New comic site Bleeding Cool launched yesterday, by breaking news of the collaboration between Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, which Millar — whose Kick-Ass is currently being filmed with Nick Cage and Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse in starring roles — initially called "totally wrong" before admitting that the two are planning something for mid-2010:

Dave and I still in very early stages, but would imagine we'll do something for next summer, probably around six issues.

The comic will see something of a return to the mainstream for Gibbons, who has stayed somewhat away from high profile projects since his post-Watchmen Martha Washington series with Frank Miller. Maybe his experience with Zack Snyder got him interested in making more movie dollars. Expect us to give you more details if and when they're released.

Mark Millar And Dave Gibbons To Create New Comic Together [Bleeding Cool]

According to Exhibitor Relations, Watchmen made $25.1 million yesterday, including the $4.6 million from the Thursday night screenings, from 3,611 theaters; 300's first day gross was $28.1 million from 3,103 theaters. The box office tracking site now projects an opening weekend gross for Snyder's latest movie of around $60 million, which is below 300's $70.8 million... as well as, worryingly for Warners, Ice Age 2, the movie to hold the March opening weekend record prior to the swords and Spartans flick. Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke agrees, saying that "[i]t's now certain that $70M, even if Thursday's 1,600 midnight shows are included in the total, is impossible," and quoting an unnamed marketing guru warning that things could get worse:

They will get a lot of initial interest because it's an event movie in March — and then the bottom falls out. Whether Warner Bros can broaden the campaign to sustain interest in Watchmen is what movie analysts will be watching after this Sunday.

While there's no doubting that Watchmen's opening weekend will be huge - at $60 million, it'll still be the third largest March opening ever - it's far below what now look, in hindsight, like unrealistic expectations; even yesterday, after all, we were being told that advance tickets were outselling 300 and that that a $70 million weekend was the target (although /Film pretty much hit the target with their estimate of $63 million in the first weekend). Now, because of such excitement - and because 300 was being set up as the movie to compare this to, Watchmen's big weekend looks somewhat less impressive. But who knows? Maybe word of mouth will boost the movie's Saturday and Sunday.

"Watchmen" Scores $25.1 Mil Friday [Exhibitor Relations]

You can probably read The Watchmen Film Companion, from Titan Books, in an hour... if you don't get distracted by all the incredible art and photos. Pretty much every one of the book's 176 pages contains eye-popping images I haven't seen elsewhere.

Some of them are just brilliant-looking stills from the film, showing quite how nice all the imagery is. But they also include tons of storyboards, concept art, artists' renderings of the characters from the film and portrait photos of the characters. And most of all, tons and tons of easter eggs that you'll never spot in the film the first time around. Like that giant mural welcoming Vietnam as the 51st. state of the USA. Or Adrian Veidt's electric car and African famine relief campaign. I knew director Zack Snyder was detail-obsessed and OCD, but I still discovered extra layers of OCD-ness looking through this book.

Here are some of our favorite images among the hundreds in the book:

OMG, I just found an image of Silk Spectre I standing over Hitler with her boot on his back. It's sort of fetishy and awesome.

The book is a nice blend between a making-of book and a primer on the film for newbies. Writer Peter Aperlo divides the book into seven easy chapters. Three chapters deal with pre-production, production and post-production. Another chapter explains the world of Watchmen, and there's a separate chapter on the characters. Dr. Manhattan gets a chapter of his own as well. Pretty much anyone who reads this book will emerge with a high level of Watchmen geekery.

I thought I was oversaturated with Watchmen movie knowledge, but I still learned a lot from this book.

Aperlo explains how Snyder created his storyboards and art references, not only from the graphic novel but from tons of 1985-era photos. And it delves into the reasons for that title-sequence montage, which is intended to "force the audience to re-imagine the past by viewing it through a Watchmen lens." Also, I didn't realize before that the film production had considered shooting on one of the stock New York streets in Burbank, before building its own chunk of Manhattan in Vancouver. And did you know that one of the guys working on the Dr. Strangelove-inspired NORAD sequences had actually worked on Dr. Strangelove? Me neither.

Also interesting: Snyder explains why he insisted on shooting the movie in script order, rather than wildly out of order the way most movies are shot. And the section on post-production not only talks CG, sound and music, but also the way the film-makers tried to highlight little touches like the changes in Nite Owl II's face when he descends into brutality avenging the murder of Nite Owl I. (A scene that's not in the final cut, sadly.)

For the newbies, there's an actual chart showing the Wachmen timeline from the 1930s to the 1980s, including every little reference in the film. Seriously, it's insane. It compares the real-life history with the film's alternate history and includes relevant superhero stuff. And the book walks you through the history of superheroes in this world, including the earliest origins and the Keene Act. The character profiles include all the minor characters, like Captain Metropolis and the Knot-Tops, as well as everybody who gets even a moment of screen time in the film.

And there are insane quotes, like this one from Snyder: "You have anyone who's been alive in the 20th Century and observed pop culture. That person can also see in Watchmen the culmination of all the pop ideas of the 20th Century finally intersecting at nuclear war and super heroes and fast food and fucking."

A slight digression: Around 1993, I was taking a lot of international relations classes, taught in some cases by actual analysts with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Dept. And the thing my fellow students and I kept asking was, "Was everybody out of their mind?" Recounting the whole crazy history of the Cold War, all the misjudgments and myths that were accepted as facts, it seemed like everyone had been living in a dream. And this was only a handful of years after the Berlin Wall fell. I'd even visited the USSR, in 1991.

And yet, the Cold War might as well have been the middle ages - it was incomprehensible that we'd been that close to destroying ourselves, for so long, over faulty intel, clashing ideologies and heaps of paranoia.

I bring this up because that feeling of alienation from the Cold War, that I and my fellow students felt in 1993, came back to me strongly while watching Watchmen. And I think the movie evokes that feeling semi-consciously, even as it sabotages any possibility of compelling story-telling.

As almost anyone reading this knows, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons published Watchmen back in 1985, and it revolutionized superhero comics forever. I re-read a chunk of my copy the other night, and had to force myself to stop reading and get to sleep. Even 24 years later, the graphic novel sizzles with narrative energy, and the characters crawl into your head and poke the inside of your skull.

In the movie, as in the comic, it's an alternate version of 1985, where superheroes are real. As a result, the U.S. won the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon won reelection - several times. He's in his fifth term in 1985, and meanwhile masked vigilantes have been outlawed. Now, as the world creeps closer to the spectre of nuclear war, someone is getting costumed heroes out of the way - starting with the biggest bastard of them all, the Comedian. The second biggest bastard, Rorschach, is determined to investigate, but the trail leads him to a mind-bogglingly huge conspiracy.

The movie version of Watchmen has a Herculean task: It has to sell us on this alternate history of the United States. It has to introduce us to these deeply flawed superhero characters - with their flaws highlighted - and yet somehow make us care about them. And it has to do something the graphic novel did not: put us in the mid-1980s "mutually assured destruction" mindset. You can see the film laboring valiantly to do all of these things, but especially the last. There are many, many conversations about nuclear destruction in this movie, especially towards the end.

And yet, the movie seems to suggest that maybe we shouldn't care about the possibility of nuclear holocaust after all. We hear this viewpoint a lot from the Dr. Manhattan, the detached scientist-turned-blue-god, but all of the movie's characters express a form of nihilism one way or another. Humans, we're told, are venal and self-destructive, and utterly doomed. Our existence (as the Comedian puts it) is a joke, and we're all crazy.

That's the weird thing about Watchmen, the film. After a couple of decades since the Berlin Wall, and years of superhero movies, a guy wearing an inkblot mask to beat up criminals seems more sane than Mutually Assured Destruction. We understand superheroes and costumed asskickers, but we no longer understand Henry Kissinger. The film struggles with this - and winds up showing how both superhero violence and Robert McNamara-style brinksmanship are insane and pointlessly destructive. They're both expressions of the same ego-driven narcissistic world-saving project.

And maybe that's why the film feels so empty, even as it serves up amazing visuals and trippy ideas. A lot of the film is stunning to look at, and the many of the most audacious ideas from Moore's writing are there, front and center, without any dilution. Dr. Manhattan's crazy physics talk, the Comedian's brutality and jolly misogyny, Rorschach's ravings... it's all in there. And I kept being startled, over and over again, by how much of this stuff is still just as batshit 24 years later, and how amazing it is that Snyder put it into a movie.

Seriously, just try to imagine a movie featuring half as many insane ideas and clever touches as this film packs in, a movie with a physicist who becomes blue, bald, naked and aware of the unity of past, present and future. A movie where sociopaths carry a lot of the narrative. A movie where Nixon and Kissinger are like a Greek chorus to the crazy action. I knew all this stuff was in the movie, but I still kept getting amazed when I saw it. And a lot of it works amazingly well, in large part thanks to Snyder's vivid eye.

And yet... instead of feeling immediate and in-your-face, all of this brilliant stuff feels like it's happening a million miles away, to people you heard of a long time ago. It really is true that Watchmen feels stiff, and dead, especially after the brash first half hour or so.

Sadly, most of the performances in the film left me cold - with two notable exceptions. Whenever Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) or Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) are on screen, the movie wakes up and suddenly becomes ferociously watchable. The rest of the time, it flatlines. Malin Akerman, in particular, is mannequin-esque as Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre II, and fails to sell her character's crucial arc in coming to terms with her parents. But Matthew Goode is also dull as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, and Patrick Wilson seems too a little too aw-shucks as Nite Owl.

I know Zack Snyder is capable of making me care about a narrative, because I was totally pulled in to his previous film, 300, despite my misgivings. I ended up totally rooting for Leonidas and cheering for his rampage. So the absence of emotional engagement, here, feels almost like a deliberate choice on his part.

Snyder, meanwhile, is obsessed with creating beautiful tableaux... and then lingering on them. Almost every shot of the movie is a still life, with the camera either stationary or panning slowly. Either because Snyder has succeeded in duplicating a panel from the comic, or because he's managed to create a lovely set of images on his own, he wants to show off each moment. (This is what DVDs and pause buttons are for, honestly.) The movie's many fight sequences, meanwhile, feel a bit endless and borrow a lot from the first Matrix stylistically. The comic-panel-on-screen motif that worked so well in Sin City is in full effect, and it's absolutely gorgeous but feels leaden this time around.

(I think this movie will be fantastic if you watch it on DVD with the sound muted, and put on some classic rock. Actually, that's another problem with the film — it sounds like a minor complaint, but the soundtrack is a little too heavily weighted to 60s folk-rock. I know the graphic novel quotes Bob Dylan a couple times, but it also quotes Elvis Costello, who would have been a welcome presence.)

But it's really in the last 45 minutes that the film uninvites the audience to care. Around the time that Rorschach triumphs over his great challenge in the film, and Dr. Manhattan is trying to decide whether to abandon the human race to its fate - I'm being deliberately a bit vague - the film descends into talkiness. I'm not one of those people who holds the graphic novel sacred, but when the movie cuts out Moore's crowning absurdity from the comic, there's nothing to take its place but jargon and blather. The movie's final act is all about abstractions. Much like Cold War statesmanship, actually.

Snyder has insisted that even though his Watchmen movie is about an alternate 1985, it's commenting, subtly, on what's happening in the world today. And thinking about it, I think I can see what he means. Once you realize that the Cold War and the domino theory and all that other stuff was just a mass hallucination, you start to question our current paranoias, like the War on Terror.

I'm going to be pondering this movie for years, and trying to figure out how a film can be so visually compelling, so conceptually ambitious, and so true to one of the greatest pieces of art of our lifetimes... and yet, feel so deathly dull.

For now, though, I suspect it's really one of those instances where style and substance collide. Snyder has made the ultimate nihilistic movie, in which you stare into nothingness... and feel nothing. It's a movie everyone should see - including people who haven't read the graphic novel - but I'm not sure you'll actually enjoy it.

Writes the New Yorker's Anthony Lane:

The bad news about "Watchmen" is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don't have to stay past the opening credit sequence-easily the highlight of the film.

If you think that's harsh, look at New York Magazine's take:

Alan Moore refused (in advance) to put his name on the movie, which must have hurt Snyder and company terribly; they've made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Newsweek's Devin Gordon goes even further, hinting that the fanboys who now praise Watchmen may eventually come to view it as another Phantom Menace.

Says EW's Owen Gleiberman:

Watchmen isn't boring, but as a fragmented sci-fi doomsday noir, it remains as detached from the viewer as it is from the zeitgeist.

And perhaps harshest of all, AP's Christy Lemire taunts the fanboys who may love this movie:

Hey, fanboys. Yeah, you guys, the ones who flooded my inbox with e-mails after I trashed Zack Snyder's "300," wishing birth defects on my unborn children and suggesting that perhaps my husband isn't - ahem - keeping me satisfied.

Yes, I've read "Watchmen." I understand why it matters culturally, why it's considered revolutionary in its exploration of flawed superheroes, why it moved you. It moved me, too. And still - or, rather, because of that - I found director Snyder's adaptation hugely disappointing, faithful as it is to the graphic novel.

And meanwhile, the movie blogs and nerd outlets are ecstatic over the same film that's causing so much pain to New York Magazine.

Says Ain't It Cool News:

I WATCHED THE FUCKING WATCHMEN AND FUCKING LOVED IT! It isn't the perfect 5 hour wet dream that I always dreamt of, but I love it. I can't wait to see the dialogue you all have with this film, with each other and with us here at AICN. This was fucking awesome!

Says CHUD:

If nothing else, Zack Snyder's Watchmen demands praise as an awe-inspiring achievement... It's a remarkable film, and an uncompromising one. It's the sort of movie that major studios are simply not supposed to be making now that the 1970s are over... A glorious, epic, exciting, mind blowing piece of art.

According to Cinemablend:

As a movie Watchmen is every bit as risky, edgy, and aspiring as it ought to be. As a bonus it's also really, really good.

UGO:

On many levels, Watchmen is a masterpiece. Visually striking from its first to last frame, Snyder's adaptation, in my opinion, even surpasses the source material.

(Although the review goes on to point out a lot of problems in the film, but then winds up saying it's basically great.)

The blog response isn't unanimous. JoBlo gives the movie a lukewarm review, for example. (My own Watchmen review will be up tomorrow, when I've had time to ponder it. Suffice to say, for now, both the New Yorker and Ain't It Cool News are right.)

We don't want to spoil the movie for those of you who haven't read the book, but there may be somethings that you need - or want - to know before you head to the theaters on Friday (or Thursday night, if you're very excited). So here are nine questions that you just might want some answers to, just in case. Click through to learn more.

What Is Watchmen?
Who Are The Watchmen?
Why Is Watchmen So Important?
Why Was Watchmen Supposed To Be Unfilmable?
Where Does It Take Place?
Who's The Giant Blue Guy?
What's With Characters With "II" After Their Names, Like Nite Owl II And Silk Spectre II?
What Is Tales of The Black Freighter, Anyway?
What's This About A Squid? (Spoilers, No, Seriously.)

The one question we're not answering yet? Whether we think you should go and see the movie... You'll have to wait for our review, coming early next week, for that one.

Still here? Okay.

As anyone who's paid attention to our coverage of Watchmen undoubtedly knows by now, the end of the Watchmen movie does not include the giant alien squid destroying Manhattan that the book climaxes with. Admittedly, when you put it like that - "the giant alien squid destroying Manhattan" - it sounds ridiculous, like a bad monster movie or something, but that's kind of the point, both inside and outside of the story.

It's the ridiculous, surreality of an alien squid that is required to shock the various superpowers out of their Cold War mindset in Ozymandias' plan; something so literally beyond the realms of possibility that its very appearance makes everything else seem equally absurd and forces political powers to reassess their priorities and put aside prejudices to deal with this new perceived threat. The squid doesn't just provide the climax to the story, it also provides the start; it was the Comedian seeing experiments that led to the squid's creation that led to his murder.

From a meta context, the squid provides a reference to the monster comics that pre-dated the Silver Age where superhero comics became the dominant force in the marketplace (What better to provide an end to superheroics in the Watchmen world? The narrative almost reads as a backwards comment on the maturation of the medium, opening with a brutal, realistic murder and then ending with a cartoonish monster apocalypse) while also exploding both the world that Moore and Gibbons had created and the rules that they had imposed on it with something so unrealistic - and, yes, unfilmable - that it could only work in comics, where imagination and conviction are all that's needed to make an idea work. By bringing in the idea of an alien giant squid - Interestingly enough, just like Starro The Conqueror, the first villain fought by the Justice League of America, DC Comics' premiere superhero team and the direct inspiration behind the creation of the Fantastic Four, which in turn led to the creation of Marvel Comics as we know it today - to a story that, Dr. Manhattan aside, had remained mostly grounded, the possibility and idea-driven nature of comics is restated, as is (in a strange way) the need for superheroes to battle such outlandish threats. The story comes full-circle, and the critique of superheroes closes with a return to imagination and the impossible, albeit one done in a downbeat tone consistent with the rest of the book.

Meredith is right; the loss of the squid, and the destruction that it brought with it, is a loss to the movie. Perhaps what replaces it fills a plot hole, but it's unlikely that it will hold as much meaning as what was removed.

Manhattan - formerly Jon Osterman - is the only member of the Watchmen cast with superpowers; all of the others are, in their ways, mostly regular people in ridiculous outfits who fight crime with the help of technology and training... Batman, to all intents and purposes. Nite Owl is the most direct Batman-analog (complete with Batmobile-analog, the Owlship... although you can blame that one on Nite Owl's more direct inspiration the Blue Beetle), but both Rorschach and Ozymandias split well-known Batman traits between them (Rorschach gets the detective skills and obsessiveness, while Ozymandias is given the intelligence and faultless strategic-planning, as well as an element of the Bruce Wayne lifestyle); in comparison, Silk Spectre and the Comedian are more generic character types (Spectre in particular; Watchmen is a curiously male story) that owe less to superhero history and more to general popular culture archetypes.

That Manhattan becomes more than human is an important part of Watchmen; in plot terms, it alters the balance of power politically, allowing for America to become the particular dystopia that it is by the time the story takes place, but it also allowed Moore and Gibbons to step outside of the story to an extent and explore less immediate themes and more inventive storytelling techniques through the character's eyes. Manhattan's inhuman perspective also acts as an important counterpoint to the all-too-human failings of the other characters which drive the story. In many ways (and, perhaps ironically considering the emotional detachment of the character), Manhattan is the heart of Watchmen.

The problem is that Watchmen, more than most comics, rejoices in its medium; there are narrative techniques used throughout that could only be achieved in comics, and that was one of the points of the comic when it was being created. For that reason alone, Alan Moore told (onetime possible director) Terry Gilliam that Watchmen was unfilmable.

Much of that may be Moore's distaste for cinema seeping through, however (The writer likened mainstream movies to being forcefed regurgitated worms in a recent interview: "The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change"); while the Watchmen movie won't be able to recreate all of the book's trickery and content, co-creator Dave Gibbons has been promoting the movie and outspoken in his support for what director Zack Snyder has done with it. Given that reviews have ranged from the insane fanboy excitement to the comedic fanboy disappointment, whether or not it really is unfilmable or not may be left up to your own judgment.

Black Freighter's pirate setting comes from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' reasoning that superheroes - the dominant mainstream comic genre in the real world - wouldn't necessarily enjoy the same commercial success in a world where people with superpowers actually existed (Please, someone tell the writers of Heroes that), and that other genres would take its place. The melodrama and grime of pirates were thought by Moore to provide a suitable counterpoint to the main story, and so poor Richard Reynolds finds himself set adrift in the sea and forced to do terrible things to survive.

While Black Freighter is in no way necessary to understand the core story of Watchmen, the fan upset over the news that it won't be included in the cinema release of the movie - it will, apparently, be included in one of the future DVD/Blu-Ray releases, and is getting released as an animated DVD in its own right at the end of this month - illustrates how central many feel it is to the overall experience of the book, adding in metatextual commentary on the main plot, as well as just being an enjoyably chilling story in its own right.

Joss Whedon has said that Watchmen is "proof of everything a comic could do, but also an affirmation of everything comics had done," which is a good way to explain, in one line, one portion of the significance of the book within the medium. Moore and Gibbons' deliberate intention to produce something "designed to show off [comic book techniques] things that other media can't [duplicate]" resulted in a book that is almost technically perfect as an exploration of a medium, despite what you may feel about the actual plot (In fact, Gibbons has since admitted that the plot "just really isn't the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, [the way we told the story is] where the real creativity came in"). In terms of ambition, world-building and technical excellence, no superhero series before or since has come close to matching what Watchmen has accomplished.

In tandem with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen also (accidentally) redefined the notion of how dark a superhero story should go, leading to a spate of increasingly dour, quasi-deconstructionist approaches to the genre over the decade or so after its release; even recently, comics like Mark Millar's Ultimates and J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power have born an unmistakable influence from the series, ignoring Moore's own attempts to lighten the genre with books like Top 10 and Supreme. Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen has said that he feels that Watchmen is such a landmark in terms of its impact and influence that comic eras should simply be "Before Watchmen" and "After Watchmen." Surprisingly, such hyperbole may be well-earned.

Essentially, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is a distillation of one of the main themes of Watchmen; namely, who will protect us from our protectors. Plato's response is that the protectors must police themselves, and should be taught that they are better than us so that the protect us out of a sense of obligation and duty. Moore and Gibbons' story not only shows us the heroes policing themselves through Rorschach's investigations (and ultimate discovery), but also at least two heroes who believe that they are better than us (Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias).

In the movie, "Watchmen" becomes the name of the superhero team, because Latin-based allusions don't always fare well with mainstream audiences. Insert your own joke about Hollywood patronizing its audience here.

Longer version: Originally the result of Moore looking to revitalize characters purchased from the defunct publisher Carlton Comics for DC Comics - characters who later found their way into the regular DC Universe such as the Question, Captain Atom and Peacemaker - in a similar way to which he had approached Swamp Thing and Marvelman/Miracleman (both of which he has won industry awards for), Watchmen grew in terms of scope and ambition as Moore and Gibbons worked on the series, eventually becoming a series that would redefine the superhero genre forever... much to the creators' upset. Aiming to create, in Moore's words, the superhero version of Moby Dick, the two veterans of British SF comic 2000AD set out to make a book that required multiple re-readings and tried to redefine the technical boundaries of the comic medium; the series is structurally complex in ways that are still groundbreaking, from the metatextual comic-within-the-comic Tales From The Black Freighter to the complex use of visual metaphors throughout the book (most obviously in the fifth chapter's visual symmetry).

Sadly, neither the technical brilliance nor the ambition of the creators became the lesson learned from Watchmen's success; instead, the book - and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, also published by DC in 1986 - ushered in a spate of "grim and gritty" superhero stories that aped the story's tone without understanding the intelligence, or humanity, that lay underneath. Moore has since decried Watchmen's influence within the genre:

The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine.

Nonetheless, the book was a critical and commercial success unlike any other. A multiple award-winner within the comic industry, the book has also been recognized in the mainstream; Time Magazine called it one of the best 100 English-language novels written since 1923 and Entertainment Weekly said it was "the greatest superhero story ever told" and one of the best 50 novels of the last 25 years. The collected edition has remained a top seller since it was released (outselling every other graphic novel released last year, for example), and it will likely always be one of - if not the comic that other superhero comics will be compared with in terms of content, technique, and critical and commercial success.

Don't get me wrong; I don't actually want the movie to fail, and actually expect it not to, at least in the short term. If nothing else, the ridiculous success of The Dark Knight has definitively proven that a mainstream audience exists for what, for want of a better term, could be called "Arthouse Superhero" movies (Something that had been hinted at before; I tend to think of Tim Burton's Batman Returns and Sam Raimi's last two Spider-Man movies - in particular Spider-Man 3, with its jazz interludes and weird uneven tone - as earlier examples of superhero auteurism), and Watchmen's intense, endless marketing campaign is definitely aiming for that level of gravity, with mentions of a "visionary director" adapting "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time." What I'm worried about, though, is what the marketing isn't saying, and what effect that could have on the Arthouse Superhero genre moving forward.

From what we've seen of Watchmen so far - and I write this as someone who hasn't seen the movie, although I've talked to people who have - we know that they're trying to be faithful to the look of the book, at least; the trailers show glossy CGI-massaged scenes that we recognize from Dave Gibbons' original drawings, and many comparisons have been made between movie stills and comic panels. It seems, at times, that this is the drive of the entire marketing for the movie: Look how much it resembles the comic! Look at how much detail we have copied over, even down to the dedication on the Comedian's gun! The trailers, in fact, are much less about the story of the film than a collection of fan-familiar images meant to make the faithful fans get excited with recognition and warm with the glow of nostalgia. But the problem with that is, in many ways, the visuals are the least important thing about Watchmen the book.

For all of the claims that Watchmen the book was unfilmable, very few of them centered around the kind of special effects needed to make us believe a man could explode and then re-create himself as a glowing blue naked go (In fact, shitty special effects may even have been more in tune with the arch-knowingness of the original book that both acknowledged and transcended its pulpy, ridiculous roots). No, what would make Watchmen unfilmable - and what the trailers and the arcade game-style web extras and the released scenes with too much slow-mo and the black and white portraits od actors and everything we've seen from the film so far have failed to show us is in evidence in the movie - is the deftness of Alan Moore's writing, which manages to balance a formal exploration of the comic medium with a complex, flawed humanity that looks "behind the hood" of the characters to make them into real people who would look ridiculous in those outfits... and not as Batman Begins-esque as the movie's Nite Owl. Of these two things, one is literally impossible to translate to another medium, and the other would seem to be nearly impossible to fit within a three-hour movie, no matter what you may feel about Zack Snyder's talents as a director.

I can't help but feel that it's this potential misdirection - that the truly important elements of Watchmen the book have been ignored or lost, and instead we're seeing the movie being sold on how much it looks like the comic - that will be the downfall of the movie, ultimately. It strikes me as foolish to try and promote the movie to fans on how faithful it is visually, when the heart of the book will be missing, and to non-fans, the mainstream audience that made Dark Knight such a massive hit, the faithfulness will have no meaning without the original context; all they're seeing are a bunch of colorful characters and explosions and being told it's a big deal.

It's that mainstream audience that all of the hype should have been geared towards; the very idea of a Watchmen movie would be enough to anger and excite the hardcore fanbase in and of itself, and while all of the promotional pandering has been welcomed, it won't change the final outcome, which is that Watchmen the movie will almost definitely disappoint them. That's not a comment on the quality of the final movie, but on the expectations those fans have for it; after almost a year of hype and previewed footage and interviews and seeing the Owlship at San Diego Comic-Con, there is almost no way in the world that any movie can live up to the one that they've created in their minds (A movie that will, undoubtedly, include the squid at the end). You can almost taste the backlash now. Better to have spent the time, and the money, selling everyone else on the movie, and hope that they understand and embrace whatever it turns out to be.

And what happens if it DOES fail? In one sense, very little; more mainstream superhero movies like Thor and Avengers will most likely be unaffected in terms of box office, although they may find more snark thrown their way by critics stung by wanting to fall for Watchmen more than they actually did, perhaps. I think that, if audiences don't love the movie to Dark Knight levels, then that won't affect their desire to see Robert Downey Jr. wisecrack his way through another 90 minutes while wearing armor; they may not even see any real connection between the two movies. But what I'm worried about is what it'll mean for movies that aren't summer blockbusters based on well-known comic book franchises. Will The Dark Knight start to be looked at, not as a sign of things to come, but a fluke that shows that audiences only really want to watch self-important superheroes when they grew up with them? Will movie producers shy away from projects that aim for epic grandeur and high budgets, because Watchmen suggests that that kind of thing scares people away? Will Billy Crudup's career survive?

Okay, maybe I don't really care about that last one so much. Sorry, Billy.

There's a lot resting on the success of Watchmen, I think; not just Fox's ability to point at Warners and laugh and say that they were right in the first place to pass on the project (and then, you know, sue just in case), but in a strange sense, it's managed - through force of marketing as much as anything - to become the First Post-Dark Knight-Era Important Superhero Movie. If it succeeds, then the door may be open to more and more ambitious science fiction movies (whether based on comics or not). But if it fails, then maybe we'll end up with a movie industry that thinks that Transformers and X-Men Origins: Wolverine is all that genre movies should aspire to... And that's a much greater tragedy than losing a giant alien squid for your climax.

The talented Mr. GIbbons took us aside and told the world that whether they're ready or not, they're going to get big blue dong. Kind of. In reality, he explained, it's a just a "mental construction" of a man so the penis if not really a penis. So meta.

But what about a possible Martha Washington movie? To that, Gibbons replied that he thinks it would make a great movie, but he would have to talk to Miller some more about directing the picture. As he should because, well, The Spirit was awful.

Doing promotional interviews for next year's Watchmen movie, Gibbons hinted that there may be a movie in the offing for his co-creation with Miller, Martha Washington:

Frank's enjoying a certain amount of success in Hollywood and I wouldn't be surprised if something happens with that. I think that would make a great movie. People misunderstand Frank, they think he's very grim and right-wing, but he's got his tongue very firmly in his cheek. Martha Washington is a war story but it's quite satirical and I think has a strange resonance with what's happening in the world today.

If there is any way that we can make this happen - and bring the series' oddball collection of characters, like "the Aryan Thrust," an all-gay neo-Nazi terrorist organization, to a wider audience - then we must do it. I'm not saying that it may break Miller's strange cache in Hollywood (I think The Spirit's box office and reviews are likely to do that, to be honest), but the very idea of Give Me Liberty managing to make it to the big screen unscathed is so unlikely that I think it's almost our duty to try and make it happen.

Dave Gibbons [Digital Spy]

It's rare to get such a close look inside the creative process behind any work as Gibbons grants us here. And oftentimes, when you do get to see all the rough drafts, outtakes and stoned bull sessions, the work ends up cheapened a bit. You realize quite how much of it was luck, or good editing, or cherry-picking. (I'm looking at you, Complete Poems Of Sylvia Plath.) But the unused art in Watching The Watchmen, just out from Titan Books, is just as compelling as the stuff that made it in in the end.

And it's especially great to get a glimpse inside the tangled briar patch that is the mind of Alan Moore. The book includes a bit of his memo to Gibbons about what the world would be like, from a geopolitical perspective, if Captain Atom and other superheroes were real. There's also a piece of paper that both Gibbons and Moore doodled on, during a Sunday morning chat about the project. One side of the paper is Gibbons' super primitive designs for the Watchmen characters, and the other side is Moore's own loopy ideas. You can just imagine being inside that cloud of invention, on the sofa next to them. Somehow, I'd always imagined Watchmen being the typical project where Moore sent script pages and notes to Gibbons, but it seems like they worked more closely together than that.

Gibbons also reveals which Watchmen easter eggs he came up with, like the repeated references to the Gordian Knot, which provide a bit of a hint as to how Ozymandias plans to "solve" the problem of the Cold War nuclear standoff. (By cutting the Gordian Knot, essentially.)

Even more amazingly, Gibbons includes pages and pages of unfinished sketches and layouts, and shows how some pages changed, and then changed back, from his original layouts. Check out these panels, in an early and then finished form:

And finally, the book goes into the project's afterlife, and Gibbons talks about the early response to the book, including a jealous piece of shopping-bag fanmail from Marvel Comics' Archie Goodwin. In those days, comics were still a fairly disposable medium, and usually weren't even collected into trade paperbacks, so Gibbons talks about the realization that the comic was going to become something more lasting. But he also tells about mailing off the pages for the last issue, and feeling elated — until he went into his favorite comic store and told the owner the good news. The owner replied, "That's great. What are you working on next?"

These images come from Watching The Watchmen, Gibbons' new book about the genesis of his most famous comics work. Co-written with comics historian Chip Kidd and Mike Essl, the book includes other unreleased concept art and designs.

The Comedian, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach:

More dynamic early sketches of Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan:

There's more art, and more details about the book, at the link. [Times Online]

Snyder said he had a meeting with the studio early on, where they shared their early "Hollywood" vision for the Watchmen movie. It would have been an updated George Bush-era film, where the Minutemen team had been hunting down terrorists. But Snyder's love for Nixon's Watchmen involvement brought him back to the table, asking Warner Brothers to trust him that 1985 is the right way to start the movie, and "maybe we should just leave it the way it is."

But before we got to hear more about the studio's attempted revamps, we saw some footage from the movie:

While it's hard to judge an unfinished movie from just a few minutes, the main things I was stuck with upon leaving were the colors and the look to each character. Even when covered in blood (or someone's innards) the characters sets and scenes were all still striking and iconic-looking.

The movie starts with a McLaughlin Group-type talk show on TV. There is a discussion about whether or not Dr. Manhattan's presence is escalating the strain on foreign policy. The Comedian (old and warn) switches the television to a show where "Unforgettable" begins to play. Just as he's about to relax the door is thrown open and The Comedian is in his deadly fight with the "bad guy." The fight scenes are just as painstakingly crafted as the sets in Watchmen. With each blow (all to the tune of "Unforgettable"), you greeted to a slow-mo pan out shot that honestly makes the whole thing much more enjoyable. Yet if this continues to happen throughout the entirety of the film I can see it getting tedious.

The fight continues, and you all know how it ends — bloody. Zack's Watchmen is blooooody, but wonderfully so. With each drop of red this movie is setting itself apart from the one-liner superhero movies of yesterday and reminding us that these heroes can and will die. Even bits from the trailer of exploding soldiers in the Vietnam war that appeared to be shiny bursts (above) were replaced with dark blood from Dr. Manhattan's victims. The same goes for the fight scene in the prison which we touched on earlier.

Cut to the opening credits playing the way too obvious and too long "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan. But besides the extra-long song the viewer is treated to a montage pictures and video showing the creation of the Minutemen superhero team. If you need a historical point of reference, Watchmen's opening credits has 1,000 of them. Ranging from Silhouette replacing the sailor in the infamous nurse-kissing V-Day black and white still, to Ozymandias standing outside of Studio 54.

Finally we got to see the creation of Dr. Manhattan and listen to the inner monologue of the "god" himself. Watching him turn from Dr. Jonathan Osterman to blue beast was amazing. The detail that they went into ripping out each little organ was shocking. The appearing-reappearing floating circulatory system that floats about days later is forever burned in my eyes. I really see why this character is Snyder's favorite.

Overall there was a lot of stuff that was a little "I get it — the Watchmen are a part of history". But besides that and a few scoring changes it was gorgeous, the characters were so lovely that even their teeth were sparkling in the Snyder film. Dr. Manhattan's back story alone (just the simple day-to-day life of a 1950s) man was strikingly detail oriented. So I'm excited to see what Snyder is going to do with the real meat of the movie. Which he addresses in the Q&A with reporters:

Q: Can you assure us that the ending won't puss out?

ZS: The ending does not puss out. I will assure you of that. In that meeting, in that same war on terror meeting. There was a different ending.The moral checkmate that is the end of the movie, to me that's the movie. That's the point of the graphic novel. I'm not going to spoil it, but the "bad guy" who's not really the bad guy but lets call him the bad guy because it's easier to say it that way. The bad guy has an evil plan and you might call it that, he does something really horrific. But at the end, the question of whether or not this was the right thing to do and the way all of the characters have to react to that is really sort of beautifully constructed so that the question that it poses is really the crux of the movie. I can assure you that in that first movie, that was not the why of the movie. The why was to run around and fight in rubber suits and beat the shit out of each other, which has also got merit, I will not say it doesn't but that's not why I make a movie.

Q: Where does Watchmen fit in the comic book movies with Iron Man etc.?

ZS: I think that question is related to the graphic novel. It's where the graphic novel lives in the graphic book world. Its place, in my opinion anyway, in the comic book world... Here's the thing also: Iron Man, Batman, those two movies in particular, they're not based on graphic novels per say. Those characters get to go on adventures based on a director or a writer coming up with one for them to go on. And there are political and or creative reasons why they did something that are completely valid and awesome, but they don't serve any piece of literature like Watchmen does. I have an obligation to that material and I think that material, the last thing it wants to do is send its characters out on an adventure in the classic Hollywood sense. It's completely deconstructed in what we've been trained to think a superhero is.

DG: I think another example as to why this is being made now is it kind of stands in relation to the other superhero movies that the comic book did to the superhero comics at the time. In other words the average movie-goer understands superheroes. They know about secret identities and alcaves and nuclear powered heroes. They come in and see it and immediately know what it's about. And just like I like to think that the readers of comics in the 1980s were, they will be finding questions being asked that they weren't thinking of before. Like basically if there was a Dr. Manhattan what would the world be like? If there really were superheroes, what would they be like?

ZS: It's come full circle. My mother knows the origins stories to superheroes she has no business knowing. She's just been to the movies a lot. The average movie goer has the back story.

Q: Some people have been nervous that the movie would be simply panel by panel but I see now that may not be the case?

ZS: The book has a luxurious pace that is awesome. But I knew that I had to get some information out at the beginning of the movie. There were things that I had to do that were different. So there are going to be differences in the basic structuring. But there are things that I like, that I wanted to keep. Like in the title sequence I remember reading about Dollar Bill getting his cape stuck in a revolving door, and thinking, "gosh I want to see that." The Incredibles made a whole movie out of it and I thought it was worth a shot, you know. Those were the things that I was inspired by that were in the supplemental material that maybe there wasn't a frame for and I wanted to try and work it in. Just like Wally Weaver plays a couple different parts, he takes a lot of the weight of the scientific community. But that line he takes Milton Glass' part as well. He says "I never said that Superman was real and he's American, I said God was real and he's American," I always thought that was a really cool line. I wanted that to be on the poster, but they weren't into that by the way [Laughs].

DG: Stragely enough if they had stuck to everything I drew I would be very disappointed because I think it's important that it stands as a good movie. And a good movie isn't just a literal translation of every single comic book panel. I really loved the things like with Wally Weaver where things have been amalgamated that had been made much better for the film.

Q: What was the hardest stuff to get into the movie?

ZS: The hardest stuff to get into the movie was the stuff I liked the best. I remembered when we started talking about the movie and if you're familiar with the book, the Comedian's funeral and Manhattan on Mars, and some of the Rorschach flashbacks — those three are the corner stones of the beginning, middle and end of the movie... But those three sequences and the Comedian's funeral in particular were difficult. Everyone is internalizing, it's raining and they're thinking about how the Comedian affected their lives and they're flashing to that moment. It's very particular, although those are kind of the whys as to why I did this movie. Whenever I was debating on doing this movie I would think about the Comedian's funeral, on Mars and Rorschach and I gotta do it. Those things for me is as cool as it gets. As far as things I couldn't get in, the whole detective story — those two detectives that are trying to figuring out why these people are killing each other — those are the things we had to leave out. Although you do see them in the movie, just not their whole story.

Q: What's the status on the Black Freighter?

ZS: In Watchmen there is a parallel pirate story that kind of parallels the Watchmen story. We are creating it as an animated film and it is our hope that on the DVD that we can put those sequences into the DVD so they are woven right into the the actual story line of the movie, in the theatrical release that won't be the case. But we're going to release a DVD at the time of the theatrical release there is going to be a DVD that has a mock documentary on it called "Under The Hood" that is a TV show from '85 where this guy looks back to '72 (I believe) which is the year that [superhero autobiography] Under the Hood was published, and that reporter had done a news story about the publishing of the book and is now doing a retrospective on what had happened to all the characters. So it includes a lot of stuff form the body of the book. It will also include the animated short on it. The one movie will be the Ultimate Black Freighter Watchmen movie which will be 3 hours and something, 25 minutes. Who can say?

Q: Zack you've done Frank Miller and Alan Moore — is there a Neil Gaiman movie in your future?

ZS: It's pretty funny. I didn't mean it I really didn't. It's a coincidence, but he's good.

(I couldn't find that still, but this interior of The Comedian's home has pin-up of Sally Jupiter on the wall)

Q: What did you put in this movie for the fans?

ZS: You know it's more an Easter Eggy thing than it is a filming technique that if you play the movie backwards [you see something.] "I'm good, but I'm not that good." But there's tons of that stuff. Even in the shot where the Comedian punches his hand through the wall. If you look at that shot on his bedside table, even though it's only a second long, there is a picture of Laurie torn out of a magazine where Manhattan is torn out of it, and it's put into a frame. And if you know the story that makes sense. It's literally like 12 frames long. There's a lot of that.

Q: What was the budget of the film?

ZS: I can't say the number because there's lots of laws apparently. But I will say, there wasn't anything that we wanted to film that we didn't shoot.

Q: Speaking of Easter Eggs was that a 3001 on the Comedian's door [from the footage]?

ZS: Yeah, there are subtler ones than that [Laughs].

There is a rabid and vocal fan base for the graphic novel that support the graphic novel and may be against the motion picture or the changes you'd make to support the motion picture. And I always say look, No Country For Old Men I guarantee you is changed twice as much or three times as much as we changed Watchmen. But there is no vocal group of anti No Country For Old Men purists. That are going to kill the Coens. Although Cormac McCarthy is awesome, so there's grounds. That's a difficult thing I just treat it like a great book that you're making into a movie.

Q: Dave do you think some day you could convince Alan [Moore] to watch it? And in your heart of hearts what do you think he would think?

DG: I don't think it's my job to convince Alan to do anything. I wouldn't even go there. I'd rather not be drawn into hypothetical speculation about Alan's thought process.