HBO premieres their long-awaited Watchmen TV series this weekend, and even if you know that it used to be a comic book and is a cornerstone of modern geek culture, you still might be confused by how it all fits together. Don’t worry, dear reader, this Geeksplainer will get you up to speed on everything Watchmen-related. Note that spoilers for the original series and spin-offs follow.
What Is Watchmen?
Originally published as a stand-alone 12 issue limited series from DC Comics in 1986, Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, tells the story of an alternate Earth in the 1980s and the costumed heroes that lived there.
In the book, the Cold War continues to rage, but the world is very different – clean lithium batteries have eliminated fossil fuels, and we won the Vietnam War. A small number of costumed vigilantes operated in the 1960s and 1970s, with names like Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and the Comedian.
Only one of these heroes has superhuman abilities. Jon Osterman, known as “Doctor Manhattan,” was the victim of a scientific accident that reduced his body to individual atomic particles before reassembling them. Possessed of godlike powers, he’s behind many of the breakthroughs that have brought the world to where it is. He’s also increasingly detached from the needs and emotions of ordinary humans.
The story starts with the mysterious murder of the Comedian, an act that brings several current and former vigilantes together to get to the bottom of it. This is a grotesque oversimplification, but it’s nearly impossible to sum up Watchmen in just a few paragraphs. It’s a groundbreakingly dense and layered take on superheroes that was like nothing that had been done before.
The book’s climax reveals Adrian Veidt, the former hero known as Ozymandias, as the mastermind behind the events. His plan – to fake an alien invasion and unite all of Earth’s civilizations against a common enemy – involves teleporting a massive alien carcass into Times Square and releasing a psychic pulse that murders half the city. And it works! Unlike many superhero stories, the world is truly changed at the end of Watchmen, not returned to the status quo.
How Was It Created?
Alan Moore began working for DC Comics in 1983, taking over the poor-selling Saga of the Swamp Thing. The book quickly became a critical and commercial success, inspiring DC to take more risks and hire a number of British writers to take over flagging characters. They also let Moore write fill-ins for other books and demonstrate his range.
That same year, the company acquired the intellectual property of Charlton Comics, a one-time competitor that published out of Derby, Connecticut. DC was all about this kind of move in the 80s, absorbing Fawcett and others into their universe. The Charlton heroes – Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, the Question and others – inspired Moore to write a treatment called Who Killed the Peacemaker?, a reimagining of their universe as a murder mystery.
DC managing editor Dick Giordano asked Moore to replace the Charlton characters, because the company had plans for them. He agreed, and with artist Dave Gibbons began building the world of what would be called Watchmen, after the Latin phrase “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Moore wrote notoriously dense scripts – Gibbons says that the first issue measured over 100 pages – and that detail made its way into the comic, with its precise structure and extensive supporting cast. When DC couldn’t pre-sell ad space in early issues, they tapped the team to create backmatter in the form of newspaper articles and other material, which would become a trademark of the series.
Who Owns Watchmen?
Short answer: DC Comics, but it’s complicated.
Most of the work published by the big companies is owned by them – if you create a new character in an existing book, you can get some royalties, depending on your contract, but the actual intellectual property is theirs. They can kill the character, make them evil, or strip them down to their undies in the middle of Times Square and the creator can’t do anything about it.
However, because Moore and Gibbons created the cast and world of Watchmen (even though they were based on the Charlton characters), they could argue their right to ownership. So DC offered them a contract before the book was published that would grant them an 8% royalty on sales in perpetuity, and if the book was out of print for a year the rights would revert back to the duo to do with what they will.
Obviously, that never happened. Watchmen has been a perennial best-seller for DC for the last three decades, and has sold millions of copies. They’ll never let it go. But for many years, they seemed content to just let it earn money passively. That all changed in 2012 with Before Watchmen.
What Was Before Watchmen?
Coming off of 2009’s Watchmen movie, DC decided that letting the IP of these characters sit was wasteful, so they announced a slate of seven prequel series, each of which focused on one of the original story’s characters. Moore, who by this point had left DC incredibly acrimoniously, wanted nothing to do with the project, which would be called Before Watchmen. Gibbons was more diplomatic about it, but also did not participate.
DC brought in many of their highest-profile creators for these books, including Darwyn Cooke, Adam Hughes and Brian Azzarello. While a huge amount of technical skill went into the comics, they didn’t actually accomplish anything. Moore and Gibbons had carefully laid out their fictional world, and although it was interesting to see these characters interpreted by different creators, most of the books seemed disposable at best.
Fan response wasn’t great – they sold decently but nobody was really clamoring for more, and DC would leave Watchmen alone for a few years, only to return to it in a way that many perceived as even more disrespectful with Doomsday Clock.
What Is Doomsday Clock?
Previous Watchmen spin-offs still kept the story in its own segregated universe. But the events of DC Comics: Rebirth, where some mysterious force “stole ten years” from history and Batman found the Comedian’s bloody button on the floor of the Batcave, changed all that. The following “The Button” storyline made it official, with Doctor Manhattan showing up at the end.
This led into Doomsday Clock, a 12-issue miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank that apes Watchmen in numerous formalist ways – nine-panel grids, in-universe backmatter – while telling a story of several of that book’s main characters traveling to the main DC Universe and causing trouble.
11 out of 12 issues have been published at press time – the book was originally supposed to end in December of 2018 but is running a full year late. In the book, which was promised to “have an impact on the entire DC Universe” like all of their other events do, Ozymandias follows Dr. Manhattan to the world of Superman and Batman, which is contending with a crisis of its own as a conspiracy theory about superhumans created by the U.S. government threatens to tear apart international relations.
Whether the Watchmen characters will stick around after Doomsday Clock ends is anybody’s guess, but we can’t see how that would work out. The book has consistently been one of DC’s top sellers, despite delays.
How Did The Movie Get Made?
Hollywood interest in Watchmen started up shortly after the book began, with Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver buying the rights for Fox in 1986. Alan Moore declined to write the screenplay, and it languished for a few years. Through most of the 1990s, maverick British director Terry Gilliam was attached to direct, with a $100 million budget that he was unable to raise.
In 2001, writer David Hayter (yes, the voice of Solid Snake) was brought in to pen a new script. For a brief, terrifying while Michael Bay was hired as the director, later being replaced by Darren Aronofsky. Eventually, impressed by 300 (itself a comic adaptation), the studio chose Zack Snyder to helm the movie.
The script got another rewrite and filming began in 2007 with a $120 million budget. The screenplay followed the events of the comic closely, although it had to pare away a lot of the detail so they could make room for longer fight scenes. The movie was released in March of 2009 and had a strong opening weekend, but began to fall off precipitously week after week, eventually ending its theatrical run with just over $107 million grossed. Critical response was split, with some impressed by the audacity of the effort while others criticizing the overwhelming lack of subtlety Snyder brought to the project.
What Is The TV Show About?
Wisely, HBO showrunner Damon Lindelof (probably best known for Lost) isn’t trying to adapt the source material once more. Instead, Watchmen takes place thirty years after Veidt’s scheme, and explores how the world changes afterwards. The series moves away from New York and instead takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Uncompromising vigilante Rorschach, considered the hero of the original book by people who spend too much time on Reddit, is now an icon for white supremacist movements who hide their identities underneath his iconic inkblot masks. In response, the town’s police officers begin hiding their identities themselves, most notably a young detective who starts calling herself Sister Night.
Instead of slavishly mimicking the source material, which failed miserably in the Snyder film, Lindelof instead is using the tools that Moore and Gibbons made to understand how superheroes would work in the real world to ask and answer different questions, ones more relevant to the current day. Initial critical response is overwhelmingly positive, so we’ll see if this is the first post-Watchmen project that lives up to the original.
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