The comments of James Robinson regarding Alan Moore posted last week by somebody who enjoys fanning the flames of enmity, got stuck in my noodle. Alan was saying that the whole comic book industry is a morbid mess of putrefaction. No, actually he didn't say that, those are my words. Whenever you say comic books are crap, somebody always stands up to argue that they are just the way their readers want them to be. And you can't really argue with that. James Robinson is the guy who scripted the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the movie that made Alan Moore swear off any more dealings with Hollywood, the movie that brought about Sean Connery's retirement. ("Connery decided to accept the lead role in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, despite not "understanding" it either. In July 2005, it was reported that he had decided to retire from film-making, following disillusionment with the "idiots now in Hollywood" and the turmoil making the 2003 film."), the movie through which my wife was so bored she spent the whole two hours planning what underpants she was going to wear the following day. Robinson lists all the times Moore employed somebody else's ideas in his work: "And let’s not forget that Watchmen had an ending taken from an episode of the Outer Limits." I've been hearing that Moore purloined this 1963 plot idea in his 1987 masterpiece ever since one of the Hernandez brothers brought it up in a Comics Journal interview and I always figured that one day I would have to check it out for myself, just to see if it is relevant. After the Robinson remark it occurred to me that it is probably now viewable on Youtube. Sure enough, I found it instantly. So let's see how the Outer Limits version of the giant squid materializing in the middle of Manhattan plays out.
(If you give a hoot, watch it before I spoil the plot. It's an hour long)

The Architects of Fear, parts
One
two
three
Four
Five
six

It turns out that there is no squid.
A group of scientists figure they can save the planet from nuclear war by making it look like an alien invasion is imminent. To do this they draw lots and the guy with the short straw is subjected to a series of biological alterations over a period until he looks like a bug eyed alien. Then they send him up in a bogus spaceship with the plan that he will land at the UN general assembly and address the world's representatives with his bogus evil demands.The flight's trajectory goes wrong and he comes down instead in the woods, makes it back to the lab, and dies in the arms of his beloved pregnant wife who was kept in the dark all this time but had started to have suspicions that he hadn't really died in the bogus lab accident. The thing ends in voiceover: "Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque, it would at least have been a lesson. A lesson, at last, to be learned."


Alan's use of the essential idea of manufacturing an alien for the purpose of uniting mankind is turned into such a radically different variation, especially since in this version the plan succeeds where in the earlier one it failed, that I'm not sure why a thinking person would bring the matter up in a debate about the paucity of ideas in the current comic book field.

there's been a recurring theme here since I reviewed the Watchmen movie on 30 July. The jist of my argument is that a good book is not just 'about' the contents of its plot. Andrew Rilstone has written the finest analysis of Watchmen that i have so far read.

In our world, kids read comics about superheroes and wish that they were real. In the world of the watchmen, supeheroes are real, so kids read about pirates instead. Hollis Mason described the emergence of superheroes as being like characters escaping from comics and coming to life. The idea of superman was so powerful that it caused real superheroes to come into being. In order to create his squid monster, Ozymandias kidnaps the man who wrote the most frightening comic of all time, gets him to imagine the most frightening monster possible, and persuades everyone on earth to believe it is real. Like Hooded Justice, the squid has escaped from comics- from the realm of ideas- into the black and white factual world of newspaper headlines
Watchmen is about the power of stories, of ideas, of comic books. Bernard, the comic book reader is its hero. He has in his hands the grand key to the whole story, and he couldn't care less. in the middle of this great insane complicated game the comic book fan is the voice which debunks the whole exercise.
"Lotta people called Bernard, man. Don't signify nothing."

(thanks to Greg Gerrand for sending the link)

***********
In other news:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An American widow is selling her husband's burial spot directly above film legend Marilyn Monroe so that she can pay off her mortgage.
Elsie Poncher has put an advert on eBay to auction off the tomb in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Los Angeles.
"Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe," says the advertisement.
"In fact the person occupying the address right now is looking face down on her."

a little knowlidg is a good thnig

i've been reading Spiegelman's excellent new edition of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which was released last October. The 28 huge new pages in this alone are worth the entry price. Artie dedicates it in part to the memory of Woody Gelman, who at one point, in 1977, was to be the original publisher of Breakdowns, which reminds me of a theory I entertained for a while. That is, the significance of Gelman's contribution to the modern 'idea' of comics. Before making my point however, I would have you know that this is no longer an idea that I have faith in. It's an idea that had its day in the world and has given way to a smaller, shrunken situation in which it is difficult to locate any idea. Alan Moore was addressing this state of affairs when he wrote: "I did once feel I was part of a movement that wanted to change comics into something valuable to culture, but I don't really feel that kinship in the way I used to." I do admit that Spiegelman's book almost revives the old enthusiasm, but occasions the thought that this may be a generational thing.
My perception was that it was Gelman who first envisioned comics for the bookshelf and, whether he invented the notion himself, he certainly inspired us with the thought of it. With his Nostalgia Press editions of Flash Gordon in two pleasing clothbound volumes, and particularly the lavish large format Little Nemo (all between 1967 and 1975 approximately), he put in our heads the idea that one of us might one day do something worthy of such a serious presentation. I'd bet that Alan Moore had such a thought when he held them. And I know he could not have failed to have bought them, probably in the same place as I did, Bookends in Camden Town, the only shop I know that imported all this obscure stuff in the early 1970s. This was just one aspect of the multi-faceted concept of what later they were calling the 'graphic novel,' long before we had stalwarts like the following chap to explain it to the world on our behalf:

'Comics 101: What is a Graphic Novel?' by one Adam Relayson- Examiner.com - July 20,

One of the most common mistakes made in our medium is the confusion of Comic Books with Graphic Novels. This is sort of like referring to a Magazine as a Newspaper; while they may contain similar information, they are entirely different formats.
The main source of misinformation in this case is the film industry and celebrities. Part of it is simple ignorance, while much of it is the desire to disassociate multi-million dollar film projects with the stigma of comics on which they are based. For instance, Zach Snyder's recent film adaptation of Watchmen contained a tag line in the trailers referring to it as "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time." Yet Watchmen is not a graphic novel. It was 12-issue mini series published from 1986 to 1987. Later Watchmen was collected into a format known as a Trade Paperback.
Trade paperbacks or 'trades' can easily be confused as graphic novels because they both present a seemingly self-contained story in a similar format. The difference being that a trade is the collected version of a story previously published in an ongoing, maxi- or mini-series comic. Whereas graphic novels present an original story.
At the end of the day, they are all comics in some format. Still, a little knowledge is always a good thing.

All of the labels that he explains so cleerly and knowledgously, all this misinformation that he sends out into the world, are the end-results of several years of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, every bit of it originating within the comic book collecting community and not outside. A person of any education, while accepting that these labels exist as such within this tiny enclave, would be embarrassed to be asked to promote them to a larger public, where a 'novel' is not a format and 'trade paperback' just means a larger-than-conventional paperback whose name resulted from old-time practices within the book 'trade.' That's what it meant when I was ordering printing only seven years ago and the printer didn't care what you called the stuff inside it, because content and format are completely separate things. It could be recipes or song lyrics or a novel, or a 'graphic novel' even. And in the larger world, since a novel is not a format but a literary form, which I realize may be too abstract for some comic book minds (think: it can be taken out of one format and lodged in another without altering its internal formal connections), serializing a novel in a newspaper or magazine, prior to its book publication, never disqualified it from being a novel. Will Eisner likewise serialized some of his earlier unquestioned 'graphic novels' (Message from Space, A Life Force), so labelling them as he did so. Marvel comics devised a format into which to put their their 'graphic novels,' that became standard for a while, being 48 or 64 pages- in large size-perfect bound-card covers, and called it their 'graphic novel format.' Comic book fans interpreted that to mean that 'graphic novel' IS a format.

Examiner.com is hardly a site of any authority (in fact I had to go to wikipedia to find out what the hell it is), but the bunch of opinions expressed by this particular citizen journalist are held by a large number of his fellow fans. There was a time when such blather would only be found in xeroxed fanzines and nobody would pay it any attention, but his page turned up for me via a Google news search, not a blog search, while I was investigating Watchmen's DVD reception two days ago. A sensible person arriving at it as I did must wonder how such a load of baloney could ever have come to be. It dents longstanding general knowledge in at least four places, and offends the preposition in two, all of this just within the 'pull-quote.' And it does it while declaring others to be 'ignorant.' Said sensible person might find himself momentarily questioning his or her previously held suppositions about the lately trumpeted value of the so-called 'graphic novel,' or worse, reverting to the earlier held supposition that comics are read by people who are not very bright.

I suppose all pop-culture communities are bound to have their own jargon, but it's very cringeworthy to find fans arguing that the larger society has got it wrong when they themselves have mangled it out of shape in just three or four cultural generations. My inclination is to feel as Alan felt when I quoted him above, and to say: they're not with me; I came in alone.

who watches the Watchmen? Eddie Campbell finally gets around to it.

'Watchmen' dominates video charts

The action hit "Watchmen," from Warner Home Video, shot to the top of the national home video sales and rental charts its first week in stores, with 36% of its total unit sales coming from the high-definition edition.

Firstly, the hullaballoo about Mahnhattan's willy was completely unnecessary, and the product of small minds. It's no big deal and I wish I hadn't commented on the comments of the fanboy forums, where far too much was made of it. There are annoying things in the movie and that isn't one of them. And there are more annoying problems with the reviews of the movie, for instance this new one:

Watchmen is too faithful to Alan Moore's book, writes Paul Owen on the Guardian Film Blog

Zack Snyder told the Guardian earlier this week that his version of Alan Moore's comic novel was 'not really a movie, in the traditional sense'. I wish it had been
At times this labour of love seemed like a shot-for-shot adaptation of the comic, with as little as possible squeezed out during its lengthy running time. Does it work as a movie? Does it work independently of its source material?... my feeling is that it does not. Anyone putting Watchmen into the DVD player unfamiliar with the comic and what it was trying to do might well be left baffled by the plot and alienated by some of its imagery and themes. Enjoyable as it is to see Rorschach snarl at his fellow prisoners "You're locked in here with me", for example, this whole jail sequence could have safely been deleted without interfering with the plot.
Most importantly, some things that don't necessarily seem ridiculous in comics – superheroes' physiques, their costumes, capes, secret identities and underground lairs – seem much more silly on screen, when brought to life by real human beings. The leap of imagination or suspension of disbelief is much more difficult to make in films than in comics. And Watchmen does not do enough to make these aspects of the film credible to the general viewer.

Separating the points, firstly: It's a very smalltown reviewer who only concerns himself with what the commonplace viewer is likely to accept. A bigger person would lead the way and casually attempt to influence taste. I would certainly have expected more from a writer in the Guardian, whether online or off.
Secondly, there is a great deal of the book that can arguably be left to one side for the purpose of a movie; Rorschach in jail is not part of that. 'Springing' Rorschach is the hinge upon which the drama turns. His refusal to give in must be pushed to its very limit, even in the face of brutal murder in jail, before decisive action is taken by others to influence the course of events.
Third, the business about the exaggerations of the comic books not taking well to the screen is palpably untrue. All action movies now are comic book movies, even those that didn't originate in the funny books, such as Die Hard and James Bond. Even the Bourne movies might as well have strip cartoon origins for all that they respect the rules of physics. The comedies even moreso. Jim Carrey is a walking cartoon; so is Eddie Murphy. The fact is that movies, insofar as they are all about spectacle, are more likely to have their antecedents in the circus and street parades than in books. Costumes and tricks of the eye are the very essence of movies, or at least one strain of them, from Georges Méliès to George Lucas. Speaking purely theoretically, a comic book is as likely to provide the stuff of a successful movie as any other source material.

Now, as to the problems. In spite of all I've heard, if the movie is weak, it is categorically NOT because of its faithfulness to the original. I found myself continually wondering if the adapters had completely understood the original. For example they retain the line "(Blake) saw the true face of the twentieth century and he chose to become a reflection, a parody, of it. No one else saw the joke" but they do not, as does the book, combine those words with the image of the Vietnamese woman bottling his face. They do show that in its proper place in Manhattan's memory, and the result is a gash in Blake's cheek. But the whole point of the act of violence was that it transformed the permanent expression on his face into a cruel sneer. Blake does not have this in the movie. Small things like this say a great deal symbolically. Blake has changed from the arrogant jocular chancer of his youth in the gaudy yellow clown suit, to the vicious cynic of a politically more complicated time. A similar amount of thought went into Rorschach's mask in the book: "Viscous fluids between two layers latex heat and pressure sensitive. Customer young girl, never collected order, said dress looked ugly. Wrong. Not ugly at all. Black and white, moving, changing shape. But not mixing. No gray." Then it turned out the woman who ordered the special dress was real life Kitty Genovese. I'll admit this is perhaps much too complicated for a film, but the business about 'black and white, no grey' says a huge amount in a very small space, and they didn't really get into Rorschach's world view in other ways. It would have made the mask a potent symbol and carried more weight than adding in the completely new action of him putting a cleaver in the child murderer's head four or five times, which is no more or less meaningful than all the other acts of violence.
Then there is Rorschach's diary. In the book the diary has the first and last words. Perhaps a crucial scene has been eliminated, to be reinstated in the director's cut, in which we see him actually writing in the diary, or perhaps I just closed my eye and missed it. Otherwise his words exist only as a voice-over, so that when an actual book-diary turns up at the end, I was a little surprised. I had presumed from its absence that it was going to be one of things they were cutting out.
Then there's all the violent stuff that has been added in, as I referred to above. In the movie version of the fight with Laurie and Dan in the alley with five thugs, we now see ten thugs and they are all brutally dealt with. One has his arm snapped in two by Dan, another gets stabbed in the throat by Laurie. I must say I was shocked. In other places, Dan is horrified at the violent acts of Rorschach breaking a thug's fingers to get info and The Comedian's violent dispersion of protesters; it makes no sense. And why do the thugs attack one at a time, apart from the cinematic need for each act of violence to be clearly outlined? In the book the point of the scene was to create an oddly humorous sexual frisson, as they lean back against the wall and the first thing she thinks of is to light a cigarette. You'd need to be a nut job to be up for humour after seeing the guy with the knife in his throat. More added violence in the attempt on Veidt's life. Not only his assistant as in the book, but now three politicos also, as Veitd ducks behind them in what looks like a cowardly maoneuvre. In the movies, meaning will always be secondary to spectacle, and the favourite spectacle of our miserable age is the spectacle of hurt.

And this movie is very spectacular, in many places, especially the sequence on Mars, and the owlship in flight and it is also, I would say, the best adaptation of Alan Moore to the big screen. But all through it I felt ill-at-ease. You know that feeling, when you have a visitor in your house and he's going around manhandling all your things.

i believe I have lately admitted to myself that I do not care for Hollywood and its product, and I have resolved that before i start advancing into old age i should allow myself to be more opinionated. When You see comic book content having to be dumbed down in order to be turned into movies, you know that something is wrong with the world. To start with, what's all this stupid business about giving Dr. Manhattan a circumcision, when he was not portrayed thus in the book, and turning him into beefcake? He was based on the classical ideal of proportions expounded in Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man:


The circumcision is therefore another slice of American baloney. To suggest that he made himself thus because, faced with unlimited choices, he chose that which was fashionable (a justification I have just read on a discussion forum), is to turn a sophisticated idea into a commonplace one. Man imitates the gods after all, not the other way around. And all that musclebound stuff came in when the Image artists started referencing the body-building mags. In Classical anatomy, that look was reserved only for Hercules.

email from Hayley Campbell: (WATCHMEN SPOILER ALERT)

cal's right, it really is sparta.

saw watchmen yesterday.

the first five minutes are amazing. in the credits they do 5 second bits about what happened in the past. there's dollar bill slumped against the bank, his cape caught in the revolving door (the one he wouldn't have designed for himself only the bank wanted something iconic, remember?). there's mothman being dragged off to the loony bin. there's silhouette kissing a pretty nurse at the end of the war then being found dead in bed with her, old fashioned flash bulbs exploding above them. the design of it all is so perfect it's gobsmacking.

then it starts. most of it is such a carbon copy of the book that some of what alan's saying gets across by accident. it's kind of like someone with no sense of humour retelling a joke he heard once. some lines are taken out of context and you remember them from the book so you KNOW they're a good line, you KNOW they made sense and had a purpose once but without that it's probably just another 'i gave birth to the 20th century'. i wonder if the movie makes a glimmer of sense to someone who's never read it. i re-read it so recently that i'm not sure if stuff was in the film or if i just remember it so vividly from the book.

i liked the way the violence in the book was implied rather than seen. the worst we saw was a man getting his fingers bent backwards. in the movie we see arms broken in half, the skin splitting open and bone shards shooting past the camera. when they fight the comedian in the beginning to toss him out the window it's as if his entire apartment has been dipped in liquid nitrogen -- they throw him against a wall and it shatters. they slam him against what looks like a marble bench top and he leaves a head-shaped hole. everyone seems to be full of 90 pints of blood. when the dogs fight each other for a bone in the book it's just a long bone - it's up to us to realise the true horror of it all. in the movie, it's a leg bone with a frilly sock and a small pink shoe on the end. it's all there, it's just so fucking obvious.

but the worst bit - the bit that keeps replaying in my mind which means i can't look away - was the sex in the owl ship. jesus fucking christ. WHO'S FUCKING IDEA WAS IT to play 'hallelujah' when poor ol' dan sorts out his willy problems? i would have suggested that in the meeting as a JOKE. HALLELUJAH HE'S FINALLY NAILING THE SILK SPECTRE! the bird who plays the silk spectre, incidentally, is one of the worst actresses i've seen in a long time. but back to the sex scene: it goes on for ages. i think they used every verse and chorus in the cohen song and we all know that goes on for 3 weeks. there's the close-up of spectre coming against the dashboard, pull-out (oo-er) to a wide shot of nite owl thrusting just as the choir sings 'hallelujah'. the timing. they did it on purpose. oh it's awful. it's so, so awful. offensively obvious the lot of it.

there were lots of things, little human details, that were skimmed over for the sake of time (it wasn't janey's watch jon went back to get - the one that got broken on the pier - it was his own, we don't see the psychiatrist having problems with his wife, we don't get to listen to the newsstand vendor telling us what he thinks, nor do we see kovacs going to buy his new frontiersman so that when rorschach's face is revealed you didn't see enough of him to go 'oh, he's that guy.') but if they cut the bogus fight scenes in half they could have fit so much more stuff in. my favourite bits in the book were the tiny details. when veidt says 'bubastis...forgive me' and she says 'owr?' before she's exploded. i liked that. in the movie he says 'sorry, girl.' but she's so busy menacing dr manhattan she doesn't notice.

they changed the ending. i think it probably makes more sense. it's a far more likely scenario (as comics go) than having an island full of artists designing a cthulhu. but it wasn't as ridiculous and lovable. i wanted a squid, i just got another BANG! THWAP! BOOM! explosion. once again the movie has turned out more comicbooky than the comic ever was.

but the thing i think most reviewers are missing is that dr manhattan has no scrotum. it's amazing. he's a eunuch. that's why laurie left him, i reckon.

and that's my two cents.

Thanks for letting me use it, Hales.

In summary, I wouldn't say that a good movie is an impossibility. In the realm of the classics, Branagh made a great version of Hamlet that was able to incorporate old brit tv stand-up comic, Ken Dodd as Yorick. Negative reviews were few and nitpicky. And in the popular realm, J K Rowling stuck to her guns and now there is a whole series of Harry Potter movies that, once again barring a few nitpickers, has not failed to please the fans. And I guess that's what keeps fools like me from completely writing off the idea of the screen adaptation, apart from the fact that the world of comics is about as dumb a world as you could hope not to live in. However, I believe that trying to make superheroes, which are but graphic symbols, stylised and colour-coded, look real on film, is as absurd as the person dressed up as Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. High camp is the only way to do it, like the old Batman tv show, which I loved as a kid. Scenes like the Penguin fixing the races by throwing itching powder around the stables so that several horses had to be 'scratched'. Or Batman calling police headquarters to say that he was trapped in a giant cookery book at the corner of Broadway and Fifth. (or some such coordinates). Not that I could be bothered watching them again, mind you. I'd rather be thumped on the top of my head.