Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

The kids cannot get enough of it... but man I wish they were actually good

I think they’re pretty good! They have some funny stuff—at least the early ones—mixed with some genuine poignancy.

completely fucking wild coincidence that there's a character called Rorschach in it, whose image appears on both the front cover that he approves of and the one that he doesn't. dude never even knew!

― Steppin' RZA (sic), Monday, July 27, 2020 3:35 PM (one month ago)

I called this comic Dr. Manhattan because everyone is talking about people getting sick in New York, duh

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, July 28, 2020 12:42 AM (one month ago)

turns out maybe Rorschach doesn't actually appear in King's Rorschach comic, also loooooololol forever

The interior art is pretty meh and they just made it returnable out of desperation.

This is going to be a big ol' bust.

also loooooololol forever

Since I've spent half my career ripping him off, it's not a shocker that I worship Alan Moore and Watchmen. I wrote Omega Men, which is like almost the direct one-to-one rip off of Watchmen — I mean, I used to joke that "Who Omegas the Omega Men" should have been our title for The Omega Men. I sort of come from the School of Alan Moore. I mean, he's my guy.

At least he’s honest about it

hah, true that

I like King's earlier work better than his recent stuff. But none of it's *anything* like Alan Moore.

To cycle back to the thread topic—a guy who works in “the biz” told me recently that at a preview screening of Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen movie, Lindelof was sitting in the audience, weeping with joy after the opening “stage-setting” sequence.

I like King's earlier work better than his recent stuff. But none of it's *anything* like Alan Moore.

advertising your authenticity as a writer by claiming you did war crimes for the CIA is totally a School of Alan Moore move

tbf that was by far the best / most inventive part of the movie lol xp

yeah, i really like that intro actually

(ftr, I presented that anecdote without judgment... just thought it spoke to DL’s investment in the material.)

He was good at that. The pre titles sequence of his dawn if the dead was the only good part of the movie.

just thought it spoke to DL’s investment in the material.)

in that he could be insanely moved by separating "the material" from it being ideas and words and lines made on paper by specific authors? sure does :)



turns out maybe Rorschach doesn't actually appear in King's Rorschach comic

also turns out that King will lie to disparage the work & personality of the other character's creator too. another CIA psy-op!

As part of his research for the series, King did a deep dive on Ditko. “You can see Ditko slowly going, there’s no other way, but slowly going mad as he goes forward and forward. But he’s going mad in the most artistically beautiful... It’s like watching Van Gogh. You’re watching a madness poured out on a page where it gets more and more intricate. [...] He eventually trapped himself in his apartment for 30 years, basically left just to get groceries and ignored the outside world except to grumble now and then.”

this is some deep level concern trolling

if you mean King's quote, otm

i mean... everything i know about ditko suggests he was absolutely meshuganah, no?

accounts suggest he went to work at his office every day. his nephews and nieces have written of how genial he was, and how much they enjoyed his company. colleagues and admirers who corresponded with and visited him have reported him being mentally sharp, engaged and polite. (I'd choose to disregard the NYMag editor and book-deal-haver who serially harassed an 88-year-old man as a worthwhile source here.) Ditko's polemic period is marked by artistic refinement - partly as a deliberate communicative strategy, partly due to his facility decreasing with age - not by his drawings becoming "more and more intricate" like Van Gogh.

you know who else goes to work at their office every day, where their family writes about how genial he is and where colleagues and admirers in print an in person report him being mentally sharp, engaged and polite is doonlad turmp

citation needed

do you get Fox?

King's 'deep dive' into Ditko is really pretty shallow and as sic points out, this business about him trapping himself in his apartment for 30 years is anecdotally inaccurate - I know people who met Ditko up at the Marvel offices, even, where he was more than happy to chat (just not 'on the record'). Ditko's very late work is pretty eccentric by the standards of a DC Comics hack, but far from 'insane' when set against the real extremes of right-wing/libertarian thought (apparently Ditko actually enjoyed arguing politics with Gary Groth years after they'd had a falling out working on an anthology project together, and his political comics are largely free of conspiracy theories and paranoid persecution complexes - even with the last comics, you get the sense of a thinking mind, working through ideas on the page, although of course he was (like all of us!) convinced he was right about things). Easy to dismiss Ditko's iron-willed integrity and refusal to play the corporate comics game as a form of madness; easy to dismiss someone who didn't want to be interviewed and lived on his own as a loon or a fool.

it's also easy to dismiss that guy if you've read any of those later comics tbrr

Big Emmy night

This is actually pretty cute

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CFe0sabAyMm/

alan will be loving that

"The first time I read Watchmen I was very young, maybe 13 years old. ...obviously Rorschach was the most charismatic character and everyone's favourite. I grew up in the '80s between Rambo and Bronson movies every week, so for me Rorschach was another hero fighting against crime."

Tom King says that Steve Ditko would hate his Rorschach and probably hate everything about Tom King's life, working as a field agent in the CIA and now writing comic books.

"Instead of it being from an Ayn Rand background, I transitioned it just to sort of respond, and I made him obsessed with Hannah Arendt, who is a different philosopher, Ayn Rand's contemporary, another Jewish immigrant from Germany, but on the left, not on the right, who was obsessed with the concept of citizenship," King explained. "She had been in a concentration camp, and how we as a free society stop another Nazi rising was sort of her obsession of her whole life. Instead of constructing Rorschach from a Randian point of view, if we construct him from an Arendt point of view, how does that change our conception of superheroes, and our conception of vigilantism? If we go from the idea of 'it's obviously bad to kill people without trials' to 'Is it bad to kill Nazis without trials?' it makes a different moral universe and (asks) different moral questions, or at least the same questions but, you know, turning the ball on its side so you can see it from a different angle."

Ayn Rand was Russian btw

I'm really no expert, but it seems like every single detail of that is wrong

This was a huge flop AFAICT.

it seems like every single detail of that is wrong

Tom King does write comic books tbf

The comic Itself is a total snooze

I just watched this and man, a lot of early posts in this thread have aged incredibly poorly

instead of dr. manhattan obliterating Rorschach he just conks him on the head with an oar which causes him to pass out. he does this every time rorschach wakes up.

instead of the monster destroying new york it just rolls over the city like a giant penny and good people can avoid it by ducking into holes in its side

instead of one scene on mars the characters constantly shuttle between the two planets and when asked why they say do you have a better idea?

― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Wednesday, June 21, 2017 11:24 AM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

1/3

also, given what the show is, sic comes off super racist in this thread

as one of the few ppl to assume it would be good, the ending was really a shame

I loved the whole thing

agree

hard disagree, but i think i've been pretty clear about why upthread. perhaps someday after finishing a dozen other more promising series i will regretfully return for the back end of this show simply out of the need to see what i'm apparently missing.

i never thought i'd be so disappointed about and by the critical and commercial dominance of comic book adaptations, but damn if i'm not increasingly uninterested in watching thematic chainmail weight collapsing the wire hanger of superhero pomp.

dunno, I can't recall your previous objections but that assessment is miles off the mark re: this series

scroll ctrl+f if you want context but my main concern was the terrible scripting

i loved the show too!
also i love everyone itt but jfc this thread was a fuckin ~chore~

word. when the ilx hivemind just decides to hate on certain things and people, then its time to step away from the thread

I mean, as the threadstarter I had absolutely no hopes for it. Turns out Lindelof did the right thing in the end, which I didn't expect in the slightest. Happy to have expectations undone.

in yr face NED

:D

What do you mean by “terrible scripting”? The only thing in the show I thought was off was the idea that Veidt would make a video for President Redford.

this is a batch of pertinent quotes all upthread. it's been months since i tried to watch it so i don't have specific lines in mind but I do remember hitting at least three "OH COME ON" moments per episode with the scripting.

Thoughts after two episodes: the casting is great, the acting is fun, the production values are movie level, the score is good, the ideas at play seem generally interesting and worthwhile and the script and plotting are hot garbage. There's also an ugly, oily taste to the childish absorption with ultra-violence; the brutality=serious drama HBO formula is in full effect here. It doesn't much move the story forward in any way but it does seem gratuitous as fuck and clearly designed to make sure viewers understand this ain't no funny book this is GRIM AND GRITTY pilgrim.

Maybe these very serious, very harsh realities are better dealt with in a series that doesn't see a car electromagnetized away by a night owl UFO?

a lot of my immediate antipathy likely comes down to just not being able to cope with lindelof or his schtick. his work at its best seems generally like the brightest ideas we came up with in high school about how a fight with wolverine and the hulk would REALLY go down.

Fumbled through the third episode. Why is this writing so fucking bad? The Ozymandius/Irons and Silk Spectre/Smart scripting is particularly egregious but there’s just so many bad decisions throughout.

so here's the thing: I'm a fan of Hong Chau after seeing her in Driveways so I'm inclined to try one more episode to see what she does in this, at which point I suppose i'm at the tipping point of "you're not coming here for the hunting" and I'm either gonna cope with the shitty dialogue and plotting and just enjoy the acting and the fx or else i guess i've tried my best.

Smart is fun in the role! Irons is fun in the role! Both of them have abysmal scripting! Basically everyone is great in the role! Basically everyone has shitty writing! Tons of stupid shit going on here with little to justify it other than a definite sense of "we gotta get to the point where all our story points are in place so we can have the two hours that fit within the parameters we've very arbitrarily and sloppily laid out."

if the "joke" on the phone with doc manhattan or the "how do you tell the difference between a vigilante and a masked cop" line at a funeral seemed reasonable to you, we're looking for different things in our television.

Some thoughts after episode 4:

- I forgot my biggest issue with Lindelof is trust. He creates a hundred nagging "yeah but" situations that he leaves hanging and then surrounds these with MORE questions built atop the earlier questions. You end up hanging on watching just to see how he cleans up the mess... but it's rare that he actually does! Generally there's a number of unlikely twists and/or a deus ex machina and considering this show has a literal deus ex machina baked in, I just realized that I don't much care about the answers behind the questions behind the questions. Or any of these characters! They're well acted but, after over three hours of screentime, they are all still total ciphers.

- Lesser crime but worth considering: there is no reason for this to be a Watchmen story! It might actually be a lot better without the IP or at least be freer to indulge in the story it wants to tell instead of propping it up with something far distant and disconnected.

- Fourth episode title was “If You Don't Like My Story, Write Your Own”. The other option, of course, is just to find a better story so I'm done with this and off to I Will Destroy You.

('I Will Destroy You' ended up being probably the best television of the year btw)