Watch out!

I used to be a huge comic book nerd. Then I grew up. To this day, one of my favourite pastimes is ripping into people who consider comics a serious art-form. Sequential art, they say. Bollocks, I reply. I will write a longer diatribe on how laughable it is to lionize comic books, especially mainstream ones, at a later date.

Having said that, sometimes it’s impossible not to get lured in by a work of seminal genius (a phrase I use sparingly, unlike comic book aficionados). Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen is one of the few comics (or graphic novels, if you are being pedantic) that is a complete work in itself. In fact, it is the Citizen Kane of comic books if you will, not just for the story, but for its use, nay mastery, of the comic book form – including, but not exclusive to, all its natural limitations.

Anyway, a film version, long, long in gestation, will be out exactly a year from now. 300’s Zach Snyder is at the helm, and even though that film was an abysmal piece of trash, Snyder has the visual mastery, as well as the nerdish excitability, that a project like Watcmen demands. He’s finally posted the movie versions of most of the characters from the story. Most of them look great, though I am not sure why Ozymandias is wearing George Clooney’s costume from Batman and Robin.