Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

yeah these takes don't register with me at all. it's like you're watching a different show.

If we're thinking about the same character I'd say they are not an exception, even if their ultimate fate isn't the same laughable fridging that is doled out to near every other black character on this show. Okay just saying that is a spoiler but this thread is already full of them and the person we're trying to hide them from doesn't seem like they're keen to continue so whatever.

And even if it didn't happen frequently enough to be a reoccuring pattern (I don't think one lone example makes what I said blatantly untrue but it's ultimately just my opinion)... the one egregious example I can think of (not the first but SECOND time it happens in Angela's backstory!) is so, so unforgivably stupid, pointless and awful that I'm not willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt on the matter. And I say that as someone who still ultimately enjoyed this show and was actually pretty eagerly anticipating it ever since it's initial announcement, compared to the venomous initial reactions on here and frankly everywhere online from ardent Lindelof haters and Alan Moore comic rights evangelists (not that I disagree with either position necessarily lol).

so here's the thing: I'm a fan of Hong Chau after seeing her in Driveways so I'm inclined to try one more episode to see what she does in this, at which point I suppose i'm at the tipping point of "you're not coming here for the hunting" and I'm either gonna cope with the shitty dialogue and plotting and just enjoy the acting and the fx or else i guess i've tried my best.

Smart is fun in the role! Irons is fun in the role! Both of them have abysmal scripting! Basically everyone is great in the role! Basically everyone has shitty writing! Tons of stupid shit going on here with little to justify it other than a definite sense of "we gotta get to the point where all our story points are in place so we can have the two hours that fit within the parameters we've very arbitrarily and sloppily laid out."

I don't recall anything off about Smart's dialogue.

not to be too much of an asshole there; this is all subjective of course.

ulysses do you enjoy the series of Noah Hawley, if you do I think it would explain a lot

(also not to be an asshole, just trying to see if we simply process televisual entertainment in opposite ways)

that's cool, not trying to be combative.

I have mixed responses to Hawley: I liked the first two seasons of Fargo A LOT and then season three tipped all the way into sadism and formula and lost me. I tried REAL hard to like Legion but it lost me after like two episodes. I frankly find comparing my issues with Hawley and Lindelhof to be narcissism of small differences; they're basically in the same sandbox. Hawley's strengths are scripting and plotting (which is clearly important to me!) and I would say Lindelhof is a bit better at executing gargantuan action sequences.

should be noted that my poptimist attitude toward music extends to films/television: i generally assume that if I can't find something to like in the work, I'm more at fault than the creator... there's lots to like in DL's Watchmen and I get why it became a watercooler show! I also kinda think it's garbage and I'm not sure I need to fight my way through the 6+ moments per show where I'm audibly muttering "oh COME ON" while on the couch

I don't find them at all similar, I just hate everything Hawley's done and ppl who hate on him seem to often praise Fargo/Legion

that said, I think even staunch Lindelof haters would find something to admire in the Chris Eccleston and Carrie Coon-centric episodes of Leftovers S1 (and virtually all of S2-3)

Huh! They seem remarkably similar to me both in their nerdy choices of subject matter; consistent more-is-better approach to large form/ensemble cast storytelling; emphasis on visuals, murkily red-pill revealing themes and shylaman-esque twists; outrageously good casting and critical love; juvenile and regularly sadistic torture of the characters to the presumed glee of their jaded audience.

Again, two eps of Leftovers burnt me out badly and I would have to watch a few hundred hours of backed up media before I was ready to dip back into that show.

shylaman-esque twists

both an absurd characterization and a good excuse to repost this clip, spoilers for up to mid-s2 of The Leftovers for anyone who cares

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duzZa9Bez8c

sorry, i think you meant to post this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH0DigVw1bA

good dog

I mostly really liked watchmen but I think it’s fair to say the scripts were blarney

Ile tv threads are 90% people talking about how they didn’t watch the show

Ile tv threads are 90% people talking about how they didn’t watch the show

Ile tv threads are 95% people talking about how they didn't watch the show

I don't even own an ile tv thread!

anyway The Leftovers is better than your favorite show, unless your favorite show is Twin Peaks. thank you and goodnight

okay, that's episode four down. Some thoughts:

- I forgot my biggest issue with Lindelof is trust. He creates a hundred nagging "yeah but" situations that he leaves hanging and then surrounds these with MORE questions built atop the earlier questions. You end up hanging on watching just to see how he cleans up the mess... but it's rare that he actually does! Generally there's a number of unlikely twists and/or a deus ex machina and considering this show has a literal deus ex machina baked in, I just realized that I don't much care about the answers behind the questions behind the questions. Or any of these characters! They're well acted but, after over three hours of screentime, they are all still total ciphers.

- Lesser crime but worth considering: there is no reason for this to be a Watchmen story! It might actually be a lot better without the IP or at least be freer to indulge in the story it wants to tell instead of propping it up with something far distant and disconnected.

- Fourth episode title was “If You Don't Like My Story, Write Your Own”. The other option, of course, is just to find a better story so I'm done with this and off to I Will Destroy You.

give it another episode.

no stop it

Episode 6 is the one worth watching. Duck out after that and you don’t miss much.

Yeah, maybe it's best to think of the show as a delivery mechanism for the sixth episode and the Jeremy Irons bits. Dug the squid episode too.

Episode 9 is really the one to watch (shh don't tell)

agree that it’s worth sticking around until ep 6. If you’re still not convinced after that then yeah, you can bail.

it's nine episodes long!

the first like, 5 episodes are largely setup for the climactic final half. but they're good themselves

setup is arguably better than climax in this case

I was disappointed in the last two eps only because they basically became "WELL actually NOW THIS MEANS..." over-exposition and less the exploration of social themes the early eps were.

I May Destroy You is really good btw

absolute king shit for the hack writing the new Watchmen spinoff comic to get outraged at DC interfering with his vision, on ethical grounds, three months before the comic even comes out. respeck nux.

okay that's amazing

xp wait what? i only saw that thing about King spazzing out, confusing Jae Lee for a #comicsgater (which also makes him look stupid anyway, i suppose, but I get the misunderstanding regarding Van Sciver)

Today DC put out an alternate cover to Rorschach by Jae Lee, who has also done covers for comicsgate, a hate group. DC does not consult creators on alternate covers; I reached out to them to express my deep disappointment. Far as I'm concerned this is the cover to Rorschach #1. (posts other tulip cover)

Jae Lee’s “I didn’t even know Comicsgate existed” is pretty obvious bullshit, though.

also lol:

"Like the HBO Watchmen show and very much like the original ‘86 Watchmen, this is a very political work. It’s an angry work. We’re so angry all the time now. We have to do something with that anger. It’s called Rorschach not because of the character Rorschach, but because what you see in these characters tells you more about yourself than about them.”

completely fucking wild coincidence that there's a character called Rorschach in it, whose image appears on both the front cover that he approves of and the one that he doesn't. dude never even knew!

I called this comic Dr. Manhattan because everyone is talking about people getting sick in New York, duh

In the wake of the AT&T takeover, HBO Max flopping, and print DC mysteriously losing loads of money by deciding to pull out of the monopoly distribution system instead of exercising their contractual option allowing them to purchase it outright, DC Comics may be closing down as a publisher altogether at the end of the year.

Before the doors close, the fired-in-2009-to-make-room-for-WB's-Harry-Potter-brand-manager publisher who was directly responsible for repeatedly pulping, axing, or blocking Alan Moore publications during the decade Moore had been tricked back into working for DC, evidently just to fuck with him, is editing a $50 hardcover celebrating how "The ’80‘s were a truly rad time for comic books" in which "DC was killingit." 30 separate issues of the time are included.

The only authors credited are the writer and penciller of two of those 30, Alan Moore and the late Curt Swan.

The hardcover will also include, published legally for the first time ever*, Moore's pitch document for a DCU crossover event, including the possibility for merch based on multiple versions of DC IP. This is also included as a highlight of the solicitation, in lieu of any of the other writers, pencillers, inkers, colourists, layout artists, letterers, plotters or scripters who worked on any of the other 30 completed stories.

Also, the cover of this hardcover is from a 199ish? reprint of the two Moore issues, by the dead guy that drew them, so they don't have to pay anyone.

* reportage notes that this has been "leaked online" before; fuck that, it was circulating in paper APAs before the WWW existed.

buying watchmen in 2020 is like buying steal this book in 1990

"tbh probably unrelated, no one's putting out material doing Watchmen numbers because the best straight-up superhero book isn't going to be THE graphic novel non-comics readers read."

neither is Watchmen in 2019 tbh, even with the TV boost, it ranked mid 20s overall with 110k sold, triple its 2018 numbers. still the best-selling superhero comic though.

((Dav Pilkey's best-selling book was #1 with 1.1 million sold; he also had the #2, #3, #5, #6, #7, #8 and #9 2019 best-sellers, for a total of four million books flogged #copaganda #defundthepolice.

Pilkey's next issue comes out on Tuesday with a 5 million print run

Dan Didio would literally turn red and scream at people if they suggested DC should try to sell one single comic to people who weren't 40+ year old men

I don't know that a singularly popular kid's graphic novel is all that telling about the overall comics market? DC and Marvel don't exist publishing single issues without the direct market, which is not where most of Dog Man sells or where it could ever sell (it sells in big boxes and Amazon).

DC and Marvel could stop publishing floppies and go to an all-OGN lineup also marketing entirely in Target/Wal-Mart/Amazon (or in DC's ideal world, digital only) but that's not really going to be comics as anyone has known them for decades.

(wasn't quoting you to zing you, just for context btw)

Levitz and Berger spent 15 years setting up other distribution channels and audiences and book-format approaches, and Didio scrapped all that, instead of building on it, or even keeping it. Multiple creators and editors have talked about the tantrums he threw in response to suggesting that DC expand to kids graphic novels - kids are literally a growth market for superheroes, but he preferred to sell nine copies of the same floppy to one 50-year-old man than one million copies of a 96-pager to a million families and libraries. New audiences will go to comic shops once they actually read comics.

(Levitz was over-cautious and hobbled various attempts to sell OGNs to teen girls and manga readers too of course, but he didn't break actual doors over the proposals)

DC has been doing those Super Hero Girls GNs recently (unless they gave up on those)?

DC started to expand their all ages offerings when Didio was still in charge - and he was EIC or whatever when they were trying to push the 5G initiative that was controversial because it wasn't just going to be the same old same old. Whereas the new regime is rather pointedly moving in the opposite direction, much more traditionalist in superhero presentation.

I don't know the extent to which Didio was opposed to all ages stuff (my default attitude is that I dislike and distrust everyone at Marvel and DC whose job is to sell their product) but what I've heard from people who'd have some idea is that his objection was to the move away from single issues/printing at all to a digital/OGN format that the new regime seems to favor. If you're going to keep publishing single issues, you need those 50-year old men. (They're not the primary demographic buying anymore, but they do make up a bigger chunk of the whales that keep stores in business.)

Comics as readers know them can't exist without the direct market - like, we're not a notable account and our new comic wall in one location is 60 feet long @ five shelves high. That kind of space will not ever be given to comics in the mass market. They're fragile, they're difficult to order, buyers have high expectations in terms of service.

It should be both, obviously - but the two concepts as markets don't overlap much (as I said about Dog Man).

Dog Man is good stuff (“Petey” is a truly great character) but I don’t really think of it as comics.

I don't know the extent to which Didio was opposed to all ages stuff

There was a really detailed account from one of the driven-out female editors in the last two weeks, that I can't find now. Here's a classic though, even more direct than I remembered:

Asked by Yang if he had tried to do an all-ages book with a franchise character, Paul Pope said he did test the waters, only to be knocked back. "Batman Year 100 did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do 'Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]', this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch... and he said 'You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do 'Scooby-Doo.' And I thought, 'I guess we just broke up.'"

So he did his Kamandi ideas as Battling Boy instead, an OGN that he owned the copyright on, and had an NYT #1 bestseller, touring art exhibition, and various spin-off books.

(Then got cancelled for sexual creepery and various drunken assaults. If only he'd been an editor, Didio woulda backed him!)



DC started to expand their all ages offerings when Didio was still in charge

Yeah, but in his last year, after 16 years there, with imprints that were axed after a fistful of months, and the editor who ran them has now been appointed EiC after he's gone, all of which might point to it not representing a major sea change in his attitude