Conversely, the movie version played by Billy Crudup is perhaps best known for his massive blue CGI dong. The confusing layout of his chapters highlight his disconnect from humanity. You’re left with people lumbering around in costumes pretending to be serious, more unintentionally funny than effective. In the book, Doctor Manhattan is a tragic figure. You don’t get the juxtaposition between cartoon and violence. You miss the way words flow across the image, and connect from panel to panel to keep everything together. You still lose the majority of the book’s subtext. Say HBO keeps the gaudy look of Watchmen, like Snyder did for the film the first time around. Dave Gibbons’ designs for the Minutemen are often gaudy, ridiculous, and over the top on purpose. Something has to be lost if you translate all this from the page to the screen. It all works so well because it’s a comic book, laughing at comic books the whole way. If traditional comic books were a children’s TV show, Watchmen showed when the taping ends, and all the actors go the dressing rooms to drink whiskey in their costumes because they fucking hate kids. If we ever wondered what “heroes” looked like at our level, Watchmen showed we wouldn’t like what we saw. Moore plays a lot with the way words interact with picture in Watchmen, usually to distort perspective and the reader’s understanding of the time-line. But he also toys with the idea of a comic book itself. I had no idea “writing” could be anything but linear, or that words could do anything but describe what was in a picture, that they could also emphasis what wasn’t. I didn’t know that “writing” could be a combination of images, words and subtleties. Until I grabbed Watchmen randomly off a shelf about seven years ago, I didn’t really understand that writing could be something I did outside a school paper. But occasionally, for some young people who picked it up, it was life-changing. Watchmen was violent, and it was dark, but at the same time Watchmen was human. They could be legitimate literature, and they could move you. In 1986 the collected version of Watchmen, along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman ‘s Maus, reminded comic audiences that these funny-pages weren’t just for children. It’s also, coincidentally, incredible in terms of comic book history. Manhattan who is blue and constantly naked. Oh, there is also an all-powerful man-god known as Dr.
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