While Frank Miller and his incessant works about whores are often credited with the birth of the ‘dark age’ of comics, it was writing legend and chaos magician Alan Moore who did the real heavy lifting (whilst Miller was lifting something else). Moore has plenty of feathers in his cap in this regard – all the best parts of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight were lifted more-or-less intact from Moore’s The Killing Joke – but if there’s one work of his which singlehandedly propelled the comics medium into its grimdark ’90s period, and simultaneously raised it into a format that wasn’t just for spotty kids, it is undoubtedly the only comic to feature on TIME’s 100 greatest novels list, Watchmen.
The twelve-part series, drawn by Dave Gibbons and released over 1986 and ’87, turned the costumed hero genre on its head, exploring just what neuroses it is that makes a man dress in spandex tights and go out to bludgeon criminals – if you’ve ever had the concept of deconstruction explained to you, even money it was Watchmen they reached for as an example. To Moore’s intense distaste, Zack Snyder adapted it for film in 2009 – the single biggest point of contention among the fans being the excision of the giant alien squid from the final act.
However, the real issue was that Snyder ran headlong into director François Truffaut’s old maxim that there’s no such thing as a truly anti-war film – that is, any depiction of war on film will end up making it look glorious to some extent. Similarly, Snyder’s iteration of the Watchmen universe, with its slow-motion fight scenes and hard-bodied stars, simply had no room to truly display the kinds of fundamentally damaged characters the work was all about. (Though, given how the fans reacted to Rorschach even on the page, it would be wrong to say Moore completely avoided the same issue.)
This comes down to Moore’s creative process – Watchmen was always intended not simply to deconstruct superheroes, but as a comic deconstructing superheroes. It was tailor-made for still panels and speech bubbles, and as such is bound to lose something if adapted for the screen, no matter how faithful it is to the original.
HBO’s upcoming adaptation seems to be taking this lesson to heart – a recent Instagram post from writer Damon Lindelhof (which is well worth reading in full) asserts that they are taking a markedly different approach to Snyder. Lindelhof writes:
“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.”
“They will however be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with ‘Watchmen.’ The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.”
And while this may sound like a sequel, Lindelhof claims that’s not it either – rather, his approach sounds closer to an updated reboot, citing the original as a work of “the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev”, whereas this adaptation will “resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless”. This does not necessarily mean heavy-handed social commentary – remember, the original was in a different-but-similar world, where America won the Vietnam war and annexed the country, and Dick Nixon was in his fourth term in office.
As this upcoming series has been rejiggered for the present day, one would hope it’s also been rejiggered for its planned medium. Still, one thing’s for sure – Moore, for whom adaptations of his works in general and the rights to Watchmen in particular are still sore spots, will, at best, be ignoring it in contempt.
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