At 4thletter Gavok decided to try out the Before Watchmen project:
Whether you loved or hated the idea of more Watchmen comics, you have to admit that the audacity of it is interesting as all hell, else nobody would be talking about it.
I decided to give it a fair enough shake. I didn’t read every single comic. I didn’t even read every single series.
I don’t understand why anybody would do this, even if they had no problems with the moral aspects of this project. (The short version: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had been screwed out of the rights to the original Watchmen, which were supposed to revert to them, with Moore being vehemently opposed to any sort of sequel or prequel.) Because I don’t understand why anybody would think that it could ever deliver anything better than a series of perhaps well crafted, but pointless comics which would always come up short when measured against the original series. Then again, I also don’t understand why any respectable cartoonist, other than egomaniacs like JMS, would want to be involved with this either.
Or indeed, why DC has bothered doing this in the first place, other than as yet another fuck you to Alan Moore. I can sort of understand why back in 1986, once it became clear that Watchmen was a huge critical and sales success, DC wanted to do spinoff series, but to do this three decades later?
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