Presenting the Minutemen

[thehefner]

I fucking love it.

There are some people who will think they look ridiculous. These people miss the point entirely.

Not only does it look like one of the old Batman/Republic serials, but one commenter on the CHUD.com message boards made this observation: "The thing that truly sells the picture for me is the looks on all of their faces. The costumes look ridiculous like they should - but that's not hard. Get a decent costume designer to exactly replicate what's in the comic and it's done. The faces though, betray a lot of character and do for the the costumes what the actual cloth can't accomplish. With each face, you can see the slight embarrassment that is a subtle undertone in the book. There are (perfect) exceptions - the comedian looks like he couldn't give a shit, hooded justice just looks slumpy, un-photogenic, and uncomfortable, and night owl looks like he's dove into this thing head first and is bound to take himself seriously. I can't get over how absolutely fantastic the look on Dollar Bill's face is."

More than ever, I know that if WATCHMEN fails, it won't be for lack of honest effort and passion on Zack Snyder's part.

Comments

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Neat! I'll be very interested in your thoughts when you finish!

That said, I doubt you'll be blown away. WATCHMEN suffers from a bit of CITIZEN KANE worship, if you know what I mean. Part of it is to remember the time it came out and the influence it had. That said, I reread it every year, and there's always something new I notice each time. It holds up to repeat reads excellently. Still, I'd be totally interested in your thoughts.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying it thus far. I still have a bit of an issue with graphic novels in general: I don't know how the pages work.

Perhaps that sounds stupid, but it's part of the language of graphic novels that you have to learn. It's essentially equivalent to scene shifts in movies. There's a convention for what sorts of things happen to indicate different times and places, shifting of story lines.

In graphic novels, they usually (but not always) occur at page breaks (but not all page breaks).

In film, they can play with that, the gradual dawning of where you are in a scene. I don't know the language well enough to play that kind of game.

It definitely bears repeat readings. It's got enormous scope in both time and cast, and deliberately doles information out.

Perhaps you can answer me one particular question though: is there intended to be any sort of connection between Jon Osterman and J'onn J'onzz? Perhaps it was just because I'd recently seen Justice League: New Frontier (the best of those I've seen yet). The characters aren't identical, by any means, but there's enough similarity that the names struck me.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I've actually heard that before, and while it sounds strange to me, I think I can understand that. It doesn't help that sometimes the actual artists don't know how to pace a story, and that can fuck up even us experienced geeks.

There's a connection, but not to J'onn. The WATCHMEN characters are analogues of the Charlton Comics characters, a superhero publisher that went defunct, the rights of whom were bought by DC. Alan Moore originally wanted to use the Charlton characters, but DC forbade it, which in the end is for the best. I love the Charlton characters, and they'd never have been able to be used again. Rorschach is the Question (Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko's awesome Ayn Rand-ian vigilante), Nite Owl is the Blue Beetle, and Osterman is based upon Captain Atom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Atom

You saw and liked NEW FRONTIER? Cool! The book's very worth reading, especially as one of the main criticisms of the film is that it reads like a Cliff's Notes version of the story. While I dearly wish it had an extra hour and a bigger animation budget, I definitely dug the NF movie.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

NEW FRONTIER started off very well. Towards the end it did what the other ones did: a big scary monster beating up heroes, and then heroes beating up the big scary monster.

Superheroes actually fighting things almost never interests me. That's what's making Watchmen so interesting: the vigiliantes are for the most part just costumed people, and when they get into fights there's real chance of getting beaten up. And you can identify with it when they do.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Actually, I agree with you on this, at least to a large extent. Fights with big scary monsters are one of my least favorite classic traits of superhero stories. I'm far more interested in the characters themselves. That's what I really disliked about the first couple seasons of JUSTICE LEAGUE: the characters never took off their masks. They were just superheroes fighting bad guys and big scary monsters, nothing more. Thankfully, the show vastly improved.

At least with NEW FRONTIER (where the monster was easily my least favorite part of the otherwise-wonderful comic, which is far more fleshed out than the film), Darwyn Cooke created the big scary monster as a metaphor for communism, in that it's a big faceless threat. He thought the metaphor would be too obvious, when instead no one got it at all.