Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Nov 17, 2015 2:27:22 GMT -5
I voted 10 out of 10. Could Watchmen be better? Maybe, but I'm damned if I could tell you how. Amazing writing, compelling and interesting characters, great sequential artwork and hugely influential on the entire medium of comics. What more do you want?! Is it Moore's best work? Hmmm...I dunno, I think I prefer V for Vendetta and possibly From Hell too, but Watchmen is definitely way up there as well. To address specific points that others have mentioned, I liked the Tales of the Black Freighter comic within a comic a lot. I also liked the alien squid ending because having the threat that united the entire world coming from outside of the known world is kind of integral to the whole plot working. The alien squid also feels like Moore messing with genre tropes in a very inventive way. That said, I firmly believe that the movie got it right in having Dr. Manhatten be the threat at the end. I think that, for general movie-going audiences, an alien squid would've left far too many non-comic book readers scratching their heads. So ... did anybody else read the Watchmen prequels? Get behind me, Satan!  |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 3:17:33 GMT -5
The art. For a long time, I also thought Watchmen would benefit from a different artist, but when I saw Jae Lee, taking a shot at the visit Blake paid Edgar Jacobi, I reconsidered. I still think Gibbons is a great artist, and the grid system he adopted for Watchmen was a stroke of genius. |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 3:18:41 GMT -5
So ... did anybody else read the Watchmen prequels? Wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Nov 17, 2015 5:39:36 GMT -5
The art. For a long time, I also thought Watchmen would benefit from a different artist, but when I saw Jae Lee, taking a shot at the visit Blake paid Edgar Jacobi, I reconsidered. I still think Gibbons is a great artist, and the grid system he adopted for Watchmen was a stroke of genius. I think that the Gibbons style, which was understated , worked perfectly with the story. There is so much happening in the background apart from the words, that it makes the series a new read every time. |
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Post by Ozymandias on Nov 17, 2015 5:44:52 GMT -5
Tales of the Black Freighter. When I said that I don't see a way to change anything in Watchmen, to make it better, I meant that you can't add, subtract or replace anything. The pirate allegory is another cog in the story, you take it out and the clock won't give you the right time. It's necessary because it tackles the moral dilemma of the main character: does the end justify the means? Dr. Manhattan questioned the very concept of "endings", with an explicit answer, and Tales of the Black Freighter shows with an example, that you can't be sure about right and wrong, it's all relative.
The ending was an example of something you can't replace, just like this part of the narrative can't be subtracted. I wonder how long, until someone brings up a fundamental piece of the story, apparently missing.
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
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Post by shaxper on Nov 17, 2015 8:26:28 GMT -5
[I wonder how long, until someone brings up a fundamental piece of the story, apparently missing. Not that you need to, but you really haven't addressed the criticism I offered on the previous page. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 17, 2015 9:38:41 GMT -5
Originally, I voted "7" and having seen the movie just recently and all the stories in the Comic Book Series - the Stories were good but I wished the artwork was a little bit better. I changed my vote to "8" today because I was thinking about it for the past 12 hours and I've want to acknowledge the fact it was a ground-breaking work with many great characters involved.
My Favorites are:
Rorschach
Nite Owl
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Post by Ozymandias on Nov 17, 2015 10:33:49 GMT -5
Not that you need to, but you really haven't addressed the criticism I offered on the previous page. I guess you mean this post: My biggest obstacle in enjoying Watchmen is that the characters are all such lousy people. I get that this is much of the point (the "watchers" are flawed human beings) but I need characters I care about to drive my interest in a work, and, worse yet, there's a misanthropic "all people suck" theme sort of pervading the entire work. On the other hand, V for Vendetta is, in my mind, a more densely plotted, more consistently developed story with a character (or lack thereof) at its center that you can't help but love and believe in. That work can deconstruct an entire society and still find things beautiful about it worth celebrating. It's not all bleak and terrible. So far, I've limited myself to addressing arguments, about specific parts of the story. You're talking about a personal preference, towards characters you can care about, a more optimistic take on society and all that positive stuff, most people want to agree upon. About "V" being more densely plotted, that's only true for the British part, as a result of constrains imposed by the anthology format. He made the most of it, but working your way around constrains, can hardly be translated into a virtue. There's also a clear inconsistency when reading trough the American section, which was published years later, at a different time in his career and in a different format, for a different audience. |
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Post by Ozymandias on Nov 17, 2015 10:35:39 GMT -5
I changed my vote to "8" today Did you? I've tried, and it doesn't seem to be possible. The lone "7" is still there, BTW. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 17, 2015 11:26:46 GMT -5
I changed my vote to "8" today Did you? I've tried, and it doesn't seem to be possible. The lone "7" is still there, BTW. There were 2 votes of 7 there at one point yesterday, and it is back to 1 now, so one went away somehow and there was not always one lone 7 vote. To change your vote, you have to unclick your old vote first, i.e. click on the box of the number you voted the first time to remove the vote, then click on your new vote. -M |
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Post by Ozymandias on Nov 17, 2015 11:35:16 GMT -5
Did you? I've tried, and it doesn't seem to be possible. The lone "7" is still there, BTW. There were 2 votes of 7 there at one point yesterday, and it is back to 1 now, so one went away somehow and there was not always one lone 7 vote. To change your vote, you have to unclick your old vote first, i.e. click on the box of the number you voted the first time to remove the vote, then click on your new vote. -M Thanks for the heads up, I seemed to remember you just had to check your new selection, and it automatically modified the old one. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 17, 2015 11:39:18 GMT -5
There were 2 votes of 7 there at one point yesterday, and it is back to 1 now, so one went away somehow and there was not always one lone 7 vote. To change your vote, you have to unclick your old vote first, i.e. click on the box of the number you voted the first time to remove the vote, then click on your new vote. -M Thanks for the heads up, I seemed to remember you just had to check your new selection, and it automatically modified the old one. It may work like that in polls where you can vote for multiple options before you reach the max limit of votes, (I can't remember, it's been a while), but on single vote polls you have to essentially cancel your vote to change it. -M |
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Post by MDG on Nov 17, 2015 12:50:15 GMT -5
But, honestly, it was a little too LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM LOOK AT THE CLEVER THING I DID! You can't really read it without being aware of the formal play, which makes it a little inferior in my brain to, say, Maus which is doing some pretty amazing stuff control-of-the-medium-wise but is far more subtle about it, so you can actually read the story without examining the story if you want to. This may be it for me too, but I haven't voted because I think I've re-read Watchman once since buying them off the stands. It was damn impressive at that time, but I don't know how much patience I'd have for it now. I remember it being too much of a direct reaction to traditional superheroes + the current political climate. It read like a formal examination/exercise, and a lot "colder" than things like Love & Rockets, Journey, or even Lloyd Llewellyn, which were very well done comics and their own thing. |
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shaxper
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Posts: 22,460
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Post by shaxper on Nov 17, 2015 12:55:56 GMT -5
About "V" being more densely plotted, that's only true for the British part, as a result of constrains imposed by the anthology format. He made the most of it, but working your way around constrains, can hardly be translated into a virtue. Actually, I think the later chapters are far more densely plotted than the ones appearing in Warrior. The story certainly grows more elaborate and complex. When I say "densely plotted," I don't mean that the action is compacted. A change in tone and scope, absolutely. I see it more as an evolution than an inconsistency, and it works for the story, which evolves its understanding of what it means to resist tyranny throughout, evolving the reader's understanding along with Evey and, yes, Moore himself. |
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 17, 2015 13:00:27 GMT -5
I voted 10 out of 10. Could Watchmen be better? Maybe, but I'm damned if I could tell you how. Amazing writing, compelling and interesting characters, great sequential artwork and hugely influential on the entire medium of comics. What more do you want?! Is it Moore's best work? Hmmm...I dunno, I think I prefer V for Vendetta and possibly From Hell too, but Watchmen is definitely way up there as well. To address specific points that others have mentioned, I liked the Tales of the Black Freighter comic within a comic a lot. I also liked the alien squid ending because having the threat that united the entire world coming from outside of the known world is kind of integral to the whole plot working. The alien squid also feels like Moore messing with genre tropes in a very inventive way. That said, I firmly believe that the movie got it right in having Dr. Manhatten be the threat at the end. I think that, for general movie-going audiences, an alien squid would've left far too many non-comic book readers scratching their heads. So ... did anybody else read the Watchmen prequels? Get behind me, Satan! That's fair. Especially if you read the Nite Owl or Rorshach issues. |
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So ... did anybody else read the Watchmen prequels? 
