DC unveils Watchmen prequels...

I'm willing to call Watchmen his best work and that it deserves the place it's been given. But my favorite? The Killing Joke. It's the Bat-fanatic talking, there's nothing I've read that I _enjoy_ more by him than that.

Come to think of it, I'm more upset that The Killing Joke was retconned more than I am about the Watchmen prequels.

I'd be curious to see what Cooke would bring to the table. He has a warmth that would suit the time and setting. Azzarello would suck, he's too heavy handed to get this stuff right.

Your right that the movie sucks, and it sucks partly because it's redundant in the worst kind of way, and partly because it was meant to be a comic.

It was also meant to be one comic, it was kind the of point. Backstory already included.

I have to agree Moore is the best writer by far but his comics frequently don't look like it and for visual tour de forces in my time only his books with O'Neil measure up. In that department Frank Miller kicks most peoples asses, if only he didn't get stuck in a time loop. I'd add too that Cerebus 2-4 is every bit as good and revolutionary for the medium as Watchmen. Sim might be a dickhead but he's fucking talented.

Moore has been matched before but no one is as versatile. The Black Dossier is phenomenal in terms of showing just how much he can do. Like it or not.

I'm not sure what I think about making new ones other than every writer who agreed to do this is de facto a hack now.

Unappologetically loved the watchmen movie, no matter what "Facts" internet dweebs throw at me. This I couldn't give a fuck about, and is pretty much the reason I don't give a rats ass about comics.

When a tale is told a tale told. What's the point of bringing this shit back? If these storys are good why not use them with new characters?

As far as good literature goes, it's pretty difficult to beat Neil Gaiman's Sandman grand story arc.

Louis Vuitton is a prestigious and exclusive brand. Counterfeiters manufacture inferior-quality LV handbags. This impairs the value of the LV brand by making the product less exclusive, and by negatively affecting the perception that the LV mark denotes quality.

Watchmen is a brand that is recognized even by casual readers of comics. For many 'civilians' it is the only superhero comic that they will buy or read. Like LV, it is also a brand that denotes quality. There's a reason the book has never gone out of print (other than the desire to never see the rights revert to Alan Moore, I mean): people keep buying it. The population of dedicated comic book readers is too small to sustain continued sales like that. Watchmen is one of the few books you can recommend to your hip but relatively non-nerdy friends. Non-nerdy people buy it and buy it.

I'm sure that DC has been under constant pressure over the years to find new ways to monetize the equity that's in the Watchmen brand. Publishing new Watchmen material seems like a natural way to accomplish that. Unfortunately, it's also a really stupid idea, because:

1. it confuses the casual consumer who won't know which "Watchmen" book was recommended to them by well-meaning friends. "Do I need to read 'Before Watchmen' first," the civilian will wonder, "in order to understand Watchmen?" The prequels will be presented in a variety of styles, and will certainly be of at least slightly inferior quality to the original book. Will civilians who mistakenly read the prequels first get turned off, and then never read the real thing?
2. If the name Watchmen is no longer shorthand for "the very best in superhero comics," then DC will have squandered a lot of brand equity simply for the sake of promoting this year's turn-of-the-crank summer cross-over event.

The counterfeit handbags cause a lot of trouble for Louis Vuitton, but I don't think they're stupid enough to manufacture their own counterfeit product. "Before Watchmen" is a fake purse.

Setting aside the ethics of "Before Watchmen," it's a really stupid business move from an editorial team that has demonstrated its incompetence repeatedly. In the short run, they'll sell "Before Watchmen" in respectable numbers, but in the long run they'll discover that they shouldn't have messed with the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Also, Before Watchmen could not possibly be better than this:

www.warrenellis.com/?p=13655

Jackwraith wrote: To be honest, I think V for Vendetta is his finest work, purely on a story level, because it's not burdened with any of the superhero tropes that Watchmen is forced to engage. Of course, the fact that me makes most of those tropes work for his story is what makes Alan the writer that he is. There's simply a measured pace to V that is as obvious as the chapter titles, all of which start with the letter 'v' and all of which perfectly describe both the chapter and the next step in the process. It's a really a remarkable level of insight. Of course, if you ask Alan, he'll say that his finest work was Big Numbers. Everybody has their foci in life.

I read V for Vendetta exactly once, issue by issue, back when it came out. So maybe my recollection is off. But what I remember is being very disappointed at a shift in tone partway through the story. Maybe 2/3 of the way through. I don't remember now exactly what that shift was, but it didn't feel deliberate, it felt mistaken. Like Moore got writer's block partway through and lost his feel for the tone or theme or characterization or something important when he finally got back to writing. The only other time that I've seen that happen with Moore was Promethea, where it seemed like he got bored and just phoned it in for the last few issues.

Big Numbers? I bought the first issue, and it left zero impression. Not bad, not good, just nothing. I still have that somewhere... it isn't even comic-shaped, so it's in some other storage box and not with my comic collection.

My favorite work by Moore is probably Top Ten. The concept is both awesome and ludicrous, and then Moore sneakily includes a stunning variety of perversions into the mix. And then the whole mess works just great anyway, because Moore sticks to the basic cop show structure as much as possible, while imbuing the diverse cast with so much life.

Top Ten is my favorite to read, followed not that far behind by Tom Strong. But I don't think either are his best work as a "writer". They are just the most fun. When it comes to his best work, I dunno really. Watchmen is of course amazing but then the stuff he was doing with From Hell is also really incredible. Litle stuff with other characters like The Killing Joke or Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow are also some of, if not the singularly, best individual stories told with those characters. Dude is just too good and different projects showcase different aspects of how amazing he is.

Favorites eh? Tough call. Top Ten is good fun and Tom Strong was good for one book. Then the second one bored me and I stopped buying the series. At some point I read number 3 but don't remember it.

Watchmen is his best and very re-readable
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is his best too. The art is the most interesting Moore has ever had in a comic and he pushes boundaries no one thought were there. The Black Dossier is an incredible effort that really fucks with what people thought was possible in the medium of comics. I love how they steal the book and when they open it so do you, I love the 3D glasses and how it's not just a gimmick but makes sense in the story.
Swamp Thing is brilliant and was the blue print for Sandman. Gaiman took not just the characters from it but the style and feel too.
A Small Killing was an interesting Moore book as was From Hell. Turns out his does realism quite well and can tell a great story without any horror or super hero trappings.

I'm starting to think Lost Girl is up there too. A Phenomenal book and truly something no one else in comics history could have pulled off. An erotic comic that doesn't make a good one handed read but does make you think.

As for his small stories I think his Batman Clayface story is under-recognized and his fantastic Green Lantern stories as well. No one could save "Vigilante" it's just the dumbest character ever to exist and those bums were lucky Moore wrote them two issues because otherwise no one would have ever heard of this dude.

Shellhead wrote: I read V for Vendetta exactly once, issue by issue, back when it came out. So maybe my recollection is off. But what I remember is being very disappointed at a shift in tone partway through the story. Maybe 2/3 of the way through. I don't remember now exactly what that shift was, but it didn't feel deliberate, it felt mistaken. Like Moore got writer's block partway through and lost his feel for the tone or theme or characterization or something important when he finally got back to writing.

Ha. That's pretty perceptive, because there was a gap. It was begun in the British anthology Warrior, in the early 80s. When Warrior got cancelled, DC offered to pick up V but it didn't get sorted out for two or three years and he finished writing it around 1987. So, yes, there is a change of tone but I didn't think it was overwhelming. The pacing does change a bit because the original segments in Warrior were 12 or 15 pages, as opposed to the 24 of standard comic length, so there are adjustments that had to be made in that respect, too.

Shellhead wrote: Big Numbers? I bought the first issue, and it left zero impression. Not bad, not good, just nothing. I still have that somewhere... it isn't even comic-shaped, so it's in some other storage box and not with my comic collection.

I agree. I was never that interested in it, either, but he worked on it forever and I've heard him talk fondly of it more than once; moreso than most of his other work (that he feels gets 'tarnished' by one thing or another.)