TERRIBLE Comic Book Movie Adaptations (the 3rd and Final Part)

Here is my conclusion to the worst comic book adaptations I have ever seen. Maybe someday there will be a fourth installment. I can only pray there won't...

Priest – I’m not familiar with the comic this movie was based on, but the movie seemed like it could have been cool. It wasn’t. There was only one thing that worked in this movie and that was Karl Urban. Thank God for Karl Urban. Priest was set in a post-apocalyptic meets dystopian future where religion rules what remains of society and priests, highly trained spiritual warriors, are humanity’s only defense against evil. Seems cool on the surface, but remember… it isn’t. So the main character priest guy goes after these vampires who are more like nocturnal demons with no eyes than Dracula or sparkly metro-sexual vampires. The vampires appear to be on the offensive, wiping out various outland towns and villages. Turns out their being led by a fallen priest who was turned into the first human-vampire… and it’s Karl Urban! The movie soon became a test of will as Jonny and I would anxiously wait for the next scene featuring Karl Urban.  Everything else just seemed stupid and forgettable. Priest suffers from a myriad of problems. While I say I know little of the comic, I do know it does not take place in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future. That aspect was invented by the Hollywood Mediocrity Machine (patent pending). Whenever you have people outside of the source material making such drastic changes to the plot, story or even setting, you are asking for trouble. I mean, what if somebody else decided to continue Bryan Fuller’s Dead Like Me without any involvement from the creator despite his heavy influence toward the feel, direction and mythos of the show?  Oh wait, that happened. So did S. Darko. (It can’t be undone, people!) Another issue was that the plot was implausible. No, I don’t mean that vampires exist. I mean that it took how many millennia for a human to be infected by a vampire? Really? How was Karl Urban’s character the first one? I call bullshit! This race of vampire had to have been smart enough to realize the benefits of turning humans. For one thing… humans have eyes! Those optical things do kind of come in handy don’t they?  Plus, a human-looking vampire can infiltrate human civilization. That certainly improves the odds of eating them! Honestly, Jonny and I were more fascinated by the dystopian society ruled by religion aspect of the story than a dumb Judge Dredd versus vampires plot. Thank God for Karl Urban. Both for helping us survive Priest and giving us a GOOD Judge Dredd! Which leads me to…

Judge Dredd – This movie should have worked. It had good special effects with details and characters straight from the comic. Then mistakes were made. Many, many mistakes. On the surface, Sylvester Stallone is a great fit for the title role of Judge Dredd. The character is portrayed as a snarling, tough as nails, takes no bullshit cop with the power to be judge, jury and executioner all in one. Plus, Stallone brought great star power to the movie. But someone apparently forgot to tell Sly Stallone that Judge Dredd NEVER TAKES OFF HIS DAMN HELMET! This might seem trivial to bitch and moan over, but it is a huge detail to overlook considering the authenticity to the source material and the meaning behind Dredd’s hidden façade. Judge Dredd represents justice at its most carnal, most brutal, but also most honest. Dredd is the uniform complete with helmet and it represents him just as much as he and the uniform represent the law that he serves, abides by and sacrifices for. In the same way that justice is blind, you don’t see Dredd’s face. Having Stallone walk around 95% of the movie without the helmet made Judge Dredd just another Stallone flick. It’s the same reason that lesser known actors were cast in the Watchmen movie. The goal was to see Ozymandias, not Tom Cruise as Ozymandias.  Thank God for Karl Urban. He left that helmet on the whole time. He got it where Stallone didn’t and probably didn’t care. (It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Sly never even read a single Dredd comic to prepare for the role.) The plot to Judge Dredd felt underwhelming, as if nothing was really at stake. Seriously, Jonny and I both think that the best part of the movie was the ABC Warrior robot that Rico (Dredd’s evil clone brother who surprisingly looked nothing like Dredd) uses as part of his scheme. Most would argue that the biggest problem with the movie was Rob Schneider. Herman Ferguson was made to be this comic relief that felt akin to a Death Wish movie where Charles Bronson had to drag Pee Wee Herman around with him. Not only did it not work, it missed the bar for the usual dark humor that the Judge Dredd book notoriously brings. Instead it was like the boring version of Demolition Man (boring because Wesley Snipes wasn’t in it and let’s be honest, he stole the damn show in that movie!). Plus, Hollywood is obsessed with this idea of there always having to be a romantic subplot. The comic, however, never really shows any romantic desires on the part of Judge Dredd because such relationships are forbidden among judges. So having Judge Hershey kiss Dredd simply would not have happened as Hershey would have known better and Dredd wouldn’t have allowed it.  Sadly, the script seemed to be built on the best of intentions. Pat Mills, a writer for the Judge Dredd comic who helped to develop the character early on, penned the screenplay and filled it with lots of characters, images and details straight from the source material. Even the annoying Schneider was based on the Fergie character in the book. Like I said, the movie should have worked. I think the Hollywood Mediocrity Machine (again, patent pending) got their hands on the film project and turned it into mindless action cheese, which is sad considering how unique and complex the Judge Dredd comic is.

Jonah Hex – Jonny and I didn’t hate this movie, but lots of people did… and we can see why. If you are a fan of Jonah Hex comics, this movie will anger you. We have never really read those comics, so our knowledge of the disfigured bounty hunter is limited. However, I can tell you that the movie was really stupid at times. I know Jonah doesn’t have supernatural powers, so his talking to the dead thing was total bullshit. It was quite amusing to watch Megan Fox try to pull off a western accent and… well, attempt to act. Considering that she was paired with Josh Brolin, who is easily one of the best American actors today, it was all the more painful to watch. (I must also point out that her playing a prostitute in the Wild West was very misleading. Wild West hookers were not that attractive!) John Malkovich was his usual intellectual bad guy (i.e. Cyrus the Virus) which he has mastered to such a level that I am confident he was just phoning in his performance, yet he still managed to be one of the best actors in the movie. Brolin did a great job; he really made the best of a bad situation. (For the purposes of this review, situation is another word for script.) The best actor in the movie was Michael Fassbender, who stole the damn show as Malkovich’s crazy Irish henchman. He was freakin’ awesome and the main reason Jonny and I didn’t hate the movie. Hell, Fassbender’s good enough for me to encourage people to see this stupid movie just to check out his performance! So to sum up this wretch, Malkovich gets this super secret weapon that… I’ll just say it… it’s basically a nuclear bomb without being a nuclear bomb. You know that thing where a movie will take place before scientists split the atom, but want that end-all-be-all super weapon so the writer comes up with a ridiculous “not-a-nuke” thing? That’s what Malkovich had. (For note, I did like the steampunk nuke from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes… it was ridiculous and yet somehow awesome.)  So when President Grant finds out about Malkovich having the weapon (which I can describe only as fiery super-balls of death), he whips out the classic cliché “Get me Jonah Hex.” Yes, somehow this movie was a secret agent film set in the Wild West without Will Smith and giant mechanical spiders. I do have to question how the president knew of a random bounty hunter out west and thought so highly of him as to place the fate of the United States in his hands… the same hands, by the way, that had not long before fought for the Confederacy. (I wonder if the writer of Jonah Hex ever uttered the words “Wow, it writes itself!) So inevitably Jonah Hex and his side-kick Whore-girl save the day. President Grant commends Hex for a job well done and appoints him a US Marshall. In the last scene, Dirty Harry Hex throws the US Marshall badge he got into the reflecting pool in Washington DC and walks off into the sunset with his lady rental. Wow, words cannot express... the bile rising in the back of my throat.

Dragonball: The Magic Begins & Dragonball: Evolution – I am counting these two

because Dragonball started out as a manga. I’ve already explained why I don’t think a

Dragonball movie will ever work. These awful experiments in cinematic torture just prove my point.  Dragonball: The Magic Begins was a Taiwanese film that was so terrible, I have never watched the whole thing. In fact, a friend and I attempted to watch it at two in the morning, the golden hour for viewing bad cinema, and still couldn’t get through it! The only positive I will give that movie was that the actor they cast as Master Roshi was SPOT ON. He looked and acted exactly how I picture the eccentric perverted martial arts master to behave. It is because of that movie that my expectations were so low that I didn’t think Dragonball: Evolution was that level of bad. I reached this conclusion on the fact that I was able to watch the entirety of that movie. But holy shit was that movie crappy. It’s sad since the cast was great; you had Justin Chatwin and Emmy Rossum, both of whom are amazing on Shameless. Plus you had Chow Yun Fat, Jamie Chung and James Marsters. But good actors can only do so much with a shitty script. The film could have starred Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Spacey, Natalie Portman and Matt Damon; Hell, you could have raised Stanley Kubrick from the dead to direct and that movie still would have been a steaming pile of dog shit. Like I said before, I don’t think you can make a live action Dragonball movie work, but certainly setting it in our world with a white American high school student named Goku wasn’t the best idea.

Fist of the North Star – Again, Fist of the North Star (aka Hokuto No Ken) began as a manga, so I am counting this horrid excuse for a martial arts flick. Unlike the Dragonball franchise, I actually believe this could work as a live action movie (perhaps a future installment of Live Action Casting?). With the right cast, a good script, a passionate director and a great fight choreographer, Fist of the North Star could be awesome. This movie, however, was not. I can sum it up simply with this sentence: Martial arts master Ryuken was played by Malcolm McDowell.  I love Malcolm McDowell. I have the 40^th anniversary Blu-Ray of A Clockwork Orange and have McDowell’s autographed picture hanging in my den. But seriously, I can’t use my love of the man to suspend my belief well enough to buy a British man as the practicing master of an ancient martial art. I don’t remember a ton about this movie but I do recollect that it was very low budget. Most of its money was probably blown with one cool effect at the beginning of the movie where Kenshiro made a bad guy’s head explode. In hindsight, I should have just turned off the movie there as it was all downhill from that point.  I remember the late Chris Penn played a character named Jackal which was a cross between a warlord of the same name and Jagi, a villain I would have much rather seen. As the plot was based on the first story-arc of the series involving Shin, there was no Raoh or Jagi or Rei. I do remember the actor who played Rufio in Hook played a similarly annoying character that died the exact same way! He was literally impaled on a sword! I couldn’t stop laughing at that. I would love to see a big budget attempt at Fist of the North Star. (Hell, with today’s computer effects, it wouldn’t even have to be that expensive to show the gore.) Considering how well 300 did, Fist of the North Star could easily be a success. With the right amount of love for the genre (think the Wachowskis and Speed Racer), a good filmmaker could really make this property into an awesome franchise.

Spawn – I’ve only seen Spawn once and it was in the theater way back when it came out.  I’m not sure what exactly turned me off about this movie. It wasn’t abysmal, but I didn’t like it either. It wasn’t Michael Jai White or Martin Sheen, I thought they did fine. I thought John Leguizamo did a good job as the Clown, though I think the character was written a little too over the top. I would have preferred a less comical (and less flatulent) interpretation like the twisted, evil Clown from the HBO animated series (fair warning, I am going to mention that cartoon repeatedly). I thought Spawn himself looked crappy. He really looked nothing like the comic book version and more like a cross between that fleshy CGI costume the movie Green Lantern wore and the Venom symbiote. The special effects weren’t all that great if I remember correctly. I guess one of the biggest problems with the movie was that it abandoned the dark adult feel of the comic (something that the HBO cartoon got right) in favor of a more kid-friendly action flick. Now stop to think about this a second. Spawn is the story of a vicious mercenary who is murdered by his allies, gets sent to hell and makes a deal with the devil to become one of his elite soldiers so he can come back to Earth to seek his revenge.  (Wow, I know what show can follow Yo Gabba Gabba!) Honestly, I hated the ending. Spawn uses telekinesis to remove a bomb remote from the heart of Martin Sheen’s character Jason Wynn (you know, the whole if his heart stops the bomb explodes thing). I haven’t read a ton of Spawn, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember Spawn having telekinetic powers. He had energy powers, teleportation, spikes, claws, super strength, a healing factor, near invulnerability, magic chains and a magic morphing cape that could help him glide and form shields when necessary. I don’t remember him having super telekinetic powers. I also don’t remember the movie mentioning he had those powers prior to the climax. To me it just felt like a contrived ending where Spawn pulled a power out of his ass to conveniently conclude the movie with the good guys winning. Once again, I must say that the HBO cartoon of Spawn had it right. It captured the dark feel, the gritty tone, the violence and the feeling of a wayward soldier seeking a balance between revenge and redemption. If my sketchy memory of the movie is any indication, the live action Spawn was just forgettable.    

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – I can’t not bring up this movie; Jonny Prophet would never forgive me. Truth be told, I didn’t hate this movie, I honestly feel it wasn’t that bad. However, I am not familiar with the source material. Jonny is. Like most of Alan Moore’s famous works, film adaptations were made of them without his consent and changes were made. In this case, the script writers clearly decided to ignore what made the book interesting in favor of making yet another superhero movie, this time a silly one involving famous literary characters and historical legends.  But somewhere along the way, these writers must have decided that Allen Quatermain, Mina Murray, the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo and Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde were not interesting enough (when you eliminate all the aspects of their personalities that made them interesting in the comic, who can blame them?). So the writers added two completely non-comic characters in Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray. Sadly, because of how badly the original members of the team are written, Sawyer and Gray are the most interesting characters in that movie.  The entire film is a farce of the source material. Aside from using the 5 original characters (practically in name only) there is not much else faithful to the comic. For me, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a dumb, cheesy action film using public domain superheroes with really nothing more of substance. The truth is that the book centers on “extraordinary” people, not heroes. Quatermain was an opium addict. The Invisible Man was a pervert. Mr. Hyde was a murderous cannibal. Captain Nemo was more interested in world conquest than saving it. But all of these details were either lost or glossed over for the film, which resulted in the adaptation of an interesting graphic novel into just another bland production from the Hollywood Mediocrity Machine (yes, the patent is still pending). Though there were some cool moments, the movie is largely forgettable. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does have one sad distinction, however. It was Sean Connery’s final film before his retirement. (Come on, Sean, Raul Julia didn’t get a choice in his final role being M. Bison in that craptacular Street Fighter flick, but you can still end on a high note!) Sigh.

Now comes the part where I reveal which of these crappy movies I own in my collection:

The answer is 6… Spider-Man 3, Batman & Robin, The Spirit, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Jonah Hex and Superman Returns.

Now comes the part where I try to defend myself:

I got Spider-Man 3 at Walmart on Black Friday for $2. It was worth $2 to me.

This past Black Friday at Walmart I got X-men Origins: Wolverine for $4 on Blu-ray. There is enough good in the movie to justify it… I think. All right, fine, I’m a sucker for Blu-ray… I admit it.

That same night at Walmart, I got Jonah Hex for $1. The Michael Fassbender performance alone is worth a dollar to me. Plus, Jonny and I can riff that movie to shreds.

Batman and Robin were included in a four movie set of the old Batman movies from Burton and Schumacher.

I got the Spirit from my local Blockbuster for $1. It was worth a dollar to me. (BTW, Jonny got his for a penny on Amazon, but he had to pay shipping. It’s sort of a personal victory for each of us.)

And I own Superman Returns because Jonny Prophet is a bad person! He got the movie at a ‘white elephant’ Christmas gift exchange and decided to wrap it up and give it to me! I got him back though. I gave him his very own copy of John Cena’s The Marine complete with his name in permanent marker on the disc so no second hand shop will dare separate Jonny from his gift. Take that, Jonny Prophet!  

It's that time again...

So what’s up with DC Comics as of late? I mean it seems like there must be a board meeting where DC’s higher ups all get together and say “Hey, what can we do this month to piss off Ol’ Jonny Prophet?” 

My complaints actually start from back a couple years ago when they hinted at return of one my favorite characters from the Batman universe… Jean-Paul Valley (who by the way should have been Hush’s secret identity… hell, even the clues pointed in his direction. He knew all of Bruce Wayne’s secrets and could conceivably hold a grudge. Plus he has been shown to be unstable. But no, they create some character to conveniently be retconned into Bruce’s past. By the way, I also would have accepted Jason Todd as Hush, which they really should have done since they brought him back shortly after anyway!)   I know that JPV wasn’t the most popular Bat-family member, but he had loads of untapped potential.  (If he had gotten his own rogues rather than Batman’s scraps, Azrael could have been a great book.)  So instead of the return of Jean-Paul Valley as Azrael, we get some suck-job named Michael Lane as a crappy whiny emo lame-ass excuse for someone with that mantle.  Better yet (sarcasm alert!) we get to see JPV as a Black Lantern despite the fact that NO BODY WAS EVER FOUND.  

Fine. Whatever.  Then there was the crappy Countdown story line. Mary Marvel turning evil… cool right? It wasn’t.  It was so bad you start to wonder if you haven’t wasted your life by collecting and reading comics or starting to care about the characters.  What was so terrible about Countdown you ask? (To be fair, I doubt any of you are asking that since it is universally despised by fanboys anywhere.)  How about Monitors who discuss taking action but never actually taking action? What action? Nobody knows. Or Jimmy Olsen becoming a horrible superhero with a costume that made Blankman look like a badass? How about building up “the Great Disaster,” even putting together a group of heroes like Donna Troy, Jason Todd and dumbass, er I mean Kyle Rayner, seeking out the help from the missing Ray Palmer, the Atom… and what was this disaster? It was a virus on Earth-51. Wow. Riveting. Still not convinced? Mary Marvel returns to her home to find Darkseid sitting on her couch. No, I don’t think you got that. Allow me to repeat. Darkseid, the unquestioned despot of planet Apokolips, pure evil incarnate that even Satan himself bows before, was just “chilling” on Mary Marvel’s couch. Ugh… does anyone know what a brain hemorrhage feels like? 

However I soldiered on in hopes of greener pastures.  But there were only more mixed bags to follow, and by mixed bags we are talking flaming bags of dog crap! We had the unending boredom that was The Trials of Shazam, the “Grant Morrison must be downing cough syrup” train wreck that was Final Crisis and Brightest Day or as I like to call it ‘Let’s get rid of everything Alan Moore created in the DC universe.’ Then we had Flashpoint which led to the reboot of the entire DC universe (cause normally this was done with a ‘crisis’ but Final Crisis was suppose be the last one) which is odd because didn’t we reboot the universe like 6 or so years back with Infinite Crisis? But whatever, we need to get rid of time traveling Bruce Wayne and Superman being married to Lois Lane.

Flashpoint was hit or miss; when it hit it was pretty good (Legion of Doom, Grodd of War – which should have been a miniseries, not a one-shot), but when it missed, it really sucked. My best example of this was The Outsider. We are led to assume that he is that world’s equivalent of Lex Luthor (who was killed as a child by Krypto, one of the more creative moments of the Flashpoint event) but with an unspecified superpower that is never defined and always seems to be exactly what is needed at the moment. Seriously, I have no idea what his powers were! It didn’t matter because The Outsider used his evil genius more than metahuman abilities anyways. They made him out to be a total badass from the get go. Yes folks, he took down Black Adam by doing a ventriloquist trick. Apparently magic has nothing to do with it, if you can mimic Teth Adams’ voice, you can control the power of Shazam! What the hell? If that were the case why hasn’t Superman done this every time to any member of the Marvel Family that challenges him to a fight?  What an amazing ending to Kingdom Come that would have been, the climactic showdown of Superman versus a mind controlled Captain Marvel… “Shazam.” Oh look, the fight’s over. Yay.  Also, they expect me to believe that Black Adam will act like a little bitch to The Outsider after he killed Teth’s wife Isis? Apparently nobody at DC read 52 and World War 3 a couple years ago. 

How about in Project Superman when Project Zero, an insane soldier given the DNA of Doomsday, gets loose and only Kal El can stop him from killing everyone? What an amazing climactic battle that was. Surely if Doomsday killed our Superman then this scrawnier, inexperienced Supes will really have the odds stacked against him? Nope. Superman punched Project Zero once and he disintegrated. Scrawny, pale, emo Superman punched Project Zero one time and it made him explode or something. Wow. Money well spent.

So now we have the “New 52” that relaunches almost everything from the DC universe for better or for worse. It’s been a crap-shoot to say the least. Wildstorm has been merged with the DCU, but not exactly seamlessly. Where’s Astro City? Is that just going to be forgotten or will it be a random metropolitan area somewhere in the DC United States (i.e. Fawcett City)?  You have Grifter, but now he’s just Punisher-lite with the power to hear Daemonite thoughts. Where the hell is the rest of the WildC.A.T.s? There’s Voodoo, but she is completely different from her previous character. What about Zealot? Or Maul? Or Warblade? Do we just not need them? I guess we are to assume that Grifter isn’t part Kherubim, so is that just not going to exist either? You have Helspont and Daemonites but not the Kherubim? Or is this just more of DC’s efforts to eliminate anything Alan Moore ever contributed toward?

They eliminated the Vertigo universe with only a few characters ending up in the DCU to no doubt be bastardized into the mainstream. DC apparently forgot that the whole point of the Vertigo line was to create a prestige line, grown up comics if you will. Where will all those great books that follow in the footsteps of 100 Bullets, Sandman, Preacher and Transmetropolitan be published?

You have Fairchild, but where are the rest of Gen 13? You have Stormwatch, not the Authority, except they have gone out of their way to basically make Stormwatch into the Authority. They were already on a big ass ship in hyperspace and now any character that wasn’t with the Authority has been written out. It’s the same team of Jack Hawksmoor, Midnighter, Apollo, Jenny Quantum, the Engineer and I guess Martian Manhunter instead of the Doctor and Swift.

Which leads us to the Justice League comic… It’s Earth’s greatest heroes… and Cyborg. I guess he’s the new Martian Manhunter. Now if I had the option of picking up a super strong super fast telepathic shapeshifter versus a guy who can hack computers and make guns out of his hands, I’m pickin’ the green guy. But I guess that’s just me. I won’t bash the comic, it isn’t bad, but some of the dialogue isn’t great. Batman and Green Lantern tend to banter like children, Superman comes across like a dick and Wonder Woman seems like a violence craving airhead. I am interested to see what they do with Shazam in the next story arc. No, not Captain Marvel, he’s just Shazam. I guess he and the wizard can share the name. And make way for Shazam Jr. and Mary Shazam (which is totally not a stripper name).

Then there are just plain puzzling things. Where is Wally West? He just doesn’t exist? Was it revealed he had ties to Al Qaeda or was part of the Penn State scandal? Why was he just erased from existence like a photo of Marty McFly? Apparently Starfire is a apathetically violent slut who can’t remember people now? And in her place on the Teen Titans is Solstice who can fly, has long energy hair, a bubbly optimistic personality but is totally not Starfire, she’s an all new character. (Right.) Why have Mr. Terrific but no Justice Society? Static was the only representative of the Milestone universe and now his book is canceled? Are we just going to ignore him along with Icon and Hardware? I even hear they are getting rid of Power Girl’s “boob window” on her outfit! Not to sound sexist, but she kind of needs it. It’s a part of her character. Before all comic women had triple D breasts, her large rack was made her own. There are numerous jokes made about her bust. Come on, people got all up in arms about Wonder Woman wearing pants; let’s get some love for the boob window!

This leads us to the present and the upcoming event of Before Watchmen for which I’ve already made my comments about.   I now have to ask the powers that be of DC Comics… do you enjoy pissing me off? Do you want me start reading Marvel and Image comics instead of yours ? Do you want me stop reading comics altogether?  You seem to want nothing more than to take everything I have ever loved from your universe and piss all over it! Why? Are you just out of ideas? Do you need to rehash old stories to sell comics now? Do you really need to make prequels to classic books? What is your legacy worth to you?

Like an idiot I’ll be waiting around for the next thing you do to piss me off.  Heck I’ll even get the ball rolling for you too.  Reintroduce Black Adam as Pink Adam, complete with pink tights, a lisp and have him get a gay crush on Superman. Then have him hook up with a long bearded weirdo from England named Callen Boore and they go off to perform sodomy on each other and watch a movie marathon of From Hell, Constantine, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Watchmen… then it’s back to Sodomy.

Toaster's Ramblings... Before Watchmen Edition

I decided I’m going to sort of piggyback off of Jonny Prophet’s previous post about the new DC Watchmen prequels. Jonny and I agree on most things when it comes to the Watchmen graphic novel and properties… though Jonny is a lot more of an Alan Moore “purist” than myself. For instance, I didn’t hate the movie. Yes, it has a lot of flaws, but I found it to be pretty good (not great). I finally got Jonny to agree that the movie is “alright” after I showed him the Watchmen – Ultimate Cut, which at almost 4 hours long is as comprehensive and close to the graphic novel as possible. (Jonny still hates the theatrical version though.)

For quite a long time DC has been discussing a way to try to cash in on the Watchmen’s following beyond selling the classic graphic novel. Now Dan Didio has found a way. This summer DC comics is releasing several 4 issue miniseries about the “origins” of several characters from the Watchmen: Rorschach, Dr, Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and 6 issue runs about Ozymandias, Comedian and The Minutemen; All of these under the banner ‘Before Watchmen.’

Where to begin? The first thought that occurred to me was that half of the graphic novel was told in flashbacks, so what more of the origins can there really be? Given that writer Alan Moore has nothing to do with this new “cash-in” we can effectively rename this project ‘RetCon Watchmen’ because everything the new writers do will only add new details to these characters after the fact.

To DC’s credit, they have employed some of the best names in comics to write and draw these RetCons; names like Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, J. Michael Straczynski and Len Wein (an editor of the Watchmen and the only man from the original work involved in this project) write and a few of the artists include J.G. Jones, The Kuberts and Jae Lee (a personal favorite of mine).

What’s interesting is that Jonny and I have discussed who would best rape Alan Moore’s masterpiece if such a violation had to occur. Darwin Cooke was actually a name we brought up, but the names we wanted more were Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison, both of whom we consider Moore’s protégés, and of course Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is an easy choice considering how he has picked up where Moore left off before on the Miracleman series.

When it comes to the books about Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and Rorschach, I don’t really know what more we can learn. They had a great deal of time spent on their pasts throughout the graphic novel. (I suppose Nite Owl could have had more flashbacks, but his story didn’t seem that interesting. He was essentially the ‘average guy’ who became a costumed adventurer, hence why he was the main protagonist.) The other three books actually have some potential.

Ozymandias really didn’t have much time given to his back story so it stands to reason that he could have a lot to mine. How did he get to be a superhero? How did he get his fortune? How did he orchestrate his plan? It’s unnecessary for the actual Watchmen story, but as long as you have to go there, it could be a decent enough book.

The two books that I think have the best chances of not being anal-rapingly stupid are the Comedian and The Minutemen. Why? Because their careers were the longest and could really be explored. The Minutemen fought Nazis and gangsters. We know this from “Under the Hood” excerpts and some flashbacks, but it could be cool to have actual stories written about their exploits. It might also be interesting to explore the reactions to the many tragedies that the team suffered like the death of Dollar Bill, the institutionalization of Mothman and the revelation of Silhouette being gay, her ouster from the team and later her murder. Also add that Darwyn Cooke will be writing this book. Considering his excellent work on The New Frontier, writing about this group of Golden Age heroes should be right up his alley. The Comedian had a long career both as a costumed adventurer and later a mercenary. That right there has a lot of potential and given that Brian Azzarello has a gift for writing books with darker tones and anti-heroes, this miniseries gives me a glimpse of hope.

Honestly, The Minutemen and the Comedian books are the only ones I am somewhat interested in. However, I would be lying if I didn’t have some sort of morbid curiosity to check out the rest of the car wreck; will it just be a scratch, a fender bender, or a crumpled burning heap of metal with zero chance of survivors? Both Jonny Prophet and I predict that the initial first issue sales will be great… then the disappointment will set in (like the New 52?). In the end, though, it will have to be DC comics cleans up whatever debris is left from this project. History tells us that going back to add to an existing comic classic seldom turns out well (i.e. X-Men: Age of Apocalypse 10^th anniversary, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, The Kingdom… perhaps even Superman Returns?). Somehow I doubt this will fare any better. 

Dave Gibbons, the artist of the original Watchmen graphic novel had this to say of the Before Watchmen books: 

"The original series of WATCHMEN is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work."

Let's be serious here. This isn't paying tribute to the work of Gibbons and Moore. This is all about dollar signs. If Dan Didio and DC comics were really interested in paying tribute to the Watchmen, they would respect the wishes of Alan Moore and leave the book as the stand-alone masterpiece that it is. 

In an unrelated bit of news, I can’t wait for Michael Bay’s new film Citizen Kane 2: Rosebud’s Revenge!