[SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO POST THIS. IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER THE
SERIES ENDED. C2E2 COVERAGE GOT IN THE
WAY OF THAT, SO I’M PROBABLY TOO LATE TO THIS PARTY.]
When I first heard that DC was going to do BEFORE WATCHMEN,
I think my reaction was the same as everyone else’s: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT? WATCHMEN is perfect on its own. Why would you cheapen it with a marketing
ploy like that?
But of course, I was curious. I had to find out what it was really
like. It boggled my mind that there were
so many different titles dedicated to this.
It seemed like overkill to me, and it just reeked of sales desperation.
Now that the whole thing is over, I can say that it wasn’t
as bad as I thought it would be. DC put
some of their best writers on this project, from Brian Azzarello to Darwyn
Cooke to Len Wein to J. Michael Straczynski.
If they absolutely had to do this project, at least they did it as well
as they could. Sure, it was nothing more
than a scheme to make more money off a prestigious title, but at least they
didn’t half-ass it. They really wanted
to make this the best they could.
That doesn’t mean it was good. But it was better than expected.
The
worst had to be NITE OWL. Let’s face it, Dan Dreiberg isn’t an
interesting guy in his prime. He only
becomes interesting when he’s a fat has-been who has a difficult time getting
it up when he’s not in the suit. As a
superhero in his prime, he’s completely bland.
He did not need his own book, especially since it had very little to do
with the direction the others were taking.
Truthfully, I didn’t care for “The Curse of the Crimson
Corsair” feature at the back of almost every book. It seems to only exist to fill in for the
“Tales of the Black Freighter.” There is
very little creativity there. It looked
pretty neat, but there was very little substance there.
SILK SPECTRE was all right.
Again, it didn’t tie in with the direction of the others, but it was
kind of cool as a stand-alone. You
already know my thoughts on the DOLLAR BILL one-shot. MINUTEMEN was actually a cool concept,
filling in some details that were left out of the original WATCHMEN. OZYMANDIAS was a bit plain for my likes,
although the layouts knocked me the fuck out.
However, DR. MANHATTAN was pretty interesting. At first, I thought they were going to use
this book to change the original WATCHMEN story, which I would have been
furious about. Luckily, it didn’t go
that way. Like with OZYMANDIAS, the
layouts were pretty impressive.
The big surprise was how disappointing RORSCHACH was for
me. It was cool to see Rorschach in
action, but it was almost a throwaway story.
It didn’t bring anything new to the table. It tried to explain a bit why he is the way
he is, but the thing is, we already have enough information to determine that.
On the other hand, MOLOCH brought a lot of cool shit to the
table. It is easily my second favorite. We don’t get a lot of him in the original
WATCHMEN, so it’s good to get his back story.
My favorite?
COMEDIAN, of course. There was so
much going on with this book that after a while, it might even be easy to see
him as the main character of the WATCHMEN universe, even though he dies in the
first few pages of Alan Moore’s graphic novel.
Azzarello brought the most to the table with this one.
All in all, I think it was worth my money. Not much more than that, though. There is one big concern, though. You know how sometimes, people get into an
argument over how a newcomer should watch STAR WARS? Some people are of the opinion that you
should watch the original trilogy first before the newer one. Others say you should watch it in order.
With WATCHMEN, there is no way you should read BEFORE
WATCHMEN first. I hope no one gets the
impression that they should start with BEFORE.
There are waaaaaay too many spoilers in BEFORE for something like
that. These books were intended to be
read after one reads WATCHMEN.
Here’s the thing:
WATCHMEN is perfectly contained within itself. We don’t need a BEFORE WATCHMEN because Moore already gave us
that in the flashbacks. BEFORE WATCHMEN
relied far too heavily on material that originated in WATCHMEN. A lot of shit was repeated. Ultimately, this was an exercise in
futility. But it was just good enough in
the end to open my wallet.
Is it shameless in its exploitation of the original
book? Yes. But at least you get some kind of return on
that. Should BEFORE WATCHMEN exist? Probably not.
The only motive the company had was to make more money. The writers and artists did their best to give
it artistic merit, and they came really close to succeeding.
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments below.
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