It makes sense. I guess.
Fresh off critical favorite The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof is in talks for a potential Watchmen TV series for HBO. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the project is in the early development stages. An official deal is not yet in place. Representatives for HBO and producer Warner Bros. Television declined comment.
I have a weird relationship with Watchmen. It’s brilliant. It’s engrossing. It’s genuine art. And I wish that the [expletive deleted] thing hadn’t been quite so successful, because it and The Dark Knight Returns (which is also all of those things) kind of [expletive deleted] comic books for a while, and arguably still do*. More accurately, those two series inspired people to slavishly imitate Frank Miller and Alan Moore for a decade or two, only sometimes without either man’s talent or skills.
Moe Lane
*I remain convinced that Mark Millar’s Wanted is an at least subconscious protest at the way comics changed. It’s also a highly depressing comic series, by the way — and not because the conceit is “the supervillains won.” It’s in the way that the protagonist thinks that he’s free and has agency, when in reality he’s stuck dancing for the jaded amusement of the very readers he so notoriously scorns in the literal last panel. Wanted is the reductio ad absurdum of an entire decade’s worth of comic books, in other words: I dunno if Millar intended it to play out that way, but it did.
Heh.
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Every medium has imitators, Moe. Comic books imitated the more successful Miller and Moore .. but Miller and Moore were successful because, as you note, they told engrossing stories brilliantly.
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Do I need to list the imitators that followed music’s New Wave (Flock of Seagulls) .. or who tried to out-techno-thriller Tom Clancy? (noted hack Dan Brown comes to mind..)
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Hell, even in video games, BioShock:Infinite imitated many other first-person shooters, and completely discarded the unique Rapture as a setting, despite the earlier BioShock system being superior and setting being fascinating.. made Infinite a complete waste of time and money for me.
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The point I’m after is .. yeah, success breeds bad imitators .. and it’s sad that *good* art (not brilliant, but *good*) gets drowned out in the marketplace by knock-offs ..
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I will point out that’s one of the things the internet is changing – many of the bad imitators got ink and rack space because buyers, not because good artists weren’t out there .. but the internet means good artists can put their stuff up and work around idiot buyers ..
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Mew
On a separate note .. Amazon optioned a remake of ‘The Tick’ .. but the pilot seems to have missed the mark rather badly .. and not just because the original had Patrick Warburton.
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Mew
Shorter Watchmen:
There are no Heroes.
Nobility and Honor are an aberrant mental condition.
Having read the novel and seen the movie, I agree that this is an accurate summary.