willhines.net

I apologize: more comics talk. It’s Dark Knight day, for Pete’s sake! It’s OUR DAY! Today we discuss how to summarize Watchmen.

Watchmen is a revered graphic novel, but it’s also a story so dense and complicated that it’s hard to read, especially for those not already immersed in the superhero world. I’ve tried to summarize it (unsolicited) many times before, and failed.

But last night, after watching the Watchmen movie trailer (which looks AWESOME), I stumbled on a way to do it, and that is by focusing on the story of the big blue dude, Dr. Manhattan. Okay, here goes:

Watchmen is a story where a passive, mild-mannered American scientist in the 1950s goes through a nuclear accident and becomes a creature (Dr. Manhattan) with the power of a god. He advances technology of the whole world (flying cars, limitless supplies of fuel) and cements America as an unbeatable superpower (we win Vietnam, Nixon is a 4-term president). But a conspiracy works to attack Dr. Manhattan’s few remaining human emotions, causing him to flee the planet (he never cared that much about politics or humans anyway), leaving America suddenly vulnerable to enemies who have spent decades plotting war. A group of non-powered superheroes, banned by the government and feared by the people, try to figure out what the hell is going on and if they can help (one of them can, but in a horrible horrible way).

That’s it. Not so bad, right?

The book doesn’t really put Dr. Manhattan at the center. It goes from member to member of the non-powered superheros and tells their individual life stories. At the end of each issue are long text supplements telling you about superheroes of the World War II generation. There’s a pirate comic within the comic which also serves to comment on the larger story. You keep flipping back in the story to re-read something once you realize that character’s significance. You don’t even realize the over-arching story of Dr. Manhattan until halfway through the book, if at all. It is a lot like watching the television show Lost, though Watchmen is shorter and better-organized.

I always thought it was too complicated to adapt, but that trailer looks so good that maybe they’ve done it? I found the movie 300 stupid and overly-simple, but maybe the man behind it is the perfect antidote to the overly-complicated Watchmen. Alan Moore’s complicated comic + simplifying director of 300 = accessible movie? Maybe.

| Tags: comics, watchmen