This is not a review of the film Watchmen. I’m a bit late on that account, and I’ve shared my thoughts on discussion threads and on Twitter, so my views are already published in one form or another.

But I want to talk about Watchmen, and how I think that – oddly enough – the film has found its perfect place in film history, exactly where it should be, twenty-odd years after it found its perfect place in comics history.

What the what–?

Let me explain:

The late 1980′s were a brilliant time for comics. I’m going to use 1986 as a benchmark, but exact publication times may be mis-ordered or slightly off in chronology. The point is this: ask anyone reading comics at the time about the year 1986 and they will light up. They will probably start to talk. Babble even. You may have to feign interest or politely ask them to shut up. Because 1986 was a boon, man.

Comics were no longer strictly newsstand periodicals for kids. There were now specialty shops dedicated to the hobby, and as a result, comics were being taken more seriously. DC Comics actually ran an ad campaign stating that “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” And they weren’t. Frank Miller’s Daredevil was a great hard-boiled noir dressed up in super-hero clothes. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing added literary sophistication to muddy horror. A black-and-white independent comics scene was growing and adding nuance and depth to the medium. Frank Miller wrote and drew The Dark Knight Returns, and minds were blown. I was in high school, and I remember telling my friend BC Capps that I couldn’t ever really take Batman seriously because I didn’t understand how a guy who wore blue underwear outside of his tights could ever really be menacing to criminals. He gave me his issues of The Dark Knight Returns.

Mind = Blown.

And then comes Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Twenty-three years later, it’s still considered one of the greatest examinations of the super-hero genre ever written. It is the ultimate deconstruction of the genre. Later, Grant Morrison would say that his (excellent) Doom Patrol series was about deconstruction, but as progressive as Morrison was, Alan Moore had really already written the definitive tome on the subject. He had already done similar work with his British series Marvelman (known in the US as Miracleman), but Watchmen stands as a perfect, complete undressing of an entire sub-genre.

That was 1986 in comics.

Movies had some catching up to do.

In 1989, Tim Burton brought some of this to the screen with his version of Batman. But while the movies were starting to capture some of the style, I look back now and realize that as much as I loved 1989’s Batman, it was still gestating. It was like a still-born creature in a mad scientist’s cloning laboratory… to peer into the tanks of viscous fluid was to see a semblance of what comics were doing… a familiar shape, but–upon close inspection– we notice severe deformities. A vestigial tail. Webbed fingers.

As I type this, I have just finished watching a DVD of the film Hancock, a Will Smith super-hero film that is not based on a comic book. This is after a summer spent viewing films like Hellboy 2, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and The Dark Knight.

Hancock, I felt, had a flawed execution, but an interesting premise. A washed-up super-hero with some serious problems, meets a washed-up PR guy – and together, they try to change the world. Regardless of the execution of the rest of the film (which was pretty bad), I love this premise. It reminds me quite a bit of the type of independent black-and-white super-hero comic someone would have conceived of back in 1986.

And then it occurs to me: wow, a lot of these recent films seem to fall into that same 1986 timeline.

Batman Begins is Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, an acclaimed re-telling of Batman’s origin. The film marks the start of a more sophisticated story, driven by character. Batman Begins is a good film, but it is overshadowed by director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which is our filmic analogue to Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and even the Spider-man and X-men films become analogues to some of the classic runs of Marvel comics in the 80’s. What is X2 if not the spiritual child of the classic Chris Claremont era of the X-men? Does our 2008 Iron Man serve as an analogue for the David Michelinie/Bob Layton Iron Man run, which included the classic “Demon in a Bottle” storyline? In considering these, keep in mind that I don’t mean to draw links to the actual content; I’m thinking more of the overall tone and sophistication of each.

While the comics-version of Hellboy didn’t appear until the early 90’s, I think it’s safe to say that the Hellboy films could easily represent the “niche” areas of 80’s independent comics, like The Elementals, Grendel, or the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books.

And thus, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Watchmen should come along in 2009, shortly after The Dark Knight. Regardless of what you thought of the film or how it was adapted, I think it’s safe to say that it does drive home the point that “super-hero films aren’t just for kids anymore.” It’s dark and grimy and nihilistic and it deconstructs every colorful aspect of the campier super-hero films, beating you over the head with its savage message: these costumed assholes would really fuck up the real world, wouldn’t they?

So, it’s 1986 again. What do we have to look forward to?

Well, we’ve already heard rumblings from studios that super-hero films would follow the “Dark Knight” model, and be darker. Is that any different from the late 80’s when the term “grim and gritty” came into every comic reader’s parlance? Whereupon clone after clone of Miller and Moore repeatedly missed the goddamn point of those original works? Yes, I suspect we’ll see a few very bad films along those lines. In fact, we’ve already started to see them haven’t we, Punisher War Zone?

But, there could also be hope on the horizon? If we can just get films into the 90’s we could see the reconstruction of super-heroes ala Grant Morrison’s JLA or Mark Waid’s The Flash!

Of course, maybe we’re already at a point where comics and film diverge. I’ve heard that we shouldn’t expect any more R-rated super-hero films from Warner Brothers, as Watchmen hasn’t really sold as well as was hoped. So, who knows what’s next. Perhaps, just as Moore’s characters found themselves in an alternate 1985, we’ll find ourselves in the Hollywood equivalent of an alternate 1990.

Which is good, I think. At least then I know we won’t be subject to collectible variant hologram-foil-covered DVDs, right?

Tags: 1986, Alan Moore, comic book movies, Comics, Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen

This entry was posted by David Accampo on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 2:08 am and is filed under Comics, Commentary, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.