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Watchmen continued

When I titled that last post Watchmen started it, I was referring to a small streak in my life of reading fantastic fiction as well as starting the whole graphic novel thing (a listing of how the issues were stopped at one publisher and then continued at another is too long to go into and I'm not enough of a fangirl to tell it). One thing that did strike me on re-reading Watchmen (I first read it when I met my husband some 20 years ago--sweet singing Jesus I feel old) was the remarkable panel to panel work. Some people say that they can't read comics--they just can't adjust to the style of storytelling in the same way that some people say that can't watch sub-titled films. I will admit to having sometimes had difficulty with certain artists--Bill Sienkiewicz comes to mind. Other comic artists are extraordinary (so is Sienkiewicz, just sometimes distracting from the text) with work that could hang in museums--Jon Muth, John Bolton and the brilliant Alex Ross (who did the Obama as Superman shirt). As you can see, I'm more of a hyper-realist fan.

But to really be a comic fan, one should really be able to appreciate the way story telling in a comic is not just a story with pictures, but an integral part of the story--like the frames of a film.

The artist for Watchmen, Dave Gibbons, has given his stamp of approval to the film which is high praise, I think.

Alan Moore will never approve anything for a variety of reasons. I'm not going to touch that here.
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