Who watches…

I was an impressionable kid, too young to read Watchmen but later picked up the trade. I loved Moore but had to wait well until college, actually, to read Watchmen in full. It’s Watchmen, Heavy Metal and the Sandman that fully informed me what comics could be. (Later I’d pick up on the indie stuff) Strong fully realized worlds with a beginning, middle and end. An ending never really happened for me with comics I’ve read before. I liked that. It was different that the world of constant reinvention.

Fast forward to now, DC dares to take a crap on one of the things I most enjoyed about Watchmen. Watchmen was Moore’s vision and his alone. He took some shit 2 dimensional Charlton characters that by all rights should have faded away, and reinvented them through a bleak realistic world view. That’s nothing short of a miracle. Little by little, the comics industry overreacted by making everything… bleak and dark. Mainstream comics as I knew it, never recovered.

The prequels are a gross waste of talent on something that is so completely unnecessary and an obvious corporate ploy to squeeze that stone one more time. The take away from this is to be careful of what one signs before working for a publisher.