After all this years, whats your opinion on it? Masterpiece or a schizo rant?
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After all this years, whats your opinion on it? Masterpiece or a schizo rant?
Yes. Also yes.
Never read it, but based on what I've heard and read about it, I think it might be overrated. At the very least, I think the big scheme was guaranteed to eventually fail.
anyone who uses the term "overrated" in any capacity should be shot
That's what you're complaining about?
yes i hate that homosexual term
The internet has made me hate the words "underrated", "overrated", "hidden gem" and "objectively. It's like only the biggest brainlets imaginable use them to sound smart.
>Masterpiece
Definitely this. Also proof that comics can be high literature.
Most comics aren't high literature. That's OK. Most books aren't either.
>I think the big scheme was guaranteed to eventually fail.
That's a low-IQ take. The book is really about the consequences of having actual superheroes, and how they deal with some of those consequences. It's also about the visual medium itself. That big scheme was almost just a mcguffin; it's not the real point, but it is the in-universe point.
Subtlety is just a three-syllable word to you, numbskull.
As I said, I haven't actually read it. I just gave my opinion on the efficacy of one character's plan, based on the secondhand knowledge I have. And I'm not saying that it being a bad plan is bad writing, because it could be intentional for all I know.
seems to at least agree that it's not actually all that logical, as far as I can tell.
Well, it isn't in our logic but it is the logical outcome of the comic itself, and anything else would feel just half assed or a copout.
The problem is that you can't judge whether a writer's decision is proper or not by just reading a plot summary because there's so much more things than plot going on in any narrative work. Or at least in the good ones.
It's kinda like judging a painting without seeing it, just from someone else's description of it.
My main problem is that it's all based on one lie, so if anyone learns the truth, it'll be undone, unless the world actually manages to achieve real peace that isn't entirely built on the fear of aliens motivating people to work together by that time.
You mean, like that lie that led to the Vietnam war? Or Watergate?
Yeah, something like that is just completely senseless and nobody would ever do that kinda shit irl.
There's a difference between a lie that causes damage and a lie that prevents damage.
You do realize you're jut getting deeper and deeper in your bullshit, right? This is just some argument online but I hope you're not like this irl, 'cause it'd be insufferable.
I don't get into arguments often enough to know if I do that in person.
And I wasn't planning on continuing after that post, since my goal wasn't arguing this time, just saying that I think it's a bad plan, and I decided to explain how those weren't great counterexamples.
its pretty good but wtf was the black freighter shiit
>paranoid madman commits a horrible atrocity to spare people from a horrible atrocity
No points for guessing who this was supposed to parallel
Everyone
It parallels the focus of each chapter that it sits alongside
That you think it's just about Ozy tells me your opinion on the book is either from a misremembered reading long ago or just fricking wiki articles
>a misremembered reading long ago
Guilty as charged. Not sure how often everyone else re-reads it, if ever
I skim through it every time there's a thread here because someone inevitably says something wrong or moronic and I get a sexual thrill from proving someone wrong on the internet
Holy quads.
Blessed post
A hero's work never ends.
literally me
Such an amazing panel.
There's so many good ones
>Pretty much anything with Manhattan on Mars
>The birth of Manhattan
>"I did it thirty minutes ago"
>Kovacs getting atomized by Jon
>Both times the subtrinsic field extractor went to work and obliterated John
>the panel of the skeletons kissing
>"The world's smartest man is no more of a threat than it's smartest termite"
>"I'm disappointed in you Veidt"
>the panel where Ozymandias buries his crew in the snow
>the cover of issue 2, with the statue
>the comedian getting shot
It's Kino in printed form, hating on it is the highest form of homosexualry
>pushed the clock back a mere five minutes
>Adrian crucified himself.
I love you, your quads are entirely deserved
>I get a sexual thrill from proving someone wrong on the internet
I didn't know this was a fetish but now that I do it makes sense. It explains a lot about the people here, really. Also checked.
Hurf durf
The thing is in the real world there was no nuclear war, without needing to sacrifice 15 million people... So there is no certainty that Adrian's plan was necessary at all
In the real world Doctor Manhattan didn't exist.
Congratulations on realising the point.
Even though Moore was writing at a time when nuclear war was still a genuine concern, Veidt's plan is never actually held up as a real workable solution, even in the world of the story, and the comic implicitly condemns it multiple times.
This is bait
Please read the comic.
Do you think people living at the height of the Cold War knew that? Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
It's a masterpiece. It's a superb example of sequential art and how to tell stories in that medium. Unfortunately, most people read it and said "Wow, grisly violence and unhinged protagonists are so cool."
>daily reminder that Rorschach is indeed a lunatic unmeded, nasty person and bad at detective work
Rorschach is an excellent detective, he figures out the entire mystery of the cape-killer basically by himself. He's just ironically not conspiracy-brained enough to figure out the real truth.
he was wrong, the scheme was never killing masked vigilantes
>saturday morning cartoon watchmen with the same reaction as the og work
based.
still very funny it's the only watchmen related thing moore gave direct approval
He was correct in that he figured out who killed Comedian (the initial mystery he set out to solve), he just came to the wrong conclusion regarding the why
Rorschach stops suspecting Veidt after the false-flag assassination.
Until he uncovers proof pointing to Veidt
Nite Owl is the one who guessed the password and fingered Veidt. Without him Rorschach would have suspected nothing and either died in prison or become anonymous squid victim #3651
Rorschach is the reason the investigation even starts by your logic, Nite Owl would still be at home if he wasn't warned or motivated by Rorschach you dumb troony
>Rorschach is the reason the investigation even starts
and he still couldn't figure out the culprit.
But his methods lead him there
"i'd hoped Adrian might help with that" implies to me that going to Adrian's office was Dan's idea. Them stumbling on the truth was essentially an accident.
Sure, if you completely ignore that Rorschach suggests telling Adrian that Pyramid Deliveries paid to kill him in order to convince him to help them a few pages before this one
You're still avoiding the fact that his methods lead everyone there
that's still not the same as uncovering proof.
I guess the means don't matter? You're a moron
the only reason they get pointed back towards Pyramid Deliveries and Veidt in the first place is because Rorschach roughed up some goons after Nite-Owl's Google searches couldn't square the Veidt assassin circle
>related thing moore gave direct approval
Which is just a gag real. That says so much about the industry!
Re-read it. It is much better than you think. The problem is that it is an event collection of different stories without a main goal or comnection. And they vary in quality, thats right.
But even back than it was well produced. You can look through the “pissing on Moore“-glasses and hate it.
I read them around the time of that shitty HBO show, half are outright trash like Comedian and Rorschach and the other half are okay at best precisely because they're so purposeless. Minutemen is the only one out of the lineup that is ever talked about and that's only because it's carried hard by Cooke's art, the story isn't so hot. They're shameless cashgrabs that never elevate themselves beyond that. The worst thing something can be is mediocre after all, just so-so that it fades from the public consciousness as soon as it's out.
I agree on the cashgrab. But i would say it is mich more like securing the IP. It came 4 years after the movie. And the movie was underperforming, so the synergy woth the movie was non-existent.
Comedian and Rorschach are mot trash, but just generic comics with some “Watchmen“ sprinkled in to remind you. I would compare it to the Watchmen appendix text section.
Minutemen had a good story, it played alot with Watchmen themes. First the asian dad and son was a Charlton comic callback. Than the heroes being not the superheroes you get from regular cape comics. And the end sacrificing the dad and som team.
The difference is just it wasnt a challenging story or ambitous art like Watchmen.
I kinda liked Silk Spectre and how this was a generational conflict. And i liked Moloch and Dollar Bill more than i would expect from inor characters.
>But i would say it is mich more like securing the IP
That's what a cashgrab generally is, yes. You're basically stating an oxymoron here.
>Comedian and Rorschach are mot trash, but just generic comics with some “Watchmen“ sprinkled in to remind you
Nah, they're straight up trash. There's a reason the only thing remembered about them are memes about how bad they are like "b***h to be you right now" and "it's time to shit"
>Minutemen had a good story, it played alot with Watchmen themes
It required a retcon almost as big as the HBO show making Hooded Justice black and it was just an overall less interesting take on the characters compared to the brief glimpse we got in the original. Again, carried hard by Cooke's retro art that fits the style perfectly but other than that it's unworthy of note.
>I kinda liked Silk Spectre and how this was a generational conflict. And i liked Moloch and Dollar Bill more than i would expect from inor characters.
See above.
I differ. Securing an IP doesnt mean a cashgrab, it is a behaviour to keep your IP a cashcow. A cashgrab is that you put out a product which is cheap and with one thought to get double the profit.
I dont think that they really made that much money from it or were sure since many people where on Moores side. And the movie underperformed.
I wouldmt call it trash. They are ok books. You could say by the number standard comic books.
What retcon do you mean?
> it is a behaviour to keep your IP a cashcow
You just described a cashgrab. It was made for the express purpose of keeping the cashflow, whether that be actual cash or IP. F4antastic was a cashgrab since it was an awful movie made for no other reason than for Fox to keep the theatrical rights for the Fantastic Four. It might have been a box office bomb that ultimately caused them to lose the rights anyway but it was a cashgrab nonetheless. Before Watchmen was no different in that regard.
>I wouldmt call it trash. They are ok books. You could say by the number standard comic books.
I disagree, a few are outright trash while the rest are just okay. They're the very definition of mediocrity, so middle of the road that they don't inspire any sort of meaningful emotion good or bad thus damning those books to be easily forgotten by the public at large. They're a prequel no one asked for from an era where Hollywood was making boring, by the number prequels to popular movies no one asked for. As bad as Snyder's movie or the show was, at least they're memorable in that regard.
Cashgrab is a quick easy money. Thats why you call it a grab. A quick grab into the pockets of your customer!
Trash was only the pirate one. There is a difference between middle of the road and bad.
>Rorschach is an excellent detective
Yeah, him mumbling while Nite Owl figures everything out definitely proves that.
Rorschach is a man who’s faced the worst the world can throw at him and been completely and utterly broken by it. He needs help.
I love Rorschach
He is literally me
Rorschach is the kind of person who thinks people should be killed for jaywalking
He spared Moloch for the illegal drugs, so he's not completely without compassion
I think they included the Veidt to Hitler comparison if only to show he's not outright authoritarian either
I think the guy is just really, REALLY cynical
In that part he was actively defending the comedian as a patriot when he was just a nutcase given free reign to do almost what ever he wanted, ando calling him a nazi would also being he was one to. With honestly to be checks out.
Rorscach is a hypocrite, that's the whole point he wants to pretend he's objective but all he really does is blind himself to biases. He's basically your typical "facts don't care about your feelings" gays but all his facts are basically dictated by his feelings. But deep down he iscompassionate, that's his whole reason for being the way he is. He's a person who wants to help others but ever since he was a child doing so has resulted in nothing but him suffering for it, so he tries to create a mask that he doesn't care but it doesn't really quell those feelings, when he's confronted by Kitty Genovese's murder he dons a literal mask to fight crime. When confronted by Blair Roche's murder he recedes deeper into his persona. Walter wants to find a way to not care while still doing something about everything he hates in the world but it's impossible. Which is why he constantly slips up and has pity on others and makes exceptions. Then in the end finally just rejects the mask all together because he really can't run from his emotions anymore
What's funny is that people don't realize that characterization despite the fact it's right there in the name. A Rorschach test is in stark black and white but still intensely subjective.
Pretty sharp contrast to Dan, Dan felt absolutely horrible when he found out Adrian's plan but went along with it for the sake of the world. Dan chose "Destroy the truth to save the world" and Rorshach believed "Destroy the world to save the truth"
This is a revisionist take that NO ONE, including Alan Moore, ever claimed initially.
These are just wrong.
Then what IS right, homosexual?
nah it's right there in the book dude
>being this naive about something so prevalent and evident
He finally has to face his hypocrisy when Ozy's plan is revealed and he cannot deal so he commits suicide by Manhattan.
This running theme of hypocrisy is set up pretty much immediately when Rorschach mentions the nukes in Japan being justified, which are a very obvious moral parallel to Ozy's actions.
Once again, analogy falls apart when the a-bombs were not a secret and it heavily impacted the reputations of everyone involved in it.
Ozzy on the other hand made sure he would never be caught by destroying all evidence and killing or convicing everyone who knew of the plan.
It being a secret doesn't matter. I doubt Rorschach would support Ozy even if he did it openly.
>it being a secret doesn’t matter
The entire conflict in the end is about it being a secret you moron. How can you say it doesn’t matter when the entire plan relies on it being secret?
The bombings of Hiroshima were the absolute opposite. They were warned prior to it and Truman accepted total responsibility for it.
The only way the ending would have been comparable is if Veidt willingly became a villain, destroyed New York. Then threatened the USA and USSR into disarming under threat of him doing the same to every other major city. Veidt actually would be sacrificing something in that scenario. In this one he still reaps the benefits of getting paid for the rebuilding, his technology being used throughout the world, his political influence, people still seeing him as a good guy etc
>hiroshima and nagasaki were ok because we took credit
Blazing hot take my friend.
>the only person with MY moral compass
FTFY
It's pretty blatantly obvious when his inciting incident, the Kitty Genovese murder, is literally a bunch of people looking down on someone looking up and shouting "Save me!" and refusing to. And also when the streets of New York LITERALLY run red with blood he's the only one who chooses to try to pursue justice for those killed (arguments about deliberate suicide-by-Manhattan notwithstanding). He's a hypocrite in that he is a very compassionate and moral person trying to pretend he isn't.
He let prostitute landlord slide after she slandered him.
reminder that Rorschach is indeed a lunatic unmeded, nasty person and bad at detective work
Too bad he also turns out to be the only person with a moral compass at all, which is why he resonates stronger than all of the other limp dick protagonists.
this. there is no story without rorschach
>There is no story without one of the main characters
You don't say!
COME GATHER 'ROUND PEOPLE, WHEREVER YOU ROAM
AND ADMIT THAT THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN
Look at how fricking uncomfortable Spoony is to be there. And look at how smug Linkara is!
Let's play "Spot the Rapist!"
Spoony did nothing wrong.
Spoony's not the rapist!
Exactly. He's not a rapist, therefore he did nothing wrong.
Masterpiece.
Rorschach doesn't compromise on this...
But Kovacs does
People that idolize Rorschach for being psychotically inflexible always seem to miss him taking his mask off and literally telling Manhattan to kill him.
His choice was to compromise and live, or not compromise and die. He chose to not compromise, and died. That's psychotically inflexible.
Hey cool, you just totally ignored everything I just said! Neat!
Your reading is reductive to the extreme and completely ignores basically everything about the character and the pages of his death. He's not telling Jon to kill him as Rorschach in a rage over not getting to expose the truth, he's begging Jon to put him as Kovacs out of his misery because the intense hypocrisy of his belief system has finally come crashing down on his head.
If you think him taking his mask off there isn't extremely important symbolism you're bad at reading.
It can be both.
Except the mask is his face. He is not psychologically stable.
Furthermore, Manhattan didn't go out there to "talk" and he knows that. They've committed genocide in exchange for world peace. Rorschach knows he can't stop them and is just another body to the pile.
It's all very straight forward.
>The mask is his face
The mask is Rorschach's face.
Him taking it off is Rorschach's death
Jon kills Kovacs.
Oh shit, I never caught that detail. So Jon never killed Rorshach, only Walter
The diary getting out is so much more powerful now
Also notice the speech bubbles. In
everything has the wavering outlines of Rorschach's speech until the last one.
>diary getting out
>powerful
Rorsharch's insane rants (which only vaguely implicate Veidt in his "mask killer" conspiracy, he knows nothing about the squid plan when he drops it off) will maybe get printed in the back pages of a widely discredited reactionary rag that no one in the book buys except him. If it gains any traction at all, it's the word of convicted murderer Rorsharch against that of globally beloved philanthropist/athlete/entrepreneur Adrian Veidt. Realistically his journal doesn't reveal shit
The journal is really more important symbolically than practically. It represents the ever-present possibility that Veidt's new order could/will eventually collapse.
It's not impossible to justify what Ozy did if you saved the world - but where does the moral calculus lie if you only saved the world for a century? A decade? A year?
Point taken, eventually somone will start asking after all the biologists, artists and psychics he killed
>Hey cool, you just totally ignored everything I just said! Neat
Gearbox character dialogue
And then Night Owl lets him walk away so he can frick his girlfriend. Good luck with the whole Antarctic thing and getting Archie flying.
Same Rorschach face in both panels...
you'll think I'm joking, but Gibbons is the true genius behind Watchmen
even Gibbons has said he was mostly just following Moore's insanely detailed scripts
It's synergy. Both are responsible for its greatness.
It's so sad and funny to me when people say Moore doesn't like superheroes
almost like comics are a blend of words and images!!
>almost like comics are a blend of words and images!!
Most teams don't make it work, though.
Have you ever seen the script pages that have been released? Moore came up with all these little details and nuances, he even drew some basic layouts for Gibbons. They are both geniuses though.
And notice how in the lower section, Rorschach's mask doesn't shift around at all in between the panels
Masterpiece. I would suggest one of the few coherent and wholesome constructed fiction.
Before Watchmen was never good tho, a mild okay at best.
Hearing all the positive reception for HBO Watchmen is wild. Feels like dropping into an alternate dimension where the critics had watched a different (and actually good) show entirely
making hooded justice black was so fricking moronic it should disqualify you from writing anything watchmen related
Yeah but not for the reasons /misc/tards spout. Moore was clearly making a parallel between cape heroes and the klan, which directly connect cape heroes with vigilantes in the 19th century. No pun intended but Watchmen HBO "whitewash" the cape genre by making Hooded Justice black and reduce complex themes into good vs evil
I think the critical praise for the HBO show comes from three places:
>people who have never actually read the original comic (at most, they might have watched the film or skimmed through the comic one time) and so have no real frame of reference for the show
>people who want to praise it because of all the race themes, or just because it's HBO and HBO needs to be critically praised
>people who got caught up in the show and its hype/push as it aired and have never thought about it critically since and I know this, because I was one of the people caught up in the hype when it was coming out, much to my shame
I think it's that last group which is the biggest factor. I guarantee you there are countless viewers who watched the Watchmen show, thought "hey that was pretty good, Jeremy Irons was funny," and then went on with their lives without giving it a second thought. The show really doesn't stand up to genuine critical scrutiny once you look at it as a whole, instead of week-to-week. The start is incredibly slow, the middle is alright (with one great episode, the one about Tim Blake Nelson's character), and then the ending is moronic. Even on it's own merits, the show is a mess. If you actually compare it to the original, it looks even worse.
>No pun intended but Watchmen HBO "whitewash" the cape genre by making Hooded Justice black and reduce complex themes into good vs evil
That's one of my big problems with the show. The whole plot and conflict just boils down into a moronicly simple good vs evil dilemma, which both utterly misses the moral point of the comic and makes a supposedly mature show rather juvenile. There's no difficult choices made by the protagonist, she's never really challenged in her worldview, she just beats all the bad guys with a squid shower and that's that.
And I'm not even getting into the show's terrible interpretation of Dr Manhattan, which also helps derail the whole thing.
I really enjoyed the show up until the last few episodes. I really thought it was going somewhere and I was absolutely positive that the grand message of the show wouldn't just be
>racism is.... le bad
It would have been too on the nose. The KKK guys were actually *right*, they knew the truth about the squid, Rorscharch and Ozymandias, so I was sure it would turn out they had more going on, something deeper and more important to the plot.
But then they actually were just faceless dumb red neck racists and the message of the show really was just
>racism is... le bad!
And also that Asian women are very strong and intelligent but also very evil I guess?
I really couldn't quite believe what I was seeing when they had Doctor Blackhattan literally kneeling in a cage in front of a bunch of racist white southern guys.
>I really enjoyed the show up until the last few episodes.
You're a complete moron. It was dog shit from minute one.
It’s a poorly written race baiting show written by early lifers whose popularity was artificially inflated by a corrupt and nepotistic industry. It was forgotten about in a week because no one actually watched it except the hate watchers and hacks in Hollywood who gave themselves medals over it
Missing Washmen, WatchmeX, and Gillen's Peter Cannon.
>Washmen
Have to look that up.
>WatchmeX
Would be too much as meme. And i have already Saturday Morning used.
>Gillen's Peter Cannon
Dont know, it feels much more like Charlton than Watchmen-but with original names-.
I think mostly it was part of supporting BLM and wokeism. But the production value is rather high. I mean if you exclude the Dr.Manahttan cosplay.
It was just badly written and clashed with the Watchmen IP.
It feels like it was a different story that got re-named, re-skined Watchmen. Kinda like Lindeloff had some “The Leftovers“ Scripts, Tulsa drama series and wanted to do something like “Life on Mars“.
>it feels much more like Charlton
It's a constant reference to Watchmen, though. It's even subtitled "Watch".
>Gillen's Peter Cannon
That story is very weird for me. I originally read it because I was researching older characters like Thunderbolt and heard an oddly high amount people call it good. Despite being a bit amprehensive due to how they where comparing it to Watchmen I deicded to read it anyway, I honestly shouldn't have done so. The comic is a vapid to put it lightly, it's far too short for the sort of story it's trying to tell and doesn't even bother trying to get readers invested in the characters. It's honestly sad that this is one of only four real appearances of the Thunderbolt in a comic series, sure I don't really like his stories all that much but it's still a sad fate.
This happens with so much stuff that gets compared to Watchmen. That's how the James Robinson/Paul Smith Golden Age comic was recommended to me, and other than the good art, it was such surface level trash that I might've liked it if I wasn't told I was supposed to take it seriously. That and Robinson's JL run make me very dubious about Starman being a legit good comic.
The reason is that Watchmen is very dense with information and very rich in worldbuilding.
I think that Golden Age is a comic thst stands this Watchmen comparement.
>Before Watchmen
What's the point? Watchmen is already a "before watchmen". There is nothing to add to these characters that hasn't been said already.
I kinda agree. But with this mindset you can ditch any storyline that isnt world ending or a big event. Or you can delete the appendix text pages.
It can add more to the character.
I would argue that Minute Men tried to show how the Crimebusters struggled with being a hero and getting your name out.
Silk Spectre looks at taking the hero name from the mother.
Niteowl is much more a Rorschach book and tries to show how he struggle with being religious or trust someone.
Rorschach how important is the mask and whats the gangs are like.
Manhattan looks on how he became Manhattan and whta it is like to be Dr Manhattan.
Moloch and Dollar Bill looks at these characters and how they came to be.
Comedian what it is like being a goverment hitman and what did he do.
I agree that you dont need that and that they did this rather poorly if compared to Watchmen, but i dont think they were that bad. Just a mix bag and you know it was just to secure IP or money.
Where's WatchmeX?
There are two volumes lost and never reprinted. Cant rate lost media as long as it is lost!
I know the story of how Moore wanted to use characters originally from Charlton Comics, and how they converted into unique characters so that the originals' continuity wouldn't be messed up. But it seems like the conversion process laid bare the fact that the story was about a handful of violent cosplayers plus one genuinely god-like figure.
Maybe this was the expected result of the deconstruction, but it still seems odd to me that Watchmen is portrayed as a "superhero" story even though it only has one real "superhero" in it. The connection between Dr. Manhattan and the rest of the characters seems tenuous at best. Forcing Dr. Manhattan together with The Comedian or Silk Spectre came off as unnatural and somewhat pointless (like Moore is saying, "I'm telling a story about all of these characters and so I'm going to push these characters together for no good reason").
In other words, I feel like Watchmen was the questionable combination of two separate, unrelated stories, and maybe the author should have told one or the other.
There wouldn't be a story if you split off Manhattan from the rest, let alone two stories. This story only exists because Doctor Manhattan interacts with this world and its larger-than-life costumed eccentrics.
that's a lot of words to say "I'm a moron"
I think the characters were supposed to be superheroes not just regular people in a costume. Look at the scene were Daniel and Laurie beat the thugs to a pulp. And Adrian catches a bullet with his hands for frick sake. They were not supposed to be regular people Zack got it right in the movie and critics were imbeciles that misunderstood the comic book
Dan and Laurie are absolutely supposed to be regular people apart from Dan being a Batman style genius inventor. Two people who used to be adventurers who are better at fighting than two random muggers. Adrian catching the bullet is supposed to be outrageous and improbable and even he wasn't certain he could do it until he tried. Snyder 100% fricked up by showing them defying physics when they fight, the point of the story is they were fairly average people compared to the actual superhero, reality warping Manhattan
Snyder's approach to violence is one of the many, many ways he just fundamentally misunderstood the comic.
Only mouth-breathers whose sole avenue of "cultural" input is capeshit, reddit threads and TV Turds consider Alan Moore's writing a masterpiece. He's a fat pedophile hippie who can't write worth a shit and not nearly as wise as his pretentious attitude would imply. Why do you think he's been writing nothing but capeshit for most of his "career"?
i don't think alan moore actually thought out how a being that exists at all points in time would act
>a being that exists at all points in time
That's not what he is.
he exists at all points on his own timeline simultaneously, you know what i meant
what happened with the DC+watchmen connection btw,did DC ever did something after that event or nah?
Doesn't matter.
It's a pretty good comic, I wouldnt reccomend it though.
It's a pretty bad comic, I highly recommend it though.
>Manhattan: You know, I can't let you do that
Genocide to prevent possible extinction. Thousands died so millions can live. Reminds me of Bishop going into the past to stop Apocalypse's virus.
spot the smiley face
except all that does is kick the can down the road until the next time capitalist leaders want to nuke the planet
In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
Watchmen's colors are so good
I love how the movie had none of the color and decided to make everything grey and teal. Just a fantastic decision from Snyder tbh.
The video game Killer7 looked like a comic book that you could play, its artstyle would've been absolutely perfect for a CG animated movie. Watchmen was a mistake to make into live action, it's far too colorful visually. Obviously, the awful palette choice didn't help either.
>grey and teal
But thats reality. And the past was never colorfull, always grey and dull.
Masterpiece. Next thread.
Never gave a shit about it, still don't care.
I'm just sick of autists that think it is the single greatest piece of art ever made because violence, you're trapped in here with me guy, and we put down animals one liners screeching at me how it's the bestest best shit that ever best off the bestboat.
>Never gave a shit about it, still don't care.
>responds to this thread
Anon you're confusing it with the movie again
Cinemaphile doesn't seem to like to hear this, but the plot doesn't make any sense and the characters are just Freudian pop-psychology cliches.
It really isn't very good.
Explain further
Anon read the plot summary on wikipedia and couldn't make sense of it.
many such cases
I just saw the Zack Snyder movie for the first time and I hated it, I guess it's accurate enough but did absolutely nothing to add to the story.
What's good material to read if I want more out of that world and its characters?
Nothing, just re-read the comic and pretend nothing else was ever done with the property
Okay
But I had a pertinent question when I read the comic for the first time
Why didn't Bubastis reform into a glowing blue god cat when taken apart by the subtrinsic field extractor
Because it's a cat, Jon had to keep a grasp of his sanity and willpower long enough to be able to fashion himself a corporeal body and ground himself, having a PhD in nuclear physics probably helped as well.
But, Bubastis was a COOL cat
Good point. Major plot hole, in that case.
Shit, I'd be willing to draw it. Sounds funny. Not tonight though, it's getting late.
"I grow tired of this Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their yarn."
Throwing up outside or on the dining room carpet has the same amount of vomit particles, there's no difference
i remember they mention trying to create a second manhattan, but jon's situation was a one in a billion thing where every single piece fell in the right spot. Jon was an expert in physics, expert watchmaker and had the personality and discipline to eventually put himself back together. and who knows what other unknown stuff factored into the whole shebang
Indeed. I dont know what exactly Moore wrote but i remember that it was a thing that they wouldnt find a testsubject or if this would work a second time.
Honestly you cant test that on a criminal. What if you create a evil Manahttan? So the sacrificing people would be very limited!
not many people would be willing to sacrifice their top scientists
I am not so sure. Some higher ups that would decide something like that are eager to sacrifice good men. It comes down on how vital that person is or if it means social backlash.
Still it didnt felt like Watchmen.
my dumb idea for a sequel was that Bubastis put itself back together and comes back with powers like Manhattan, and she decides to use those powers to bring back the one person she knows dislikes Ozy enough to help her: Rorschach (who famously hates cats). so it would play like a buddy comedy as they try to make their way back to New York. it'd be called Watchmen: Spots and Stripes
thats stupid, not even funny, just stupid anon.
Kinda boring.
I need to upgrade my Watchmen copy, it's too worn out. I was thinking about just picking up the TPB but dislike that it advertises the HBO show on the top left corner.
The hard cover and ultimate editions while they look nice don't look like great ways to actually read a comic, they seem to be made more for show.
anyone have the old watchmex covers from Cinemaphiles early days?
The deluxe edition hardcover is literally perfect, and very readable. It's only a little bigger than the TPB and has nicer paper
I like that it's the other side of the coin with TDKR. One is "Superheroes are fascist power fantasies and that sucks" and the other is "Superheroes are fascist power fantasies and that's awesome."
So one is made for pussies and one is made to spite them.
I see Watchmen as a superhero tragedy, whereas TDKR is a superhero triumph. Both great.
Alan Moore always seemed to me like he's frustrated with how much he enjoys genre fiction and wish he didn't love Pulp so much
I think his frustration is more that genre fiction (and specifically comics) is seemingly pigeonholed forever as inherently dumb, juvenile, and artless by both the general public and the majority of creators, and I think he's doubly frustrated that he spent the better part of his career fighting to change that perception only most other comic creators to take the entirely wrong lessons from his work.
Both?
Meh
The art is good but the writing has no love in it. There's this sense of pettiness about it, this venom, where it's a takedown of something but the 'something' in question has grown so warped by the writer's perspective as to be unrecognizable. It's like Dante's Inferno or Evangelion, a confused strawman argument so divorced from its source-work that it becomes original.
Overall, I think it's worth reading but it rings hollow.
>the writing has no love in it. There's this sense of pettiness about it, this venom, where it's a takedown of something but the 'something' in question has grown so warped by the writer's perspective as to be unrecognizable
>it rings hollow
I wholeheartedly disagree. It wouldn't work if it didn't have so much passion in it.
I think this comes from knowing the author's current thoughts on the genre.
I agree that it's passionate, but it's also pointlessly spiteful and destructive. Watchmen is basically one long tantrum and everything about it just exudes salty b***h energy.
Though I will concede that this may be colored by knowing Alan Moore is the worst kind of neckbeard, yes.
>pic
>this may be colored by
It looks like it's definitely colored by your opinion of the author. You've been soured, and it shows loud and clear.
Again, I totally disagree with you. It's comprised of strong likes and dislikes, not just dislikes.
Nah, you're being dismissive.
I can dislike Ennis and still acknowledge that Hitman has a lot of genuinely touching moments where his humanity bleeds through the edgy facade. I can dislike Millar and still appreciate Starlight. I can dislike Moore and still enjoy Tom Strong.
But the thing is it's very clear reading Watchmen that Moore just does not enjoy capeshit. He does not enjoy the narrative flow of it. It's a fundamentally unsatisfying story, and while many can, and will, defend that as an artistic choice I would by that same token argue it's simply unfinished and poorly thought through. Watchmen is beloved because it's a tool for projection, which ultimately brings me back round to the Evangelion comparison.
It's one of the most thought out comics in the entire history of the medium. What are you saying?
>It's one of the most thought out comics in the entire history of the medium.
By all means, please explain the metric for what qualifies a comic as "most thought-out" and how Watchmen qualifies.
Almost every single aspect, from the phrasing of dialogue to the background details to the visual design of the characters, ties into the themes and subjects explored in the comic. Double, triple, and sometimes quadruple meanings can be discerned from art and writing.
How is it unfinished and poorly thought through?
If you want specific examples cherrypicked then genuinely you can just scroll through this thread and the sheer number of "oh that's explained in this interview/explained supplementary book years after the fact/was actually TOTALLY INTENTIONAL and if you think it's a plot hole you're stupid" should tell you everything you need to know.
But from a wider narrative standpoint the most basic issues are the capes being so utterly pathetic that it makes you question why they haven't died in a ditch long before the story starts and the utter lack of any kind of catharsis. Watchmen is a story with no real ending... Or, if you want to praise it, you can claim the story has "a sense of gritty realism" and that "the story is open-ended" which also isn't wrong but it's really just saying the same thing with a positive spin.
And then you have people like
defending it which really just reinforces my point that Watchmen's popularity comes from postmodernist projection of individual values onto a half-finished canvas. In other words, it's cope.
>The capes are pathetic
That is the whole fricking point
Dan is a fanboy with erectile dysfunction
Laurie is a pageant child and rape baby
Rorschach is a broken prostituteson
Comedian is a sociopathic hitman
Ozy is an effeminate businessman with a savior complex
...And that comes off as both pointlessly mean-spirited and raises the question of how they frick they survived a crime-fighting career and why the frick Comedian's death is even out of the ordinary.
Furthermore, Starman does in literally one page what Watchmen takes the entire book to establish and also does it better because Robinson actually gives a shit about golden age capes and that translates.
Which is exactly my point yes.
It's mean-spirited and petty and not especially impactful.
>it's not wholesome 100 keanu chungus so I can't enjoy it
Sounds like you have the emotional maturity of Mr. Enter. It very much has a point, just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Damn, five whole posts before we got to outright shitflinging. I think that's a new record.
I'm not trying to start shitflinging but if you're gonna unironically start calling things meanspirited I am very much entitled to call you Mr. Enter.
most of the capes in watchmen quit years ago and their crime fighting career didn't involve fighting actual supervillains, just normal people in costumes who were just like them. the only one who kept going is rorschach and he only survived because he's a feral bum who managed to avoid getting arrested.
>That's mean-spirited
It sure is, because the whole book is an indictment of the genre. That's the point. Anyone looking at it and going WOW SO COOL like Snyder is a moron
I don't think the book is really an indictment of the genre but I'm in the camp of "It's a Satire using capeshit" rather than "It's a satire of capeshit". Like yeah you could read it as "what if superheroes but gritty" but I always felt the point was the trappings of superheroism are just really good from the thematic angle of "weal fallible human beings try to build themselves up as something bigger by dressing up in simplistic philosophies that hide their insecurities and shortcomings"
>Starman does in literally one page what Watchmen takes the entire book to establish
Are they even about the same thing? Going by that one page, they seem completely different.
You guys aren't getting it either.
>postmodernist projection of individual values onto a half-finished canvas
literal word salad
>the sheer number of "oh that's explained in this interview/explained supplementary book years after the fact/was actually TOTALLY INTENTIONAL and if you think it's a plot hole you're stupid"
I don't see anything like that in this thread. The most common complaint is the squid seemingly coming out of nowhere but even that is foreshadowed quite a bit within the text itself.
>Watchmen is a story with no real ending
It definitely has an ending. An comment about the unending nature of human history and a reference to the impermanence of human achievement doesn't mean the story itself doesn't end, quite definitively. The protagonist dies, the last vestiges of the "superhero world" vanish, the central conflict of the story is resolved. That's an ending.
>you can just scroll through this thread and the sheer number of "oh that's explained in this interview/explained supplementary book years after the fact/was actually TOTALLY INTENTIONAL and if you think it's a plot hole you're stupid"
Please help find examples in this thread. I don't see anything that's accurate that didn't come from the comic itself.
>it makes you question why they haven't died in a ditch long before the story starts
Because they're also awe-inspiring, almost like deities with very pronounced flaws, flaws amplified by their power.
They're two entirely different stories. Tom Strong is a love letter to the genre of pulp heroes. Watchmen is a brutal takedown of capeshit. There's plenty of individual moments of humanity in the comic but it is not a celebration of the concept of the superhero and it never implies that it is.
I appreciate you're going into some genuine effort with these posts, but ultimately you come off as someone who just legitimately didn't get the comic and is trying desperately to rationalise that
He's being dismissive because you're being evasive and vague when your contrarianism is confronted
That's fricking rich coming from the fat bearded pedo when half his works are blatant rape porn.
This actually contexualizes his supposed rape fetish quite a bit. He grows up reading these stories, and as an adult he thinks "hey that was actually kind of fricked up" and starts writing stories where the rape still happens but is never romanticized and is portrayed as it is. The Comedian could even be considered a parody of that kind of "hero," at least partially.
You can even see this in reverse with Before Watchmen when Darwyn Cooke took Comedian raping Silk Spectre I and romanticized it.
>bla bla bla postmodernist deconstruction psychobabble
Or maybe he's just a talentless hypocritical pedophile.
Ok little fella, whatever you say. Now run along, I hear Marvel just released another Conan Meets the Avengers comic.
Why so vehement in your ignorance? In no way does this make you look good. In fact, this is hurting your cause. This sort of behavior is part of why limp-wristed leftist academics have taken over.
I have never read it.
It's a masterpiece. Capekino.
judging Watchmen from today's vantage point is somewhat pointless. the whole industry has spend almost 40 years now to incorporate and rearrange its groundbreaking elements and learn all the wrong lessons from it.
>and all the prostitutes and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."
It’s an interesting comic that mostly stands out because Moore signed a deal with DC basically saying if they don’t print a new edition each year he would get the full rights to it. Thus we have one of the most pushed comic book stories in history, remaining in the zeitgeist not on its own merit, but because the publisher refuses to let it die.
Why can't more authors wrangle deals like that, it's brilliant
DC pretty much stopped letting creators retain any creative rights a little after that. One of the main reasons Vertigo ended up dying a slow death, what's the point when you can just do Image?
Also frick you, Watchmen would be beyond beloved even without the publishing deal you're just a contrarian c**t
>not on its own merit
Part of it is its own merit, right? How else would they be able to keep selling it as "The Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time" if it wasn't at least convincingly really good?
Given that comics fandom is only in the ten of thousands, obviously most people DON'T consider it "the best thing ever".
>Given that comics fandom is only in the ten of thousands
That's not a given, that's just false.
>obviously most people DON'T consider it "the best thing ever".
That's not what I said.
Watchmen was wildly popular even before it became one of the "evergreen" titles. It sold so well in floppy format that DC briefly overtook Marvel for a while. And between its trade and TDKR, it basically created the modern TPB market. If it was a stinker no one actually liked, DC would've just stopped printing it and let their claim lapse decades ago.
>if they don’t print a new edition each year he would get the full rights to it
Not true.
I think it kinda is true. But i dont know if this means every year, just that they still print and sell it.
Why would they spend so much money in keeping the rights for something nobody really wants anyway, according to your logic?
MASTERPIECE
middlebrow
It's a masterpiece. Even if you don't like it, it's not schizo. Cerebus is schizo, this is fairly normal in comparison the rest of literature and media.
I've always wanted to read that comic just to witness the insane rabbithole for myself, isn't there some weird story about that series?
Supposedly the reason he decided to turn this funny animal Conan parody into a 20 year life's work is because he had several really bad acid trips that left him hospitalized for days with schizophrenic symptoms. It was all down hill from there really, especially once his wife left him. He just kept getting crazier.
Watch Strange Brain Parts on youtube.
I think it's decent but not as good as people make it out to be
What's better?
I think it's as good as people make it out to be, but most people don't really grasp why.
It is very good. The only part I think kinda suffers from being up it's own ass is Dr Manhattan's inane monologue about necessity just to get convinced by utter moronation in 10 minutes. Also, the comic does its female characters kinda dirty, they are all portrayed as vindicative spiteful losers.
There's a healthy dose of sexism towards the women in the comic but bear in mind basically everyone is portrayed as vindictive spiteful losers.
Yeah but while almost all male characters have either noble attributes or have something else going for them besides vicdictive buttholery. Rorschach is the narrative voice, he has a pretty tragic backstory and you sympathize with him, he also has a spectacular design and is extremely badass. The comedian, equally, does whatever he wants generally and plays the maverick role. Dr Manhattan is Dr Manhattan. The night owl is a technological genius and the moralistic voice of the work. In contrast, all women in the comic are defined by their relationships to men and are generally portrayed as either opportunistic, vain, spiteful, weak or a general combination of all of those.
>all women in the comic are defined by their relationships to men and are generally portrayed as either opportunistic, vain, spiteful, weak or a general combination of all of those
Anon i....
I agree with the editor who said Moore could do better and should have rewritten the ending instead of the squid
If Moore had done the Manhattan ending from the film people would have praised it as much as they do now anyway.
The Manhattan ending was the stupidest change in the film, you kidding? Snyder's a fricking moron that paid absolutely no attention to the political conflicts, nor could theorize geopolitical struggle.
A space alien is something the has no loyalty or alignments to any human nations or values, except by mere coincedence. In addition, it's something that can be fought against with our weapons. Considering Adrian wanted to unite the world, and it's literally an outsider against our world, that's the perfect tool. The entire world is now very angry and very afraid of something outside of the planet earth, concerns are no longer about what bombs Fidel Castro or Nixon could deploy in some stupid political moves. It's if a giant Alien monster was willing to destroy New York, what is it willing to destroy next? Plus, with the space race being a big factor of the cold war weapons would now point away from the earth to prevent that from happening again, not towards it.
Manhattan would only cause greater disaster. Manhattan was very definitively a United States asset with his role in Vietnam, AND you can't even fight him directly, only attack his government. If a United states weapon is losing its shit and killing millions of people, the entire world is going to be fricking pissed at America and that doomsday clock is going to go out of control. Forget the Soviets, EVERY country would want America gone. The Squid plan was brilliant, the Manhattan plan was completely moronic
Nah, the squid fits better into the overall superhero parody/deconstruction, especially when it was being written. Maybe Manhattan would work better now that Evil Superman is such a common trope, but then again "Superman goes crazy and kills a bunch of people is really worn out by now
I think the parodies are pretty funny, although I've never read the comic.
>inb4 "who the hell is steve jobs"
Kinda OTT but is there any other comic book writer that swings between writing pretty good stuff to undreadable shit the way Brian Azzarello does? Buying one of his books is such a gamble.
Garth Ennis
Never read something terrible from Ennis. Just some mediocre stuff, or him basically just ripping himself off (which kinda comes with the territory when someone's so prolific). Nothing even close as jaw droppingly bad as Azzarello at his lowest.
But then again, I haven't read anything new from Ennis in a very long time. Maybe that's the stuff you're referring to.
Frank Miller seems to have fallen off hard post-9/11, and he used to be amazing.
Sure, but in Frank's case you just know from a point on, it's gonna be shit. With Azzarello is not that he "lost it" or at some point he "got good". He's switching back and forth all the time.
Haven't read enough different things from him to judge but I always thought he was full of shit. I only read some of the Incal and to be honest, I mostly like the art. We'll see how the writing keeps up.
I would say that Metabarons is the best both in art and story and it's still weird but more focused than anything else he has written
Jodorowsky, he's weird to say the least
What I've read by him is okay (The Incal, The Metabarons, Son of the Gun). I don't know how bad his lesser work is.
Incal didn't click on me but I like his Metabarons, not counting the new releases.
His western are good, like The Bouncer and Son of the Gun. Still, Jonah Hex is better.
Eh, outside of 100 Bullets and Moonshine I never really cared for Azzarello much.
I like his Wonder Woman, the Broken City arc on Batman, the Joker graphic novel and all the stuff he did with Corben for Marvel (though that's mostly because I'm a Corben fanboy).
He never gets past 8/10 for me but it's kinda mind boggling that someone with an obvious grasp on writing can do such godawful shit like that Comedian comic. Or that garbage that was the Killing Joke adaptation.
Is Moonshine good?
I remember reading some then dropping it because it felt like a generic crime story.
Wake me up when they finally adapt 'brat pack' into a story...
I'd say the comic-to-film fans are ready for it since 'the boys' happened but I know it would be softened for softer audiences.
The problem with adapting both Brat Pack and Watchmen is that they're too referential to comics themselves. You'd have to completely retool them to refer to superhero movies/shows and by that point you might as well just do a completely new IP altogether.
The Boys' satire target was a much broader cultural one, so it translates better to different contexts, though I'd argue that the show is sticking too much to contemporary cultural references and it's gonna age like shit.
>though I'd argue that the show is sticking too much to contemporary cultural references and it's gonna age like shit.
Yeah i realized that the moment it was announced, idk why..
after reading this book, I've realized that israelites rape kids. I refuse to elaborate, and no, it's all there, you just need to read it with your mind open. if you don't, that's okay. But please, don't hate me for what I know
I didn't even know they did "Crimson Corsair" in Before Watchmen.
These fricking companies don't even waste the tiniest of crumbs, don't they?
I was gonna say it must be humiliating for the people who get hired to write a spinoff based on the sound of a fart Alan Moore ripped while on DC's offices but then I remembered that American comic book people just have no self esteem whatsoever. They still haven't recovered from the whole Wertham thing.
Whenever you wonder how Hollywood executives can take so many shitty creative decisions over and over, remember there's lots of people who still think the Manhattan thing from the movie not only works, but it's an improvement over the original ending.
These people exist and they're out there, and theyre legion.
Has anybody seen the Ultimate Cut of Watchmen? Does it actually fix/change anything about the movie?
I'd rather watch paint dry, Sir. Good morning.
No.
Like all of Snyder's extended cuts it's a marginal improvement that makes an already bloated movie feel even more bloated. If your name isn't Martin Scorsese you should never try to make three hour long movies.
I still don't understand how he made Killers of the Flower Moon so well-paced
Because the guy is talented and a professional, he knows that if you're going to do an extra-long movie not to make it a chore just to sit through.
I tried. It's way too fricking long. I like the motion comic but the ultimate cut of the film is just too much.
motherfricking John Higgins, homies
John Higgins' colors are part of why I get mad when people say the movie is a good adaptation
Interesting and philosophically poignant work bogged down by artist idiosyncrasy.
Or, in less pretentious terms, the ending was really fricking stupid and a lot of shit surrounding Dr Manhattan doesn't make much sense.
>the ending was really fricking stupid and a lot of shit surrounding Dr Manhattan doesn't make much sense.
explain
Okay. Nuking New York with a psi blast causes a lot of problems with the story. If psychics are real, couldn't they just be used to stop the impending war?
Couldn't they just be used to hypnotize everyone instead of murdering them?
Or manipulate the fabric of reality to make everyone get along retroactively?
Or you know, fricking anything psychics in fiction usually can do that are BATSHIT INSANE?
I don't think mere hypnosis is going to stop the soviets and the US from having a bunch of Nuclear weapons, the "Aliens" instead redirect weapons outward instead of inward, to nuclear Armageddon
Dude, it could beam images into the heads of millions of people. Psychics in general can do insane shit. Dropping the bombshell that psychic powers are real completely changes the dynamics of the story.
Also, hypnosis CAN solve everything. Hypnotize the people cleared to press the red button and suddenly, no nuclear war.
How do psychic powers work? Why did his brain need to blow up? What about other psychics?
You are conflating psychic powers from other cape comics with the (apparent) low-level "ordinary" psychic powers of Watchmen. He was Uri Geller-but-"real", not Charles Xavier.
I think he used Psionics not for mental reasons, but so no physical evidence would be traced back to another human. If the only thing that's around are the giant tentacles and a bunch of dead people, it's some giant tentacled creature. If there was some kind of chemical agent, or bomb shrapnel, it's human warfare. Clearly, if Veidt believed direct hypnosis would work he would've just gone for that instead.
Hypnosis on that scale require the one doing to hypnotizing to be omnipresent, you're basically trying to solve the problem with another Manhattan at that point.
Adrian found one singular real psychic and he had to blow his brain up to the size of a house to get the desired effect. This wasn't Charles Xavier or whatever.
You're forgetting that thematically, Ozymandias plan had to be a crazy silver age villain plan, to be in tune with how dysfunctional the "superhero" outlook would be when facing complex issues.
Even "genius" Ozymandias is a pathetic manchild with a very warped view of how reality and mankind work, 'cause he's got too caught up in superheroics.
Dr. Manhattan is the only one with superpowers.
You didn't understand the story.
He didn't even read it apparently. He was just criticizing the plot from reading a summary somewhere.
Yeah, It alright!
I feel like Moore retroactively changed his opinion on Watchmen and its characters in response to how his pretentious audience interpreted it. As such I feel like whatever it’s original intent was has long since been forgotten and lost
WE make it masterpiece!
tentacle p0rn
Happy New Year!
U2!
Fish sex?