World-Building in Watchmen
Mark J. P. Wolf
Cinema Journal, Volume 56, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 119-125 (Article)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2017.0006
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645454
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Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
how this emerging form affects how we experience Watchmen, Morton raises larger
issues about the future of comics in connection with new technologies and remediation,
as well as how “comics and animation have the means to engage in a balanced, formal
dialogue.”
Kathryn Frank looks at the series of comic-book prequels from 2012 to 2013 titled
Before Watchmen, which explore the origins and backstories of Moore and Gibbons’s
characters. Seeing these prequels as a case study for issues related to “the comics
industry, franchising, labor relations, and nostalgic media,” Frank assesses how Before
Watchmen has changed the way we approach the original text and how the prequels
complicate the notion of authorship.
Finally, Dana Polan examines Watchmen and comics studies from the perspective of
someone who does not study comics, using the book as an entry point for considering
the barriers we must confront as scholars when facing a new object of study. Polan
applies the idea of intermediality to comics, situating the medium within larger media
studies practices and contemplating how the need for developing a “media-specific
literacy” that involves particular “reading protocols” affects the ways scholars approach
new objects of study in a medium with which they have relatively little experience.
Watchmen has been a key text in comics studies, but whether it will retain its
canonical status is an important question for the study of comics. The ways in which
comics studies responds to such challenges—challenges it has not had to face while its
methods and approaches were still relatively young—are vital to the future study of
comics as scholarly texts. ✽
World-Building in Watchmen
by Mark J. P. Wolf
T
he graphic novel Watchmen (twelve issues, 1986–1987), by
writer Alan Moore, illustrator Dave Gibbons, and colorist John
Higgins, demonstrates the possibilities that comics offer for
world-building while at the same time making full use of the
peculiarities of the medium. While the film adaptation of Watchmen
required changes to the original, including some losses, the further
adaptation of the film to home-video formats was able to restore some
of those losses, because of the ways in which home video is better able
to emulate the original comics.
Watchmen features a world that is an alternate version of the United
States in 1985 and that departs from the Primary World (the real
world) when superheroes appear in 1938 and a superhero group, the
Minutemen, forms in 1939. Superheroes help the United States win
the Vietnam War in 1971, release the hostages from Iran in 1980,
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and jump ahead of the Soviets in technology thanks to the superhero Dr. Manhattan,
whose control of matter on the molecular level gives the United States a great
advantage in the Cold War. By 1985, airships are common, as well as electric cars,
with spark hydrants for recharging them found along the streets, and Richard Nixon is
reelected for a fifth term as president. Although the degree of invention and number
of world defaults that are changed is not as great as that of many science fiction and
fantasy worlds, there are many subtle changes and details throughout Watchmen’s world
that give it its own flavor. Illustrator Dave Gibbons even described how it was the world
itself that inspired the way he drew it:
I suddenly realized one day, this isn’t a superhero story, this is actually a
science fiction story. . . . Once I thought about it like that, I didn’t draw it as if
it were a superhero story, I didn’t want to draw it that way, I wanted to draw it
as if it was an alternative history, in which case all of the background things,
all the buildings, the forms of transport, the fashions, the fads, immediately
become what the story’s about.1
So while the initial story inspired the world, world-building began to influence the
story at a very early stage, resulting in Watchmen having much more background detail
than most comic books.
The commercial and critical success of the graphic novel made a movie adaptation
inevitable. The attempt to adapt Watchmen has a long history, including Terry Gilliam’s
turning down the project twice.2 Part of the reason for that history is that Watchmen
was designed to make use of the peculiarities of comics that make it a medium distinct
from all others. According to Alan Moore:
The relationship between films and comics has been overemphasized to a
degree. If you understand cinematic techniques then you’ll be able to write
better, more gripping comics than someone who doesn’t, but if cinematic
technique is seen as the be all and end all of what comics can aspire to, then
at the very best comics are always going to be a poor relation to the cinema.
What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other
media is capable of operating. Like in Watchmen, all that subliminal [stuff] we
were getting into the backgrounds. You are trapped in the running time of
a film—you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged
through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long
as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo
something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that
one, and wonder if there is some connection there.
1 From Eric Matthies, dir., The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video,
2009), DVD.
2 See David Hughes, “Who Watches the Watchmen?—How The Greatest Graphic Novel of Them All Confounded
Hollywood,” in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2002), 144; Kenneth Plume,
“Interview with Terry Gilliam (Part 3 of 4),” IGN.com, November 17, 2000, http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/11/17
/interview-with-terry-gilliam-part-3-of-4.
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Watchmen was designed to be read four or five times; there’s stuff in there
Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read. And
there are things that turned up in there by accident . . . the little plugs on the
spark hydrants, if you turn them upside down, you discover a little smiley face.
Watchmen was a stream of weird [stuff ] and coincidence from beginning to
end. Bizarre things kept hitting us in the face and they were perfect for us. Like
looking through NASA photos of Mars and finding a smiley face up there.3
Watchmen was first given concrete visual form when Dave Gibbons took Alan Moore’s
detailed, ninety-one-page panel-by-panel script and illustrated the graphic novel,
which changed a great deal with his input.4 According to Gibbons, much of the
changed world defaults resulted from Dr. Manhattan’s ability to control matter; with
lithium and helium easy to produce, electric cars and airships become common, along
with industries to service them.5 Some of the changes were cultural extensions of the
time as well:
And I also reasoned that there would probably be quite a lot of subtle
differences, and I wrote a whole list of the way that the world could be
different . . . things like different fast foods, which became Gunga Diner,
the idea of the Asian subcontinent being the origin of a lot of fast foods
in the USA, which it kind of is in Britain and has been for a long while.
Subtle changes in fashion, you’ll notice that nearly everybody’s wearing a
double-breasted jacket and they tend to wear what we in England used to
call “Chelsea boots,” boots with sort of elasticated panels in the sides to make
them easier to put on and take off again.6
Media in Watchmen’s world are changed as well; Gibbons figured that with real
superheroes, audiences would not want to read comic books about them, and so
pirate comics are the most popular comics genre, with Tales of the Black Freighter as the
comic-within-a-comic commenting on and mirroring Watchmen’s themes, its images
often textured with dot-matrix halftones reminiscent of early pulp comics. Television
images also figure into the story in a number of places. Other examples of media are
the additional materials that accompany the comics. Since the issues of the comic
books would not have advertising pages, it was decided that the extra pages would
be used to further flesh out the Watchmen world with diegetic materials from the
world itself. These include book excerpts from a retired superhero’s autobiography,
an academic essay on Dr. Manhattan, an essay on pirate comics, an arrest record,
letters from psychiatric hospitals, an Ornithological Society journal essay, newspaper
3 Alan Moore, quoted in Vincent Eno [Richard Norris] and El Csawza, “Vincent Eno and El Csawza Meet Comics Megastar
Alan Moore,” Strange Things Are Happening 1, no. 2 (1988): http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2006/02/20
/alan-moore-interview-1988/.
4 The script was ninety-one pages, according to an e-mail sent by Dave Gibbons to the author, February 2, 2015.
5 According to an e-mailed MP3 file sent January 19, 2015, from Dave Gibbons to the author.
6 From the transcript of an e-mailed MP3 file sent January 19, 2015, from Dave Gibbons to the author.
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articles, corporate memos, and a magazine article—all written by or about the story’s
characters. While outside of the main story line, they fill narrative gaps and provide
background and backstory for the world, increasing its illusion of completeness. Thus,
even the original comics version of Watchmen was multimedia in form from the start,
imitating books, newspapers, magazines, journals, memos, and so forth; its world was
already appearing in multiple media forms.
Watchmen finally arrived in theaters in 2009. Directed by Zack Snyder, with
production design by Alex McDowell, the film is often hailed as the most faithful
movie adaptation of a comic book, something for which the film has received both
praise and criticism.7 As such, it perhaps best demonstrates what happens when a
comic book makes a transmedial move into cinema, with the gains and losses due to
the differences between the two media. Some of the changes were formal ones due
to medial differences, such as the shift from the varying and more vertically oriented
aspect ratios of the comics panels to the unvarying horizontal rectangle of the movie
screen and the spatially juxtaposed imagery of the comics to the temporally intercut
imagery of the film. But changes also occurred within Watchmen’s diegetic world and
its depiction.
Narratively, the ending was changed, and reducing the story to the manageable
running time of a feature film meant eliding or cutting some scenes while new scenes
were added. Attempting to remain true to the source material, director Zack Snyder
even asked Gibbons to storyboard scenes that appeared in the movie but not in the
comics, just to see how he would have done them. According to Gibbons:
I did do a section of storyboarding for Zack Snyder. There is a part of the
movie that isn’t in the graphic novel and he wanted to see how I would have
drawn it, if it had been in the graphic novel. So I redid the storyboards as
three pages of comic on the nine-panel grid, also getting it colored by John
Higgins so it looked authentic. But I think there were probably only three or
four scenes that I drew, which were from the movie.8
The comics’ stylized use of color in John Higgins’s color design is also something that
was not entirely carried over to the film, because of the need to balance abstraction
with realism. While the reliance on secondary colors (orange, green, and purple)
did influence the design of the film, the more unusual or extreme uses of color, like
the very red-tinted color palette of the flashback panels in which the Comedian is
defenestrated and killed, were not duplicated by the film. Still, great efforts were made
to adapt Watchmen’s world. According to McDowell:
During the design of Watchmen, we pored over the graphic novel, carried it
as our Rosetta stone, and pulled every possible thread from the book that
7 See Andrew O’Hehir, “Watchmen: Could the Most Anticipated Comic-Book Movie of the Season Turn Out to Be
the Most Unsettling Superhero Spectacle Ever Made?,” Salon, March 6, 2009, http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06
/watchmen/; Anthony Lane, “Dark Visions: Watchmen and Leave Her to Heaven,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/09/dark-visions.
8 From “A Q&A with Dave Gibbons on the Making of Watchmen,” Amazon review, http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen
-Alan-Moore/dp/0930289234.
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we could into the film. . . . We got into obsessive layers of the world and
used Dave Gibbons’s details as clues to populate the space. This resulted in
consistent layers of visual narrative braided though the action.
. . . The backlot that we built from the ground up—from the cracked
asphalt of the streets, to four-story tall building facades, in a deserted factory
in Vancouver—was the heart of the world, and we controlled it absolutely.
All of the iconic architecture in the film, at street level, was included in the
three city blocks that we built, and the stylization of the film evolved from
the control we had in this exterior setting. Lighting and greenscreen backings
were built into the set, and the surfaces were both realistic in their materials
and highly stylized by the color and graphic layers.
. . . This balance between stylization and reality was the challenge, and the
fun of building the Watchmen world. There was no way that we were not
going to acknowledge the comic book and Dave’s art. His work is not only
essential to respect the audience as fans of the comic book, but it’s also an
intrinsic metaphor for the characters themselves, all of whom are flesh-and-
blood outcasts trying to find a role and recognition as stylized symbols of
superheroism, and who have one foot in stylization and one foot in reality.9
Along with the film, several ancillary materials were also released; from July
2008 to February 2009, the twelve issues of Watchmen were abridged and turned into
motion comics, which took elements from the comics and layered and animated them,
amounting to a 325-minute version of Watchmen. The New Frontiersman, a tabloid in
Watchmen’s New York City, was given a website and a channel on YouTube with four
video clips from Watchmen’s world. While tangential to the main story line, these extras
added to the world’s backstory, making them similar to the ancillary documents that
appeared at the end of each issue of Watchmen, although there was nothing in the film
to indicate that more material was available online. A book released a month before
the film, Watchmen: The Art of the Film (2009), also contained “making of ” materials and
drawings by Gibbons and highlighted the level of background detail in the film.10 Such
publications, of course, are themselves arguments for the inclusion of many small,
barely noticeable details in films, as the audience will, in fact, see and appreciate such
details when books about them appear.
The home-video release of Watchmen, however, in July 2009, brought the movie
even closer to the original graphic novel. A four-disc DVD set expanded the film
with twenty-four minutes of live-action footage as well as the Tales of the Black Freighter
integrated into the film. It also included the Watchmen motion comics, and several short
pieces made to look like period newscasts and interviews that added to the world,
which were similar to the extras appearing with the comics but not direct adaptations
of them; for example, Hollis Mason’s autobiography Under the Hood is presented as a
video short rather than as book chapter excerpts.
9 From an e-mailed statement by Alex McDowell, February 12, 2015.
10 Peter Aperlo, “Watchmen”: The Art of the Film (London: Titan Books, 2009).
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Visually, home-video technology encourages multiple viewings of a film and allows
the viewer to examine the film frame by frame and to move back and forth to compare
images, similar to the experience of looking through the pages of a book, but it still
does not allow one to juxtapose images the way they appear together arranged on
the comics page (although future technology could include such possibilities). Still,
frame-by-frame capabilities mean that filmmakers can include hidden visual motifs,
background details, and Easter eggs that are more likely to be found by home viewers
than theatrical audiences. Fan enthusiasm also inspires such a level of background
detail. According to McDowell:
There was a moment on the set when a fan journalist was visiting the set and
asked us about the four-legged turkey. And we had no idea what he meant. We
went back to the text and discovered that due to Veidt’s genetics, he possessed
the capability to breed turkeys with additional limbs. It turned out that the
restaurant scene features the turkey plate in a tiny detail inside a single frame
[that] had not yet been shot, so we scurried to build a prop turkey to include
in the scene. There are literally hundreds of details and Easter eggs from
Watchmen scattered though the film, in fact Zack’s amazing “The Times They
Are a-Changin’ ” opening scene alone is dense with them.11
With the potential for visual analysis that frame-by-frame viewing allows, home video
falls somewhere between the comic book and theatrical film, providing world-builders
with a chance that such details will be noticed and appreciated, thereby encouraging
discussion and repeated viewings.
Additional Watchmen material continued to appear after the release of the film.
Extending the backstory even further beyond the original comic books, Warner Bros.
Games produced a prequel video game, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh (2009), released in
two episodes, the first coinciding with the film’s release. Later in 2012, DC Comics
released thirty-seven issues of Before Watchmen comic books, including art by colorist
John Higgins. Neither Moore nor Gibbons participated in these issues, and while
Gibbons wished them well, Moore called them “completely shameless.”12 Parody
material has also appeared, including Saturday Morning Watchmen, an elaborate opening
sequence of a supposed 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon show based on Watchmen,
complete with a theme song.13
What the adaptation and expansion of the world of Watchmen also demonstrates is
how the transmedial nature of a world can change the way we think about adaptation.
As the popularity of a work, released in a particular medium for which it is designed,
creates the desire for adaptations of that work into other media, it is the world itself
that becomes emphasized, once we begin seeing it within a variety of different media
windows. In the case of Watchmen, however, medium specificity and adaptation is
11 From an e-mailed statement by Alex McDowell, February 12, 2015.
12 According to Dave Itzkoff, “DC Plans Prequels to Watchmen Series,” New York Times, February 1, 2012, http://www
.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/books/dc-comics-plans-prequels-to-watchmen-series.html?_r=3.
13 “Saturday Morning Watchmen,” YouTube video, 1:21, posted by Harry Partridge, March 5, 2009, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w.
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itself part of the thematic content, because the graphic novel deliberately both uses
techniques specific to the medium and attempts to represent some of its content as
other media (e.g., TV, newspapers, magazines). Its simulation of other media makes
Watchmen a good candidate for transmedial moves, even while its use of medium
peculiarities works against such moves. Watchmen’s world, then, can only become
enriched as it spreads across different media, and at the same time its expression as a
series of comic books remains a classic example of what can be achieved within the
medium of comics. ✽
The Continuing Adventures of the
“Inherently Unfilmable” Book:
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen
by Aaron Taylor
“M
ore regurgitated worms” were the words Alan Moore
used to describe Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation of
Watchmen.1 Tempting as it may be to dismiss Moore’s
vitriol as hyperbolic egotism, it is difficult to overstate
the importance of the 1986 limited series that he coauthored with
Dave Gibbons. Although its import for both comics and literature
has been widely documented, Watchmen’s relationship to cinema
has received comparatively less attention.2 Thus, Snyder’s film,
and its relation to its graphic hypotext, requires further attention in
order to appreciate what Watchmen means to the respective fields of
adaptation, contemporary cinema, and comics studies. Rather than
reclaim Snyder’s Watchmen as an underappreciated adaptation of an
“unfilmable” comic, we are better served by situating its hyperfidelity
1 Geoff Boucher, “Alan Moore on Watchmen Movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it,’” Hero
Complex, September 18, 2008, http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/alan-moore
-on-w/.
2 For select discussions of the comic’s “literary” value, see the following: Lev Grossman, “All-
Time 100 Novels: Watchmen,” Time, March 4, 2009, http://entertainment.time.com/2009
/03/06/top-10-graphic-novels/; Andrew Hoberek, Considering “Watchmen” (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 5–14; Aaron Meskin, “‘Why Don’t You Go Read a
Book or Something?’ Watchmen as Literature,” in “Watchmen” and Philosophy, ed. Mark D.
White (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 157–172; Sara J. Van Ness, “Watchmen”
as Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 5–23; Grant L. Voth, “Moore and Gibbon’s
Watchmen,” in The Skeptic’s Guide to the Great Books (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company,
2011), CD.
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