Evan, IN Who Watche(s)d the Watchmen? (comic and movie spoilers inside)

In the time I have actually read for comics, starting at 12yrs old, I have always gravitated towards what I called "The Big 2" Marvel and DC. The DC Universe had gods like The Man of Steel and The Dark Knight with Marvel offering a mutant that was the best at what he did and a friendly neighborhood web-crawler and if it was a comic that didn't exist into either those 2 "worlds" then it was off my radar and Watchmen was a casualty of my then narrow-minded view of comics. That was until Spawn totally pierced the veil and blew wide open the unfathomable idea that there was more than comics than The Big 2.

However, I still never gave Watchmen the time of day. It wasn't drawn by Todd McFarlane and even though it bore a DC logo, it wasn't in a world where one of it's characters could shake hands with Superman or take down the Joker with Batman and thus it was largely ignored. Which leads me to this conclusion: Not picking this graphic novel and reading it sooner has been an injustice served to myself 13 years in the making. Luckily TI9362 (Joe) pointed me towards the Watchmen Motion Comics and I was able to see all (except Chapter 12) of them before I watched the movie and it truly is a masterpiece and arguably the greatest comic story ever written. I even waited a couple of days to write this as I didn't want to still be under the influence from the hype of the movie. If comic books were a religion then Alan Moore is Alan the Baptist and I have been baptized in the name of the Nite Owl, the Comedian, and the Hollis Manson. AMEN!

The montage in the beginning of the film wasn't in the book, there are panels that show a fight between Blake and Veidt but those serve to establish what had happened as opposed to watching it happen. Most of the movie had dialogue straight from the book in it which was nice. Dr. Manhattan's losing his link to the world was captured pretty well in the film. The comic does go a lot deeper when he arrives to Mars and you get a much greater sense as to how he sees time, space and the universe and Earth, as far as he is concerned, is but a small grain of sand. The scene preceding his arrival to Mars was done wonderfully and his teleporting the audience members back to their homes reminded me of a god dismissing an annoyance as if it was nothing.

Hollis Manson being beaten to death on Halloween wasn't in the movie either, neither was the most controversial plot twist amongst readers of the comic...

The Squid

The Squid Was Adrian Veidt's (Ozymandias) final act. It was an attempt to introduce an elaborate hoax of an alien threat that conceivably showed up via some teleportation technology that was mentioned in the comic. According to Veidt whatever was alive exploded when teleported and in this scenario the explosion would wipe out half the minds in NYC killing them thus uniting the world over the fear of alien invasion.

There are numerous differences to mention but all in all this move is easily in my Top 5 comic book movies of all time.

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