Who Watches this Blog?
Sigh. I am less than awesome at lj punctuality. I have lurked on LJ so long it's a pretty alien concept for me to interact with it - posting commenting and such. Resolutions to do better, yadda yadda.
Anyhow:
#2 - Watchmen by Alan Moore
While I am still unsure whether I'm going to include comic books as a whole in the book count thing, there was never any debate about Watchmen. It is literature, incidentally with pictures. Anyone who says otherwise can take it up with this guy. The Watchmen was one of the very first comics I ever read (Back with Sandman and Preacher), but in light of the movie coming out (I'll probably come back to this at the end) I decided to revisit it, and am quite pleased that I did.
In brief, the Watchmen is the story of an America where masked vigilantes did indeed take it upon themselves to fight crime circa the golden era of comics, and the resulting fallout. After the a nationwide police strike protesting the unsystematic and often brutal approach of the 'superheroes' an act of Congress was passed expressly making such vigilantism illegal. The vast majority of the masked crime fighters retired, while a few were granted government contracts or went completely rogue. Plot happens but is pretty secondary to the in depth character studies of these various defrocked superheroes, and their relationships to each other and humanity at large. I hesitate to discuss the narrative much more because one of the most defining aspects of the Watchmen is it's immaculate pacing - carefully shaping how you perceive each character and their history along the way. It's quite brilliant.
Watchmen is set in a slightly alternate history, largely due to the influence of the one 'superhero' who has any kind of actual supernatural ability, and some of my favorite little bits are Moore's commentary through the aspects of history that he edits. There are little newspaper headlines peppered throughout the book that I totally missed on my first read of the book years ago, things like 'Russia protests U.S. advances in Afghanistan', 'Congress approves lunar silos', and 'Vietnam admitted as 51st state'. There is also a very sympathetic little cameo guess star appearance by Nixon refusing to be the aggressor in a nuclear war. All of the little stories tie together into a sort of 'I love you, but you're being a dick' letter from Moore to America, which I feel is really the heart of the book. It's a pretty far cry from V for Vendetta (the book - not the movie) in the sense that it feels more like a wake up call for the modern world rather than a death threat.
And mentioning V brings me back around to the upcoming movie. Alan Moore won't have anything to do with the movies his books are made into anymore. His name will never appear on screen, and his share of the royalties he has said he is giving directly to the illustrator Dave Gibbons. I can't dredge up the quote just now, but I read him say in an interview at one point that trying to move a piece from one medium to another is pretty pointless - you would never try to paint a picture that contained a whole novel, or write a song that perfectly encapsulated a photograph. But the fact is people are going to try - especially if there's a buck in it. I am just thankful the director (Zach Snyder, who also directed 300) read the Watchmen while he was still college aged and loved it. I thought 300 was an excellent comic to movie translation, but Frank Miller wasn't really trying to say as much as Moore was and what he was trying to convey was easier to convey in imagery. I am very hopeful that Snyder won't do anything directly contradictory to the source material (see V for Vendetta), but I really feel it would be unfair to expect him to cram the entirety of this complicated narrative into a 2 hour flick that anyone other than Watchmen nerds would want to go see. These heroes spend a great deal more time reminiscing than fighting, which is frankly not what your average movie goer expects out of a comic movie. Dark Knight may have paved the way for that to some extent, but introspective though it was we still got regular asskickery and explosions. I think that if the movie gives a good overview of the characters, doesn't try to graft some moral onto the story, and still manages to entertain someone who is going in cold, it's a win. Really it all hinges in Rorschach. And if the preview is any indication, Snyder knows this.
SO: Excellent book - if you've ever liked a comic book I'd recommend it. I am guardedly optimistic about the movie. And I have to go to work, so I will have to edit this later.
Join us next time for ... either Serenity: Better Days if I decide it actually counts as a book, or Confederacy of Dunces which I am almost finished with.
Anyhow:
#2 - Watchmen by Alan Moore
While I am still unsure whether I'm going to include comic books as a whole in the book count thing, there was never any debate about Watchmen. It is literature, incidentally with pictures. Anyone who says otherwise can take it up with this guy. The Watchmen was one of the very first comics I ever read (Back with Sandman and Preacher), but in light of the movie coming out (I'll probably come back to this at the end) I decided to revisit it, and am quite pleased that I did.
In brief, the Watchmen is the story of an America where masked vigilantes did indeed take it upon themselves to fight crime circa the golden era of comics, and the resulting fallout. After the a nationwide police strike protesting the unsystematic and often brutal approach of the 'superheroes' an act of Congress was passed expressly making such vigilantism illegal. The vast majority of the masked crime fighters retired, while a few were granted government contracts or went completely rogue. Plot happens but is pretty secondary to the in depth character studies of these various defrocked superheroes, and their relationships to each other and humanity at large. I hesitate to discuss the narrative much more because one of the most defining aspects of the Watchmen is it's immaculate pacing - carefully shaping how you perceive each character and their history along the way. It's quite brilliant.
Watchmen is set in a slightly alternate history, largely due to the influence of the one 'superhero' who has any kind of actual supernatural ability, and some of my favorite little bits are Moore's commentary through the aspects of history that he edits. There are little newspaper headlines peppered throughout the book that I totally missed on my first read of the book years ago, things like 'Russia protests U.S. advances in Afghanistan', 'Congress approves lunar silos', and 'Vietnam admitted as 51st state'. There is also a very sympathetic little cameo guess star appearance by Nixon refusing to be the aggressor in a nuclear war. All of the little stories tie together into a sort of 'I love you, but you're being a dick' letter from Moore to America, which I feel is really the heart of the book. It's a pretty far cry from V for Vendetta (the book - not the movie) in the sense that it feels more like a wake up call for the modern world rather than a death threat.
And mentioning V brings me back around to the upcoming movie. Alan Moore won't have anything to do with the movies his books are made into anymore. His name will never appear on screen, and his share of the royalties he has said he is giving directly to the illustrator Dave Gibbons. I can't dredge up the quote just now, but I read him say in an interview at one point that trying to move a piece from one medium to another is pretty pointless - you would never try to paint a picture that contained a whole novel, or write a song that perfectly encapsulated a photograph. But the fact is people are going to try - especially if there's a buck in it. I am just thankful the director (Zach Snyder, who also directed 300) read the Watchmen while he was still college aged and loved it. I thought 300 was an excellent comic to movie translation, but Frank Miller wasn't really trying to say as much as Moore was and what he was trying to convey was easier to convey in imagery. I am very hopeful that Snyder won't do anything directly contradictory to the source material (see V for Vendetta), but I really feel it would be unfair to expect him to cram the entirety of this complicated narrative into a 2 hour flick that anyone other than Watchmen nerds would want to go see. These heroes spend a great deal more time reminiscing than fighting, which is frankly not what your average movie goer expects out of a comic movie. Dark Knight may have paved the way for that to some extent, but introspective though it was we still got regular asskickery and explosions. I think that if the movie gives a good overview of the characters, doesn't try to graft some moral onto the story, and still manages to entertain someone who is going in cold, it's a win. Really it all hinges in Rorschach. And if the preview is any indication, Snyder knows this.
SO: Excellent book - if you've ever liked a comic book I'd recommend it. I am guardedly optimistic about the movie. And I have to go to work, so I will have to edit this later.
Join us next time for ... either Serenity: Better Days if I decide it actually counts as a book, or Confederacy of Dunces which I am almost finished with.