Watchmen

All i can say is once the movie comes out and the mainstream public see it this site is going to be flooded LOL.

The gates will well and truely be opened.

I re-read it last week and it's still a timeless classic, It's funny reading it and coming onto ATS afterwards and reading the stories about staged alien landings on the 14th of october and NWO etc. etc.

Anyone else re-reading it or looking forward to see how the movie turns out and the endless conspiracy theories spawned afterwards?

reply to post by SR

---

I collected comic books until the late 1970s as a kid. I did not start again until the early 1990s. I missed a lot of those "epic" comics like Watchmen and Dark Knight. I did not understand too much as I had missed Crisis back in 1986, and in many cases was wondering what happened to my beloved Silver Age heroes. I stopped collecting in the late 1990s due to money/budgetary restraints, and have tried to keep up with what they are doing today.
I have asked my library to get a copy of the Watchman graphic novel so I could read it, but so far they have not.

It's going to be a very interesting time for comic books.
Even more so than sin city, it's going to show the unknowing public that there's more to comic books than 'hulk' and 'spidey'.

I'm a 40-year-old comic reader and have been reading on and off since the early/mid 1970s and I've seen mainstream interest in comics come and go over the years.

In some ways I actually resent the attention comic characters or stories get during those blips. I'm not particularly precious about comics as if it's not as if I feel I somehow own them or 'I was here first' and I can sneer at stupid noobs* it's just that often the screen-based following of a comic character doesn't necessarily translate to a print-based following.

I mean, whilst there were a lot of people in my local cinema watching Iron Man, I'm not convinced that they'd have all been comfortable sat down reading a Iron Man comic. I know that sometimes sales do translate reasonably well for short periods of time - Dark Knight Returns for example, and I think the Sin City stuff did well &c - in between, there's still this stereotype of what kind of person is interested in comics and comic book characters.

As for the actual Watchmen film, I think it will be like V for Vendetta where new fans and old will be divided on lines based on which medium they were first exposed to. I've known people use screen grabs of 'V' as avatars but still not 'got around' to reading it in print or even being aware of the historical significance of November the 5th &c.

I think in some respects, it will the new Matrix in terms of 'wow, it really opened my eyes!!!11 Take the red pill!!!1' and people getting all intense about conspiracies and some people will just 'like, totally' understand Manhattan or Rorschach but in the long term, I can't imagine it will mean anything.

I'll be going to see it, but I'm not expecting the film to be good, to be honest.

*something I hate about anything. Often the time someone 'discovers' something is down to an accident of birth. I can hardly hold it against a teenager for not reading something that originally came out in 1986 when it first came out.