Watchmen......................................................2

Alan Moore changes his mind and wishes the Before Watchmen crew good luck.



Hahaha, no, I kid

 

Sounds like Alan Moore needs to get into indie cinema.

I think he makes some rather salient points about how the industry's focus has moved away from creating good comics, but, ironically, there's a really strong argument that the same creative freedom that protects creators from getting screwed the way he did is the very reason the big two have to lean on established franchises. The whole situation's a mess.

 

You know whether I end up liking it or not, I have changed my stance on the matter. Moore has every right to be upset about the decision for DC to do this, it is one of his babies. He's eccentric though, I find it hard to believe he doesn't own a copy of, or retain any original art. I think it's more of a pissing contest with DC, than it is him being annoyed with new stories. Rightfullay so, honestly.

However, at least it's not like a reboot, or remake. At least they're adding to the story, and not altering the original story.

Watchmen came out when I was like 3 or 4 years old, and I didn't really get into comics until the early 2000s, but I did spend a lot of time reading back issues of books when I did start reading them.

Watchmen was one of the first things I read, and I've always loved it since. But, I did have to sit back and consider the fact that a lot of people were introduced to the series, by the movie, and despite what a lot of purists thought of the movie, and a lot of people, that were newcomers to the source material, either liked or loved it.

As far as I'm concerned, if the film introduced people, especially younger readers to the original Watchmen book, than it did it's job. I pretty much rolled my eyes, and thought it was a bad idea like most people in here did at first when the new books were announced, but I really am going to at least give them a chance before I keep that attitude. Deciding I'm not going to like something, before even reading it, pretty much guarantees I'll dislike it without having an open mind.

So, we shall see.

 

Well said.

 

Did you see that sample? Rarely do I get excited over artwork, but dayumn.

 

Would be great if most "indie" cinema wasn't actually funded and market-tested by major studios, or if it wasn't mostly vapid self-importance coughed up onto celluloid [/hyperbole]

All, the same, I'm still with Moore on this one. I don't see what there is about the fact that he lives "in a compound" that makes his opinion any less valid, and I'll never understand how people don't recognize the critical difference between what he does with pre-established characters and what the Big Two do with superhero characters.

And I also had to laugh at DiDio describing the project as "ambitious." Financially ambitious, perhaps, but not in any other way. I'm also now convinced that the comic industry is the only place where a group of people who agree to do work-for-hire on an unnecessary rehash motivated primarily by profit as a "fearless group [that] doesn't play it safe".

 

Yeah, I wrote that in a rush. Obviously the film industry is doing major hack work, but the people making the "Battleship"s of the world are rarely hailed as "fearless". Same goes for music and television. The makers of "The Event" weren't hailed as fearless or visionary. The makers of BSG, maybe, but even that's controversial in some circles. And even then, that was a remake of a series that was never held in particularly high esteem by anyone.

Of course, I feel like the portion of my statement that you didn't bold clears up the problem here. Its the part about specifically being hailed as being "fearless" and not playing it "safe", in the context of writing prequels to one of the financially surest-bet, most creatively-bankrupt, projects DC has been able to think up in years. Thanks for reading the whole post! It wasn't about creative apathy, it was about the mentality and the way its presented.

Anyway, we can continue discussion of film and music when someone gets around to directing "Citizen Kane: The Early Years" or recording "Sgt. Peppers: 20 Years Ago Today" and being called "fearless" for doing it.


PS: I'm well aware that DiDio i a hyperbolic hack.

 

As long as the stories are decently produced and remain reverent to the source material, I don't see why Alan Moore would object.
[image=http://comicbookjesus.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/heir-to-the-empire-cover.jpg]
Would George Lucas have been so gung ho about the Special Editions and Prequels if not for Tim Zahn?

 

Do you just, like, not listen to music? Because that second sentence IS the mainstream music industry.

Also, there are plenty of comics coming out that do interesting, innovative things. They're just not from the big two... well, mostly.

 

Tim Zahn sucks.

 

Your opinion is duly noted, however you cannot deny that the critical and commercial success of the Thrawn Trilogy played a major factor in making Star Wars the pop culture powerhouse it is today.

I mean hell, even IG-88 (a PROP) got his own rap song.

 

1)I know there's a lot of crap music
2)I know a lot of said crap music is described as "amazing"
3)At the same time very little of that said music is trying to gussy itself up as anything more than nakedly commercial
4) Yes, I am aware that I am often the victim of my own hasty sentences when posting on a message board in my spare time
5) I know there are a lot of interesting innovative comics coming out (in fact I never said there weren't)
6) I love it when people make wide, sarcastic assumptions about a person's cultural habits based on an offhand remark
7)how is anybody actually on DC's side with this whole thing?

 

I'm not on DC's side, I'm on the side that thinks Watchmen prequels aren't harbingers of the bloody end times, as well as the side that's been trolling both sides of this debate for a good long while on 4chan and is getting increasingly flippant because of it.

 

This is what I think of whenever I hear anything by Alan Moore nowadays:

[image=http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/7400000/Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud-the-simpsons-7414384-265-199.gif]

 

What do you think that the last truly unqualified masterpiece of superhero comics was, and what the heck does that brain-cell killing rag have to do with it?

 

Oh, so you didn't actually read All-Star Superman? That's too bad.

 

I read it.

Really, aside from the art being terrible and the writing being worse, it wasn't too bad. Mind you, it's not even close to the worst writing that Grant Morrison has done, but that's not exactly a high compliment.

 

Man, if you think Frank Quietly's art is terrible, we have tastes far too different to bother trying to reconcile.

 

Apparently. Among other things, I still haven't forgiven him for drawing Emma Frost and Jean Grey as men with large breasts.

[image=http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/4/51152-9121-66994-1-new-x-men_super.jpg]
A Chinese man who has had breast augmentation surgery, dressed in an Emma Frost outfit. .


I understand on an intellectual level that people like Morrison and Quitely. But as an idea, it's like people considered Uwe Boll a great director. Morrison's touch on the DCU eventually led me to entirely drop all DCU superhero comics. Morrison reads to me like a cross of the worst parts of Alan Moore and Mark Millar. He has Mark Millar's tendency to say "Screw logic and reason, I'm just going to sit here and vomit up big ideas" without Millar's ability to make his ideas entertaining, and he has Alan Moore's "I'm writing a deep, involved piece of literature that attempts to stretch what the comic book format is capable of" without Moore's ability to occasionally pull it off.

 

I am glad I am not the only one who doesn't like Quietly's art.

 

It's DC's right and job to create more Watchmen material. That it took 25 years is a astonishing. At the same time, Moore and fans have the right to bitch. Both sides make great points, but the I believe the final outcome will be what everyone, or atleast most, expects....failure.

These books can't just be decent, they can't just be ok. They have to be either as good or better than the original book. If they aren't then the rabid fans will eat DC alive, because the worst fans are the one who say,"I told ya so."

I mean what do these books have to say about the characters that Watchmen didn't already say? Probably nothing. My guess is that these books will be nothing more that action aventure stories using the Watchmen characters. In others words just plain old fanfiction, and will prove how un-neccessary it all was in the first place. Add in the fan mentality of how a lesser work, connected to a master work, causes the master work to be tainted for all time, and you have nuclear @#$% firebomb that will probably explode in DC's direction.


Still atleast WATCHMEN fans will always have the original story the way they remember it in all it's glory. That's more than can be said for STAR WARS fans.

 

Regarding Star Wars, I do remember the ot fondly, like most others here, I grew up on it. I didn't see them on the big screen until I was 12 or 13.

I went to a charity event that showed all three of them in one evening, and of course the special editions later on. I think TPM holds a special place in my heart because of the hype, and getting to see my first SW movie first run.

There's a lot of things I'd have preferred in hindsight. I wish Dooku had been fleshed out more, and been in TPM. Losing Qui-Gon would have been an excellent opportunity to show how he got disillusioned in the Jedi order. Would have shown the human side of how he got angry with the life he was living.

I was disappointed with the fact that they introduced Aurra Siing for like five seconds in TPM, and obviously she should have been Zam in AOTC. Was later upset they never introduced or fleshed out Ventress. All of the women in the PT were background characters. which wasn't so much as insulting, as just it could have been done.

I realize Lucas was kind of doing the PT films on the fly with each one of those films, but it would have been better if he'd taken the time to at least write a good outline for all three films, before he wrote scripts.

And I'm sorry, I know wdndswintjcc

 

I especially like the fact that they put a zipper on the shorts, so they could disguise his bulge as a cameltoe.