Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

I mostly mean as far as supporting the continuation of reboots of IP as pop culture's preferred way of exploring new ideas with old clothing, which I'm kinda over.

As a "Storytelling is hard" example: I'm currently fighting through the third episode of "Adult Material" (on HBO in December) and that's another example where the quality of the separate parts doesn't seem to be adding up to an enjoyable show for me. The acting is good, the scripting is okay, the themes are challenging but they're edging a little too far into brutal for my taste (much of the plot hinges on an anal prolapse) and the story is increasingly knotty. I watch a lot of teevee but I suppose I require total narrative cohesion to fully buy into a show.

(Lovecraft Country may be a relevant comparison here).

It’s based on a recent novel, AFAIK

but she has no cthulu mythos exposure and considers anything even horror-adjacent to be unwatchable

Other than the name and the first episode (maybe), it has pretty much no connection to cthulu mythos.

We recently got HBO, via a free promo... watched I May Destroy You (which was excellent); caught up on Insecure; and now watching this crazy docuseries about the McDonald’s Monopoly racketeering scheme.

I definitely considered the plot and presentation unnecessarily convoluted and the writing awash in far-fetched cliffhanger and punchline-based dialogue.

I agree with this but it's a personal preference for me and I don't know that it makes Watchmen bad, I find the HBO house style these days often convoluted and mistaking clever for interesting (couldn't stand Westworld either). Lovecraft Country is the first HBO show in years to hook me, partially because it's more human-level and because I enjoyed the book so much. (Have not tried Succession yet.)

Succession rules, and I say this as someone who actively wanted to hate it.

Lovecraft Country is indeed an adaptation of a book and it’s more Lovecraftian Country, in both senses: full of monsters, and full of racist monsters

I think the idea that serious issues like the Tulsa massacre can only be contextualized via serious art and not genre fiction ignores how we weave the fabric of history into our stories and how that provides context in our time. We can have infinitely many films and tv shows that acknowledge Nazis and have absurdities like zombie civil war southerners that are so halfassed in execution but cement “oh, that’s the bad guy” because of historical shorthand. But when it comes to things we hold deep reverence for, it’s suddenly a grievous bastardization of history if a retelling doesn’t fit into an Oscar-winning dramatic formula

not to mention that, silly genre trappings or not, the depiction was apparently impactful/effective enough to inspire a pretty significant resurgence of interest in the event

Do all of these episodes have post credits scenes? I just left a videofile running while I went out of the room and found an extra scene on the penultimate one.

Only one does

if you don't count the one where Dr. Manhattan conks Rorschach with an oar

They were told white men ‘wouldn’t relate to’ the Tulsa Race Massacre. Then came ‘Watchmen’ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-05-26/tulsa-race-massacre-watchmen-lovecraft-country-documentaries

Season 2 dropped:

https://i.imgur.com/cCBVscr.jpg

grim

ironically, Alan Moore personally approved that one
#sicbait

Bookstore (inc online) figures for graphic novels in 2020 are out: Watchmen (in paperback) was the best-selling superhero book of the year, and DC’s #1 seller overall. (Also its 19th, in hardcover.)

32 years after DC told Alan Moore to go and get his fuckin’ shinebox, their 8th and 10th best-sellers were also written by him in the 1980s (#8 owned by AT&T, #10 also stolen). DC only had two books last year that sold close to half as many copies of Watchmen, and as their #1 seller, Watchmen was the 57th-best-selling comic on the chart overall.

(DC were the #7 publisher; Marvel are at #16, with $1.3 million total in retail sales, and their top title moving 9700 copies. They only placed six books in the top 750, four of which are Star Wars comics, and two of those are “Darth Vader volume 1”, but probably different Darth Vader volume 1s.)

What was #8?

The Killing Joke probably

Yep; ten of DC’s top twenty are batbooks.

Not to cast doubt, but would you mind linking to the data? I'm curious about everything that's selling.

I haven't seen it but I'm going to guess that Dog Man and similar YA + manga make up most of the top spots.

Marvel's constant reboots and new crossovers (and letting titles fall out of print for months at a time) keeps them from having an always-selling core like the Batfamily titles that keep DC's numbers afloat.

of course DC's masterful handling of the IP has had a major effect on the continuing sales of the original book

Certainly explains why they have so many Gardner Fox, Wm Moulton Marston and Ostrander/Yale collections flying off the shelves.

haven't seen it but I'm going to guess that Dog Man and similar YA + manga make up most of the top spots.

One manga is at #18 (My Hero Academia book one), the rest of the top twenty is Dog Man, Raina and other kids or YA.

Dog Man’s ten volumes alone are 13% of all comics sold through bookshop-type retail (& that’s probably a lesser fraction of what copawganda moves to libraries and direct through Scholastic), and only displaced from the top ten at #5 and #8. Pilkey did 4.2 million units, Raina 1.3.