What if... what if Zack Snyder is a real-life Ozymandias?

I know this is gonna sound crazy, but stay with me here, as I imagine a wild story. In this story, Zack Snyder is a far bigger comic-book fan than almost anybody knows. It's not just that he has great respect for 300 and Watchmen and their ilk... which is clear regardless of what you think of the movies... he actually loves comic books, in a deep meaningful way. They're his favorite things in the world and it saddens his soul to see them culturally and critically marginalized as they so often are.

And so Zack hatched a master plot years and years ago. While it's so deep and byzantine that its entirety is almost incomprehensible, here are the basics: Zack, in making his name through other adaptive projects like Dawn of the Dead and 300, would get himself in a position to film an adaptation what some would call the "Citizen Kane of graphic novels," Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Zack would know well in advance that many, including Moore himself, think Watchmen "unfilmable." And Zack, secretly, would agree. But publicly, Zack would insist that his movie was a 100% faithful adaptation of the story he loved so.

Now here's the twist: Zack Snyder would purposefully make a Watchmen movie that contained many of the ideas of the original novel but he that presented them in a way that was somewhat garbled and unsatisfying to viewers... at the very least, most viewers would be filled with the notion that they were missing something, that there was something more. Whether or not one liked or hated the Watchmen film, they would recognize that in reading the book they would be treated to a deeper, more fleshed-out version of what they'd just seen on the big screen. Do you get me? People of all types, from comic fans to regular moviegoers piqued by the ideas of the film, would rally behind an idea because of Zack's film.

The end result of Zack's plan, of course, would be that people would insist on buying and reading the original Watchmen graphic novel to fill out the film's story. From there, hopefully, they would be persuaded to move on to other comics... like perhaps Swamp Thing, Planetary, Preacher, Transmetropolitan, or Identity Crisis, just to pick a few random names. All of this would bring about a massive surge in the popularity of graphic novels not just among the traditional comic-shop masses but amidst the public as a whole, and Zack Snyder would finally have achieved his dream: to make comic books culturally acceptable and maybe even cool.

Like I said above... I know it sounds crazy, right? It couldn't possibly be true. You're right, of course. But just think about my story one second longer. What do you think would tell my fictional Zack Snyder that perhaps he'd been successful? What would be his television screens heralding an end to nuclear tension, what would cause him to throw up his arms with childish delight and scream "I DID IT!!!" like Watchmen's Ozymandias?

Well, I bet it would look a little something like this:

(this image is not doctored. It is a screen cap from Amazon.com taken at about 5:00 PM eastern today, Monday March 9).

Well, damn it all, Mr. Snyder. The more I think about it the more I don't like your movie. But I am in total awe of what you have accomplished.

I am not kidding when I say that this is probably the best news I personally have seen in weeks.

Now, who feels like reading some other quality graphic novels?

In case you're wondering what I thought about Watchmen

I did not like it. In fact I thought it kind of sucked. Going by various movie ratings systems, I'd give it one and a half stars, a D, a frustrated frowny face, or one thumb down and one thumb sideways but about to be capitulated by the weight of Watchmen's mediocrity.

(And yes, Virginia, there will be spoilers).

Basically, for people like us (that is, comic book fans), Watchmen is going to be judged two ways: as an adaptation, and as a movie. I'll try to talk a little bit about each.

As an adaptation, one can look at how the film follows either the letter and the spirit of the book. It's obvious that the Watchmen film doesn't do too hot in the "letter" department; it is not really close at all to being a perfectly-copied transcription from comic to screen. Curiously people involved in the creation of the film keep insisting it is--why?? It would be pretty impossible, in the feature film format, to translate every detail of Alan Moore's tome, and I didn't expect the movie to... I'm just flummoxed that so many people are saying how faithful the film is when it really isn't. Certainly some scenes are truly right out of the book and often times these are pretty cool; mostly I loved Rorshach's scenes, especially the early ones, which seemed to treat the Watchmen comic as a shooting script. That was nice to see. But as the film progresses, scenes begin to deviate more and more wildly from the source material.

However, that is not necessarily a criticism of the movie so much as a remark on its press. I have always believed that what's really important in an adaptation is how accurately it captures the spirit of the original work. When it comes to the Watchmen movie, I'm not sure I'm ready to comment on this point yet. Seeing it last night I was fairly certain the movie missed a lot of important elements of the comic, but thinking it over a little... I don't know. I was trying to think about the thematic implications, for instance, of the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the enemy Ozymandias turns the world against instead of some manufactured space-alien threat. And I think that works. What it does, in my opinion, is neatly emphasizes the otherness of Dr. Manhattan in a way the book didn't yet in a way that is still keeping with the feel of the book. Similarly last night I was pretty convinced that the movie didn't understand Dan Drieberg--in the book the dude is pretty much a sad sack apologetic loser with a costume fetish, whereas the movie seemed to make him out to be more of a regular Joe caught up in a crazy world. But the more I think about his scenes I think it's possible that his schlubiness is just played subtlely and is not absent. At the very least, the movie preserves his costume fetish quite clearly. I really don't like Dan's outburst against Adrian at the end... that seems out of character... but I would need to see the movie again to really get a grasp on this character. So I'm gonna leave the "spirit" question open for now.

Where I think this film fails, then, is not as an adaptation but as a movie itself. And my key argument here can be summed up in one word: "pointless." But let me go back to all the press about Watchmen for a minute. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard the phrase: "Watchmen the movie will do for comic book movies what Watchmen the comic did for comics."

It is here, my friends, that the movie fails.

You see, Watchmen the comic came at a time when superhero comics needed a swift kick in the ass. It brought levels of realism to a medium that few had ever taken seriously before--be it political, scientific (kind of) or emotional. Watchmen did better than make a comic-book universe ala Marvel or DC ... it made a world, a world that seemed incredibly real, with characters so well developed and situations so complex we might as well have been hearing about them on the nightly news. Simultaneously the book also achieved a new standard for comic storytelling as art by crafting an impossibly dense, symbolism-laden literary narrative that put graphic novels on the same grounds as their prose brethren. This is what Watchmen did for comics... it, along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman's Maus (all three in 1986), forced people to see comics as a valid and powerful art form.

And then we have Watchmen the movie, a movie which purports to do the same thing to comic-book movies (and it's important to note that it is doing this of its own accord, not because it is an adaptation of a story that also did this... that's why I'm talking about it down in this section). And the problem is that the context for this movie's release has kind of doomed it already. Watchmen the movie tries, like the comic, to give us a world that asks "what if superheroes were real?". In doing so it shows us a terrible world, horrific images of violence, and soul-crushing hopelessness... it shows us more of these, in fact, than the comic originally did. And one might assume from how Zack Snyder talks (he has said as much, in fact) that his goal here is to get us to think about superheroes and their films a little harder than we have been... instead of Alan Moore's "what would a good superhero comic really look like?" we're to ask "what would a good superhero movie really look like?"

Unfortunately for Zack Snyder, we know what a good superhero movie really looks like. In fact we know what a superhero masterpiece looks like. It's called The Dark Knight. It has all the psychological/emotional realism and character depth that the Watchmen comic has, and an excellent story to back it up. It is not only, in my opinion, the best of the comic book movies but it is also a fantastic movie in its own right. It is also, incidentally, better than Watchmen by leaps and bounds.

See, my primary thoughts during the Watchmen film were: "this is really violent" and "this is long and boring." The violence I see as Mr. Snyder trying to wake us up from our superhero malaise like Moore did in 1986. But, dude, that happened last summer. In fact if superhero movies have a "1986" it would pretty clearly be "2008"--besides Dark Knight there was Iron Man, which was completely different in tone from the Batman film but also a fine flick that showed more lighthearted superhero adventure movies could also be done quite well. Of course there were awful comic book movies too, but, hey, it's not like every comic that came out in 1986 was worth reading.

As for the "long and boring" part... I realize that for me this is the real sin of the Watchmen movie: I did not enjoy watching it. That could be and probably is a comment on me, but it also, I think, reflects on the movie. There is not that much fun to be had here. Dark Knight, although two and a half hours long, was a wild ride that you didn't want to be over. Watchmen, although only about 15 minutes longer, felt like much worse.

I think that works hand-in-hand with its pointlessness. At no time did I feel like the Watchmen movie needed to be made. Fans of the comic probably did not get the fun of seeing a beloved work adapted in a satisfactory fashion, and more importantly, I feel like casual comic-book-moviegoers will be hit with a sense of redundancy, because Watchmen the movie does nothing to inject life into the superhero movie genre that Dark Knight and others did not already do better and more entertainingly.

I guess the true lesson of the Watchmen movie is this: even after 2008, superhero movies can still be strikingly mundane.

The official soundtrack listing for the Watchmen film has debuted on iTunes

and I like it. I like it a lot, in fact. It seems that they've managed to include a version of every song referenced in the book except for Elvis Costello's "The Comedians," which in my opinion is not a very fantastic song anyway. A few of the versions included (those of the Dylan songs Moore cites) are covers, and that is going to be divisive to some, especially regarding the first track...

1. My Chemical Romance - Desolation Row
2. Nat "King" Cole - Unforgettable
3. Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'
4. Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence
5. Janis Joplin - Me & Bobby McGee
6. KC & The Sunshine Band - I'm Your Boogie Man
7. Billie Holiday - You're My Thrill
8. Philip Glass - Pruit Igoe & Prophecies
9. Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah
10. Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower
11. Budapest Symphony Orchestra - Ride of the Valkyries
12. Nina Simone - Pirate Jenny

So, okay. Pretty much no one is going to argue with the Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower." Lots of people think he made that song better. I do not, but I like his version all the same and I could see where one would not necessarily want three songs sung by Bob Dylan on the same soundtrack, so the lack of Dylan's "Watchtower" is no biggie. But My Chemical Romance covering "Desolation Row"... hm.

Early internet reaction to the song seems very negative. This is doubly understandable because a lot of people hate My Chemical Romance, and because their version of the song is a total 180 from Dylan's. When I listened to the preview clip on iTunes I hated it too, but I decided to download the song anyway to listen to the whole thing, just to be sure.

And you know what... in my opinion, it's not that bad. Yes it is totally different from Dylan's. It is definitely MCRed-up. But I can see getting used to it. The song is going to play over the end credits of the movie and that's a fine place for it because then you don't have to pay attention but you can. And I get the feeling that the mood of the song is going to fit well with whatever changes Zack Snyder & co. have in store for the end of the movie. But you know, I like My Chemical Romance anyway; I think Gerard Way is a fantastic comic-book writer (one of these days I will do a post on that) and I thought the band's Black Parade album was a great mash-up of Pink Floyd, Queen, and Meatloaf. So I guess I have a positive bias here. You can preview the video and start to make a decision for yourself; I'm guessing you will probably hate it:



But, even given my semi-like for the cover, it does not compare to the original. SO here's what I'm going to do, and I recommend you follow suit. If you buy the Watchmen soundtrack, download the original "Desolation Row" from Dylan seperately. Then re-order the songs on the soundtrack so Dylan's version is the first track you hear, and My Chemical Romance's the last. That way you have the option of more easily ignoring the MCR version of the song, just like you will in the theater. But the commercial appeal of putting a super-popular band's new single front and center on the soundtrack album is pretty clear, so I'm not mad that Warner Bros. did it. I assume they won't be mad when I tweak the album for my own personal enjoyment.

As for the non-Dylan parts on the disc, I definitely approve. It seems the songs included here that were not quoted by Moore still fit both the period of the music he's referencing and its mood very, very well, such as Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and Nat Cole's "Unforgettable." To me, the soundtrack listing is the result of someone really thinking about the music, and that makes me happy. As a result I shall purchase this and, hopefully, enjoy it. And that is kind of my sentiment towards the Watchmen movie as a whole.

My roommate made this at Baker's Square tonight

and it was so awesome that I felt it was necessary to share.


Here's his Halloween costume, in possibly the best picture to ever be on Facebook:

(he's Rorshach, not, as some have suggested, "the skinny white kid in the hoody," which of course is still a super-popular costume)

And for good measure, here's another picture from my phone, taken at the Halloween party I went to after my friend Laura thought it would be hilarious to put scotch tape around my friend Dwight's face. And of course it was:

If you're having a bad day, just stare long and hard at these bad boys.

Where to go after Watchmen?

This is perhaps the most important question facing comic retailers now (besides, you know, "will there be an economy tomorrow?"). Anyone in the business can tell you that since the release of Dark Knight sales on this classic Alan Moore graphic novel have gone fucking crazy. This article says it all: Watchmen sold nine times more copies in the month after Dark Knight debuted than they did in all of 2007. Holy shit, that's amazing (further amazingness: someone who comments on that article does the math to figure that roughly 3% of the people who saw Dark Knight went out and bought a copy. All things considered, that's pretty phenomenal).

I personally have sold probably about 10 copies of the book to friends since that trailer came out (and PS: thanks, guys, for making me your comic hook up!). The best example of this I can think of is at my buddy Kevin's wedding, two weeks after the launch of Dark Knight, where no less than three people told me within the span of an hour that, based on the trailer, they wanted to pick up the book from me (great wedding, Kevin & Amanda... love you guys!).

So here we are a few months later, and my friends have finished the book, to positive reviews (it is rare, I've found, to meet someone who doesn't like Watchmen.) And now several of them are saying this: "I would really like to get into more comics. What do you recommend?"

Of course this is awesome to hear, but it is also a dangerous precipice. I feel like Watchmen, for the past two months, has been acting as comic-land's ambassador to the normal world, touching the hearts and brains of people who either had no opinion about the medium due to lack of exposure, or who simply thought that comics were ZIP! BANG! POW! just like Adam West's Batman. And now, it is so, so important that we don't shuffle these potential converts off on the latest issue of, say, Trinity or Wolverine Origins (not that there is anything inherently wrong with these books... but we must aim higher).

No, this takes a lot of thought. To answer the question of where to go next, I took a look at our store's graphic novel rack (aiming to stock the essentials and partially succeeding!) and I thought, "what would someone who enjoys the emotional and intellectual depth of Watchmen really be impressed by?" Because the thing is, and I almost hate to say it, comics hardly get better than Watchmen. It has its peers, but I'm not really sure that anything in the medium tops it. But you can't use that mindset to tell people who read it "sorry, there's no other comics worth reading," because it's not good sense from a business or an artistic standpoint (and it's totally false!). Instead, you have to try to find something that will be just as engaging and interesting as Watchmen to a non-comics reader. So it is that I came up with three answers, all famous runs of comics now collected in trade paperbacks:

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. This has the immediate benefit of being by Watchmen's author. I think people who've read that big yellow smiley-faced book will come at this series with a positive bias, which may have already gotten them over the biggest hump that prevents people from reading it (which, in my experience, is that it's ostensibly a whole comic series about a swamp monster... for some reason, some find this unappealing). It's full of that character depth that Watchmen packs in, and I feel like it kind of does to the tropes of horror what Watchmen does to those of superheroes... it makes them serious, gives them weight and gravitas. Few are the people I find who end up disliking Swamp Thing once they've checked it out, but, as I said, for me it's sometimes been a challenge to convince people to read it at all.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman. This one is kind of obvious... it's probably the most welcome comic in literary discussion (except perhaps Maus), but it's obviousness shouldn't hurt its contention here, in my opinion. Sandman was the first of the "serious" graphic novels I ever read (followed by Swamp Thing, and then a whole world of wonderful populated by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Art Spiegelman, Mike Carey and more), and it's hard to deny that it's a wonderful read. The scope of the story may be a little daunting for a recently Watchmenized reader to want to commit to (10 books, some quite lenghty), but I think it's a series that someone sympathetic to the medium will not want to stop reading once they start. Sandman also has the excellent ability to be a gateway to even more comics, most notably Lucifer, which I believe only me and a few friends consider worthy of being in the same pantheon, but whatever.

Brian K Vaughn's Y the Last Man. Until Dark Knight, I would have considered this to be the best way to sway people over to reading comics. I saw it work myself at a Thanksgiving party I had a few years ago... the first few volumes of this swept around my living room on the recommendation of a friend, and I'm pretty sure no fewer than five or six people started reading the excellent story of Yorick Brown that night... a few were compelled to keep going after the party! I think there's something about the way this book is set up that is just so gripping... the plot just grabs you and doesn't want to let go. Brian K Vaughn is a master of pacing, something that has served him well in netting a sweet TV writing gig or two... and I'd go so far as to say that pretty much anything of his (except maybe his super-early Marvel and DC work) is incredibly new-reader friendly, but Y: The Last Man has got to be the king of that. It also has the benefit of having no elements of traditional superheroics or fantasy (well, maybe just a little fantasy), in case these new readers are still a little wary of capes in their literature.

There are tons of great comics series out there... I myself had quite a few "honorable mentions" that in the end I just didn't feel would make as strong a choice as the ones above, but some of those are Runaways, Walking Dead, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Animal Man. Does anyone else have input they want to share here?

Bear in mind, the ultimate goal (for me) is readership retention. And it's not just motivated by business (of course that helps)... no, my main driving force is really artistically based. I truly believe that there is a humongous world of fantastic literature out there that people have ignored for decades because of the stigma of "picture-books"... and thanks to Dark Knight and Watchmen and maybe series like I named above, we are at a point where we can change that.

How's that for good news?