More Watchmen

I feel so out of it, comics-wise. Nary a whisper had reached me that DC would publish prequels to Watchmen, the groundbreaking comics miniseries (or graphic novel, if you like) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It's a good thing I check in on Scott Tipton's Comics 101 now and again.

Being out of the comics world also makes me less enthusiastic about the new series than Tipton is. I'm unfamiliar with most of the names associated with the projects, and those I know, I don't like. (In fairness, I admit that I know nothing of J. M. Straczynski's comics work. It's his defense of the often abysmally bad dialogue on his TV series Babylon 5 that prejudices me against him.)

Moore, as anyone familiar with his reputation would expect, has condemned DC's use of his and Gibbons' characters. Before you jump to the conclusion that this is another instance of DC screwing a creator (the company has a long and dishonorable history of legalistically impoverishing writers and artists who made it a ton of money), know that Moore's claim is moral rather than legal; Tipton explains the ownership conundrum. He also identifies the very weak link in Moore's rhetoric:

Moore's objections from a literary standpoint don't really hold up from my perspective, as this is someone who's built his entire career off of reinterpreting the literary creations of others, whether it's Mick Anglo's Marvelman, Len Wein's Swamp Thing, Siegel and Shuster's Superman, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edward Hyde, H.G. Wells' Invisible Man or J.M. Barrie's Wendy Darling. It's easy to reflexively say, "how dare they use those characters without Moore's permission!", until you realize that L. Frank Baum probably wouldn't have liked what Moore did with Dorothy Gale in LOST GIRLS.

But if that undercuts Moore's position on the moral high ground, it also highlights a vulnerability in DC's strategy.

Moore is a first-rate reinterpreter, but he often has had the advantage of very low expectations for the characters he touches. With apologies to Len Wein (who, in an ironic twist, is writing one of the Watchmen prequels), I don't think anybody expected greatness from Swamp Thing. Superman, while iconic, was never nuanced. Marvelman ... well, Marvelman was simply a footnote in comics history until Moore came along. ("Marvelman" is still merely a footnote in comics history, technically speaking, since for legal reasons Moore had to christen his reimagined version of the character "Miracleman".)

In Moore's hands, these characters became the stuff of comics legend (or in the case of Superman, Moore's story became a legend alongside the character). That placed something of a burden on the fellows who had to follow in Moore's footsteps. How well did that work out?

With apologies to Rick Veitch on Swamp Thing, not spectacularly well; in his hands the series was notable mostly for the issue DC nixed, featuring Jesus Christ (and out of Veitch's hands, the series went downhill fast). In the case of Superman, DC was lucky that (1) Moore's story was a one-shot, and (2) the story was pre-Crisis; rebooting the character allowed Moore's story to be viewed as a last valentine to the old Superman rather than a challenge to current writers. And as for Marvelman, er, Miracleman, well, Moore's successor was Neil Gaiman. You might have heard of him: he wrote what is considered to be one of the greatest comics series of all time, Sandman. To my mind, Gaiman's run is as impressive as Moore's, though since we only saw a half-dozen of Gaiman's planned eighteen issues you could argue that we just don't know if the quality would have held up.

So in the "following in Alan Moore's footsteps" lottery, the odds in this small survey are 2-1 against (and that's if you give Gaiman's work on Miracleman the benefit of the doubt; otherwise, it's 3-0). It's actually worse than that, though, when you consider that comics have produced only a handful of writers, if that many, of Gaiman's caliber (and Moore is one of them). I don't know that any of the writers DC has assigned to the Watchmen prequels is of that caliber. I do know that none of them has Moore's cachet.

Moore is not the only major-league creator in whose footsteps it's risky to follow. The writers assigned to explore corners of Gaiman's Sandman mythos after that series ended didn't produce results anywhere near as entertaining or imaginative. And just how hard it would be to follow Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was proved by, of all people, Frank Miller: The Dark Knight Strikes Again was a great letdown.

Readers are going to be bringing a lot of expectations to the Watchmen prequels, expectations that they didn't bring to Watchmen itself. And DC doesn't have Alan Moore reinterpreting those characters. If (low expectations + Alan Moore) = (big success), what does (high expectations - Alan Moore) equal?