…is that this new Watchmen adaptation looks awesome:
(Via Stephen Schmidt of Schadenfreude.)
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled May 2, 2024I love that Caterpillar boots were among the returned items, and in this photo an Amazon worker took, you can clearly see the "CAT" logo near the cat. Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away wapo.st/3JJ3vqT
- Untitled May 1, 2024A new cartoon for May Day! This has been an incredible year for unions in the USA - may next year be even better. Unions Have Always Done The Impossible! #PoliCartoon #Union #LaborDay2024 #MayDay2024 #May1st #UBI #LivingWage
- Untitled April 30, 2024People on reddit are fighting about a cartoon I did about why the US health care system sucks and I am enjoying this too too much. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1ch0l0r/why_us_health_care_is_such_a_terrible_system/?sort=old
- Untitled April 30, 2024I just posted a new cartoon! It's patreon supporters only for now, but in a week or so I'll make it public. :-) https://www.patreon.com/posts/deus-ex-machina-103359912?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
- Untitled April 30, 2024Nothing against Brian, who of course needs and should make a living. But I'm increasingly frustrated by the Substackization of blogging/news writing. To read Brian's work I have to subscribe, which at the lowest price level is $75 a year. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
- Untitled May 2, 2024
Oh. My. God.
You know, it’s rare that something on the internet actually literally makes me laugh out loud. This did the trick.
(Also, the timing for this was just perfect for me, I’ll have you know. I’d just finished reading through an annoyingly endless fanboy internet argument about the movie, and it had left me feeling all queasy and cranky and irritable. You know. As reading through those sorts of arguments tends to do. This was the ideal antidote.)
Oh.
My.
God.
That is perfect.
That was hilarious.
Agreed. This was absolutely hilarious.
1:09 is the ultimate irony.
Hilarious!!!
The shot of Rorsharch with with dogs made me spit out my coffee.
Comedian wanting a kiss from Laurie is just so wrong.
I’ve already seen this like 8 or 9 times. It makes me laugh each time.
Never read the book. Read the commentary from the author that the book is inherently unfilmable and he was waiting to trash it.
I read the Tolkein Ring trilogy about 3 or 4 times. I knew that there was no way to pack all of that into a movie, or even 3 of them (I told my wife “They could make 3 movies of each one of the 3 books”), so I steeled myself for disappointment when I saw the movies. Let’s just say I was hardly disappointed. They left out huge chunks of side plots and enriching details (the whole “Frodo and pals come back to find the Shire occupied and clean out the bad guys” ending). Although they didn’t tell all the stories in the Triology, they told the core story and told it well.
For those of you who have read the book(s?) – can you say something similar here? I thought that the story they told in the Watchmen movie was interesting and well told. I like the way that Dr. Manhattan’s humanity essentially changed twice during the movie, becoming less human from when he had first been transformed and then how the female lead character got him to see things differently again. He wasn’t painted as the one-dimensional inhuman intellect.
If the book is better than this it’s gotta be one hell of a book.
RonF yes there is a lot of content that was left out of the Watchmen movie.
Rorschach’s description of what happened to the Minutemen was cut really short (let’s just say that Silhoutte was not the only gay person on the team).
There was more detail about the constumed hero phenomenon and how it went from being a way to get real justice to almost a fashion trend or something.
That’s all I can think of now and I don’t have my book with me. When I get back home tonight I’ll look for more stuff that was left out.
It’s interesting, because you get a little hint of this in the ‘last supper’ shot in the opening credits, where Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice are gazing lovingly at one another.
Also, did anyone catch the very first shot in the opening credits? It’s the original Night Owl punching out a crook in front of the Gotham Opera House after a showing of Die Fledermaus, while a wealthy couple and their butler look on. It’s Night Owl stopping Joe Chill before he kills Thomas and Martha Wayne, in other words. Which is pretty awesome, for a 2 second shot.
—Myca
I’m not much for comics/graphic novels, but “Watchmen” also is worth reading for how it’s put together, as well as the stories it tells. It’s got a kind of pastiche of detail that reminds me of one of my favorite bits from Fahrenheit 451:
That’s part of why Moore is right to call the book unfilmable. You can’t film the book, but you can film its story. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m rather skeptical that the guy who brought us “300” can do more than be faithful to as much of the story as can be crammed into feature-length running time.
Precisely right.
I even liked the movie, but as I watched, I was very aware of the different reactions that the exact same scene would produce when read on the page versus seen on the screen.
For me, the extremely graphic violence is one example … when Moore wrote The Watchmen, he was operating within a framework of the comics of the day and included pretty damn horrible violence in The Watchmen as a way of commenting on the real-world consequences of comic-book violence. It’s the “when you hit someone with a baseball bat, it doesn’t go BIFF” argument, basically. He was saying that the four-color slugfests of the golden and silver age where people walk away with a few bruises were bullshit.
Now, within that context, it was very effective . . . the graphic violence in the comic made me slightly nauseous, and I was horrified at the kinds of things the ‘heroes’ were willing to do. It underscored the essential reality of the world. In the movie, although the violence was mostly no more graphic than in the comic, it produced a very different reaction, since it was operating within a different framework . . . that of movie violence, thus producing neither the shock at breaking conventions nor the revulsion at its extremity. I mean, as violent as parts of The Watchmen were, it still doesn’t hold a candle to lots of war movies, 300, Saw, etc.
When I saw the movie, several instances of really awful graphic violence were cheered by the audience. Changing the medium changed the message.
—Myca
Perhaps this would be the right venue to get an answer to a question. When my wife and I exited the movie theater building we started our discussion of it. She referred to it as not what she had expected since it was based on a comic book. I said “No, it was based on a graphic novel.” She asked “What’s the difference?”
I said something about length and character development, but that really didn’t sound satisfactory even to me. So I’ll ask you – what’s the difference?
Graphic n0vels are to comics as books are to prose.
Comics is the medium; graphic novels are the form of comics that are book-length. So all graphic novels are comics, but not all comics are graphic novels.
“Comic books” are just short-form comics, usually published in a thin pamphlet form.
Sometimes a comic book might be a part of a forthcoming graphic novel. Watchmen was originally published as 12 comic books, and then reprinted as a graphic novel.
On the whole, I have to agree with Mrs. RonF; there are smart comic books and there are stupid graphic novels. The only real difference between a comic book and a graphic novel is length.
Is it just me or does this look like an advertisement for Adrien Veidts Saturday morning cartoon version of the Watchmen? In the book it was mentioned he had the cartoon as well as the action figures and perfume and all that
(Oh and I pretty much squicked at the idea of the Comedian wanting to kiss his daughter)