as long as there has been a Watchmen, there has been DC wanting to expand (cash in) on the book, turning it into a franchise.... the very thing Watchmen was meant to be the antithesis of. that being said, i can't even find the heart to be pissed about this. it's just such a shallow $ grab that it almost seems not worth being upset over. maybe i alleviated all the disgust i had at the idea of Watchmen being a "property" when that abysmal film came and went (now at your local K-Mart DVD budget bin), so this just doesn't phase me.
and all the prequels and Ultimate Edition DVDs and video game tie-ins will look up and shout "BUY US!"
...and i'll look down, and whisper ... "No".
i have to admit... i am curious to see Azzarello do the Comedian and Rorschach (w/ Lee Bermejo! they're tricking me). that might be the one bright spot. but sunspots are bright, too... and they're not good for you.
more from the "creators"
...they i guess make a good point about Alan Moore's re-imagining of classic literary figures in books like League of Extraordinary Gentelmen and Lost Girls, but the key there is Moore did something DIFFERENT with those characters... took them to places they have never gone before, reconnecting them with their literary roots and exploring potentials that had never been touched on before he came along. can any of these creators say that they're going to be that daring with Moore and Gibbons' characters? i mean if they are, good for them... but i don't see it happening.
what made Watchmen stand out (in addition to most, if not all, of Moore's work) was that i was a story that had never been told about archetypal characters. the characters are ones we recognize, if only at a visual level, but they are put in situations we have never seen them (or characters like them) in before. That's what matters, not the adventures before or even after. before the events Moore laid out, they were just costumed crimefighters, their stories interchangeable with the myriad of others like them. the beauty of the book is that we don't need to see these characters on generic good vs. evil punchfests... we have the afterword of those fights, of an ever increasingly dangerous world and how they react with impotence, frustration, violence, aloofness, and madness when faced with newer, more deadly threats.
if these prequels have that depth, than great. but i feel like we're just gonna get more of the same... which is what Watchmen was not.
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