighter comic was evocative and served as a great counterpoint (and sometimes foreshadowing for!) what was going on in the main story, the details presented in all the prose work (Behind the Mask) were integral for understanding the larger story of the Minutemen and their legacy, etc. Piecing together a serial storyline with a bunch of other people, reading and rereading each panel, going online and trying to suss out various theories (and their justifications) — this is similar to the kind of joy I get out of watching (and trying to understand) Lost these days.

But, back to the present. There’s no way the film can mimic this kind of reading experience, so what’s this movie actually going to be? While as a teenager I thought the comic’s ostensible storyline — “whoa, superheroes might be kinda fallible and sometimes mentally unstable!” — was mindblowing, that holds basically no resonance with me as an adult. I’m perplexed; who really cares about the superhero storyline in this any longer? Isn’t it much, much more interesting the way that Moore and Gibbons use comics to tell us a story and what it tells us about reading comics?

Rather than mimic the reading experience, it seems that Zack Snyder has tried to be quite faithful to the comic’s look and plot, essentially using the original work as a storyboard for making the film. I suppose I can understand this as a pragmatic means of making a movie that will be under this degree of scrutiny (visual accuracy certainly won’t upset the fanboys and fangirls), but is also a fundamental misapplication of the art of comics — Moore (as seen most pointedly in works like The Killing Joke and From Hell) is a master of interesting visual juxtapositions that work best in static, discrete media. Take this scene transition from The Killing Joke, for example:

It’s evocative of the Joker’s mindset, clearly sexually creepy (note the “coin slot” location), and all intended by Moore — though Brian Bolland was the artist, Moore’s scripts are always spelled out in excruciating detail. There’s something about the language of comics can get lost when translated to a film, and I think it’s completely reasonable for Moore to distance himself from any cinematic interpretation of his work. Will these kinds of subtleties be captured in the film? And, if so, how does the switch to a motion picture change the effect of this? I’m not decrying the idea of attempting to adapt his work, just skeptical that the so-called “visionary director of 300” will be creative enough to handle it.

It’s also not encouraging that, because of time considerations and studio pressure, Snyder’s been forced to cut out the Black Freighter comic (though he’s releasing it as a separate DVD), there’s really no way to include Behind the Mask as anything but exposition within the film, the ending is significantly different in content if not in theme, and, in the silliest change, Laurie Juspeczyk no longer smokes (because the studio head hates smoking). I don’t much care about how the movie deviates from the comic except insofar as this movie seems structurally incapable of conveying a rich, multimodal mix of comics and other text that the initial work featured. We’re left with a movie that, rather than reference other superhero movies is, from all accounts, rather slavishly re-enacting Watchmen’s uninteresting plot about how superheroes are fallible, etc. Well, okay, great, if you’ve somehow made it to the 21st century without ever thinking about how silly the concept of superheroes is, I wish you an enjoyable experience, but I’ve been there, done that.

What was valuable about Watchmen for me was its use of comics (and prose) form in support of these themes, plus the way its serialized nature encouraged us teenagers to engage with the text of the comic, talk to each other about it, and puzzle-solve. Basically, we “gamed” Watchmen — an activity that this movie is, frankly, not set up to afford. I’m not saying that comics cannot or should not be made into good films. Rather, I’m arguing that the very point of Watchmen is really about comics form and creating new activities of comics reading, not about superheroes. It’s just a bad fit unless liberties are taken with the source material and it is rejiggered to somehow be about film form and film viewership. Everything indicates that Snyder has done the opposite of what he should have done, and made a film which attempts to lift an innovative comic directly into a medium it was never meant to be in.

The new Watchmen film will be “dancing about architecture” at best, or just another dumb big budget shit-blows-up film at worst. Either way, it’s a rental.