Onslaught Six wrote:Here's my thing, especially about what you said: 'fake' Watchmen. As if these are somehow less legitimate? As Dom might say, they're official. They're canon. They count whether you want them to or not. And just because Moore and Gibbons aren't involved (surely by their own choice and not DC's) doesn't mean they're automatically bad.
Because Frank Miller didn't create Batman. Chris Claremont didn't create the X-Men. Geoff Jones didn't create Green Lantern. Furman didn't create Grimlock. Grant Morrison didn't create Animal Man. Neil Gaiman didn't create Sandman*. That's the nature of comics, different writers come in all the time. If Moore honestly had a problem with it, he would have written the sequels himself.
Here’s the thing though: Despite what Dom says about the characters only being ‘original’ because of DC mandate or whatever, that still happened very early in the game, and with the story we ended up with, Moore and Gibbons really *did* create these characters. The story they told, with Rorschach’s outlook and his chapter’s fixation on symmetry, to the Comedian’s persona and the whole reason he even calls himself the Comedian, were all written around those characters they created, and had nothing to do with the Question and Peacemaker and whoever. That was part of the appeal of Watchmen, especially as a comic book: That Moore and Gibbons created a single, complete story for these characters with a full arc, that told what it wanted to tell and wrapped the hell up. Turning it into what’s effectively an ongoing series (there are enough issues here to account for three year’s worth of Expanded Universe Watchmen content, and I refuse to believe it will end there) defeats the entire purpose of the series and twists it from a single story that had a point into just Another Ongoing Comic Book Series. Yeah, some great writers have told some great stories with passed-around characters like the Transformers, the Justice League, and Spider-Man, and stuff, but those characters were always intended to be used that way- as part of a long-running franchise that could be pushed again and again. I like to think that Watchmen was supposed to be a little bit more than that. Yeah, it’s still a comic book about super heroes, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be allowed to just be A Story.
I mean, you like Gaiman’s Sandman, right? How would you *really* feel if, all this time after the original series was over, eight other douches came in with forty more comic books about the same set of characters, set in the same story-timeline-whatever, and claimed that this was all really ‘the rest of the story’. Would you really think that was okay? What if someone who wasn’t Brian Lee O’Malley put out twelve more volumes of Scott Pilgrim and said it was all *totally* connected to the original work? And these are all just comic book examples, which is stupid that in this medium it’s somehow okay. Can you imagine the insanity that would stir up if someone who wasn’t Tarantino put out a sequel to Pulp Fiction? Everyone would call bullshit on that! Why does DC get to get away with this just because ‘lolcomicbooks’?
Some things just shouldn’t be turned into franchises. There’s a point where good taste should interfere with that judgment call.
Even if it wasn’t his story, what would Alan Moore say about a series that was just a bunch of characters from stories most people consider ‘classics’, tossed in by writers who don’t own them into a story that has little to do with their original context all just for-
Yeah, okay, whatever. I'm still pissed though.
