The Watchmen is the best graphic novel I’ve ever read. Then again it’s the only one I’ve ever read. About 8 years ago I dated a fanboy with an array of obsessions, including comics, Star Wars, Star Trek, Simpsons, anime, indie music, horror movies, Tolkien, and anything else that has associated action figures or a trace amount of kitsch irony. Eager to indoctrinate me into the world of comics, ex-boyfriend lent me The Watchmen as an introduction to the genre. And I loved it. It was nothing like how I imagined comic books to be. It was sophisticated and eloquent, imaginative and ambitious, suspenseful and engrossing, a science fiction masterpiece. My mind was blown and I was prepared to become a comic book geek who would accompany ex-boyfriend to comic conferences and be a smokin’ hot trophy on his scrawny arm. “Give me more!” I demanded to ex-boyfriend, who fed me about 3 or 4 other graphic novels that were totally not on the same level as The Watchmen. I lost interest in comics and eventually in ex-boyfriend, and The Watchmen sticks in my mind as the only positive impact ex-boyfriend made on my life.
The Watchmen seemed like an unfilmable novel, like Ender’s Game or Finnegan’s Wake. But despite the protests of The Watchmen‘s creator and the fears of many fans, Hollywood was determined to make it into a blockbuster. And The Watchmen is not a bad movie at all, really. The Watchmen sags in some places and nowhere near approaches the genius of the graphic novel, but it’s visual appeal is fully capable of entrancing the viewer for the full 2 hours and 40 minutes.
When any book is made into a movie, fans of the book inevitably moan about the details that are lost — the writer’s style, voice, use of language, pacing, sometimes entire characters and scenes. One would think that a graphic novel would suffer minimal distortion, especially when it adheres to the story line as strictly as The Watchmen does. But the minute details that the graphic novel choose to present in each frame — facial expressions, body positions, blood splatters — are lost when the pictures begin to move. In fact, the most striking scene of the movie is the opening credits, a sequence of frozen images set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing.”
People who never read The Watchmen will be able to keep up if they pay strict attention and manage to filter out all the little gorgeous details — what may have been one fleeting frame in the graphic novel becomes a distracting flashback in the movie. Still, I can’t imagine liking The Watchmen half as much as I did if I never read the graphic novel, because most of the fun was seeing the characters — Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian — come alive on the big screen. Overall, a flawed achievement.
