As you may or may not know,
Watchmen is finally going to be a movie. It is already in post-production. Whether it is any good remains to be seen, of course, but the cast is
pretty fucking awesome, if you ask me. And of course the
Supernatural fandom will be pleased with their casting of The Comedian (though I assume the entirety of
Supernatural fandom already knows about this).
If you have not read the graphic novel,
I cannot recommend it highly enough. Written by Alan Moore (
V for Vendetta,
From Hell,
Batman: The Killing Joke), It won the Hugo Award, and it was on
Time Magazine's list of
The 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Note that the list is 99%
standard novels--
Watchmen is the only graphic novel on the list. Others on the list include
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Mrs. Dalloway,
Catch-22,
Slaughterhouse Five, and
The Grapes of Wrath. Not bad company to keep.
Keep in mind as you read it that it was written in 1986/87, and the political landscape / zeitgeist was quite different at the time. Oddly (sadly) enough, we now have a political landscape which can be linked in a nearly one-to-one comparison, though in a completely different world. The movie was one of those "never gonna get made" movies forever (a million different screenwriters and directors have been attached at one point or another), but the timing is right, now. I'm glad they didn't make it before.
There's no way they're going to get the whole story into the movie (of course), which is why I recommend reading it.
Those of you who have come to comic book fandoms after 1987, let me say this: nothing you are reading would be what it is without
Watchmen. In this world, there are very few works of art that one can point to, and say, "This is where everything changed."
Watchmen is one of those.
For those who know the story (or for those who don't mind seeing a photo which doesn't really give anything much away),
( Check out The Minutemen of 1940 )I didn't think I'd say this about the
Watchmen movie, but I'm pretty darned excited!
