Committee on Public Information

I have been trying to just generally not think about “Before Watchmen”

face-down-asgard-up:

itsinthetrees:

But David Brothers wrote an awesome, searing critique of that bullshit Newsarama article about it, and it’s worth a read.

I think what gets me about this idea though isn’t even the intellectual property issues — like, those bug the hell out of me, but they’re not my core issue.

My core issue is that Watchmen is a story specifically about the dangers of nostalgia. That’s like. The point. Of the book.

And the reason it is deservedly called a classic of the genre and hailed as one of the best things done in the medium is not because its characters are somehow brilliant (they’re not, particularly) or because its plot is amazing (it is kind of a mess in places, let’s be real), but because it does brilliant things with the structure of the sequential art narrative. It does things with the form no one had done before, and it does those in order to make a point about the human drive toward nostalgia and how dangerous it is.

Watchmen works specifically because we never actually really know what happened in the past of the book. We get snippets of events, we get the impressions of each character, but the Good Old Days they’re all imagining are vague and ephemeral as the ones people imagine in real life.

You can’t make a prequel book about those Good Old Days!

Like.

If there were awards for point-missing, this would be in major contention.

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   You should read this, read the link, and then NOT read the Watchmen prequels. If we continue to screw over our creators,...

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    God, that’s both hilarious and sad.

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    Which is why Alan Moore is scoffing the critics, and wholeheartedly for the new prequels. Oh wait. The point of...

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    And I am now ashamed of my original excitement.

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