DC announces Before Watchmen

So, DC has done it at last. They have announced Before Watchmen, a new series of comics using the characters created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986. Well, as a summer event, it beats yet another universe-spanning reboot, I suppose. I don’t suppose I shall buy them myself, but then I’m generally disenchanted with superhero comics these days, and to be honest I thought the original not without serious flaws.

DC have wheeled out Dave Gibbons to give the most non-committal and unenthusiastic endorsement it’s possible to imagine, and employed John Higgins, who coloured the original series, to do the art on Crimson Corsair, written by original series editor Len Wein, who is also writing Ozymandias. And there’s a pretty impressive line-up of creators involved (Darwyn Cooke, Andy and Joe Kubert, etc.). But the question remains, should they be doing this?

Alan Moore, as reported in The New York Times is, unsurprisingly, unimpressed. And I’ve seen online fan reaction that takes the attitude that these characters should be left alone.

On one level, this is a bit silly. Before Watchmen is just DC doing what they’ve always done, and exploiting properties they own through new stories. DC is not dependent, as Moore suggests, on characters and ideas he created twenty-five years ago, but on characters created by Jerry Siegel, Joe Schuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Jack Kirby, etc., seventy to seventy-five years ago (just as Marvel are dependent upon characters created in the 1960s by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko). If you’re going to object to Before Watchmen on the basis that DC are not using new ideas and characters, then you pretty much have to object to almost everything DC publish (and almost everything Marvel publish, and new Judge Dredd material, and Doctor Who …) . From that perspective, Before Watchmen is no different from Paul Cornell writing Stormwatch, or indeed Moore himself writing Swamp Thing or Superman. It’s clear from their press release that Dan DiDio and Jim Lee view the Watchmen characters in the same way as they view Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Blue Beetle, and everyone else the company has acquired over the years.

It is particularly rich for Alan Moore to make some of the comments he has, implying that Watchmen should be left alone on principle. Moore substantially made his name playing in other people’s sandpits (Marvelman, Captain Britain, Swamp Thing). Watchmen itself began as a treatment of the Charlton characters.  Moore is still going back to other people’s characters. A number of people have picked up on this, including J. Michael Straczynski (who is writing Dr Manhattan and Nite-Owl).

Moore, in some of his comments, is implying that simply because the story of these characters has been told, no new stories about those characters can ever be originated, as if that should be a general rule for all literature. Leaving aside the fact that I think that denies a basic feature of storytelling that’s been there ever since writing was invented, I would concede that it’s fine for Moore to say that characters should be left alone on principle; but he can’t then go and write (and if we agree with him, we can’t then go as readers and enjoy) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. When Moore says, “As far as I know, there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick, ” I think, “Hang on, who is it in the crew of the Nautilus?”

Moore uses Ishmael, the narrator from Moby-Dick, as first mate of the Nautilus in the first two volumes of LOEG. In any case, he’s clearly using Moby-Dick as an example to stand in for all classic literature – yet he is busy writing what is in effect a sequel toDracula, King Solomon’s Mines, The Invisible Man, etc.

By making statements like this, Moore muddies the waters and exposes himself to charges of double standards. This distracts attention away from his actual legitimate grievance (a grievance that Straczynski and others rather overlook). Because, in the end, Moore is right to get upset, not simply because other people are now doing to his characters what he has done to other people’s, but because it would appear that he was told that this wouldn’t happen; indeed, his story is he was told that the characters would revert to him and Gibbons should the comic ever go out of print (which, of course, it never has). DC had in any case always given the impression that, though happy to exploit the existing comic as best they could, they would never allow anyone else to create Watchmen material, at least not without Moore and Gibbons’ approval. They’ve gone back on this (as corporations always do). One wonders how long similar promises to Neil Gaiman with regard to the Sandman will hold true.

So, though I don’t accept that Watchmen should be left alone simply because they are sacrosanct characters whose story has been told, I would agree that they should be left alone because DC always promised Alan Moore that they would be.

And there is a certain sense that prequels and further adventures are missing the point of the original comic.  Watchmen is a story about the passing of a world.  Any new stories with the characters can only feed into that story, and are unnecessary to it.  And as Damien Walter says (and hardly any of the comic’s imitators have recognised), Watchmen was a commentary on the superhero comic, and to turn it into another superhero franchise is to misunderstand it thoroughly. In a decade, expect to see the Watchmen fully integrated into the DC Universe, Nite Owl in the JLA and Dr Manhattan facing off against Sinestro or Darkseid. And then, of course, the original point of the characters will be well and truly missed, but there you go …