Let’s start with that famous thing Dr. Manhattan says. Yes, Dr. Manhattan, the late-’50s atomic physicist, born Jon Osterman, who accidentally locks himself in an intrinsic field subtractor and has his, uh, intrinsic field subtracted. (That’s a made-up thing. Probably.) The guy who is thereby reborn as a startlingly blue and usually naked demigod capable of manipulating atoms and processing nonlinear time. The guy who prompts a smug newscaster to proclaim, “The Superman exists, and he’s American.” The guy who, indeed, helps the United States win the Vietnam War (!) in this particular superhero-comic alternate history, propelling President Richard Nixon to multiple (!!) reelections. The guy who years later unwinds after a rough talk-show appearance (he is accused of giving all his coworkers and lovers cancer) by teleporting to Mars (!!!) and brooding at incredible length and, if you’re into this sort of thing, depth.
Yeah. Him. The Walking Galaxy Brain guy. The Twitter meme guy.
While that is, clearly, a famous thing Dr. Manhattan says, let’s start with something else. Because it turns out that meme is a weird mash-up pairing an originally wordless panel from Watchmen—the deified 12-issue comic book series about “masked avengers” and global calamity first published in 1986-87 and credited to Alan Moore (writer), Dave Gibbons (illustrator/letterer), and John Higgins (colorist)—with dialogue from Zack Snyder’s much-derided 2009 Watchmen movie. (Which we will discuss as little as possible in this space, lest you get fed up and try to teleport yourself to Mars.) So forget it.
Let’s also not start with Dr. Manhattan’s suspiciously treacly every person is a miracle speech, which he gives his estranged girlfriend Laurie Juspeczyk (a.k.a. Silk Spectre II, daughter of the original) after teleporting her to Mars, also, so that they might debate the future (or lack thereof) of mankind. Though Watchmen introduces us to many other costumed antiheroes, from the Comedian (a nihilist war criminal and attempted rapist) to Nite Owl (a dad-bod try-hard who dabbles in ornithology) to Ozymandias (a pompous über-capitalist billed as “the smartest man in the world”), only the giant blue guy has actual superpowers, for all the good that does him, or us. His miracle speech is also in the movie (sorry), in addition to being quite popular on Pinterest and the like, though its value as motivational fodder (Dr. Manhattan decides to return to Earth and help save mankind) is undercut by the final issue of Watchmen, which kicks off with six consecutive pages of corpses. Sheesh. Forget that, too.
No, let’s start with this.
That smile: very suspicious. He almost never smiles. Nobody in Watchmen smiles much, in any medium, and the very phrase in any medium is where the problem starts and never ends. The comics are set primarily in full nuclear-panic 1985, albeit with copious multigenerational flashbacks and a complex plot in which the government has outlawed masked heroes entirely, though Dr. Manhattan gets grandfathered in, given that he (theoretically) acts as a one-man nuclear deterrent and his grasp of nonlinear time is such that he can also basically see the future. (Minus the “six pages of corpses” thing, but nobody’s perfect.) So does that mean the beaming blue guy in the mid-’80s comic book has already watched the shrill 2009 movie and read the various comics spinoffs (that a tempestuous and ever-quotable Moore especially despised) and binged the new 2019 HBO series? What if that stinks, too? Would Dr. Manhattan not be smiling at all, or smiling wider than ever?
Created by Damon Lindelof and anchored by a blockbuster cast spanning from Regina King to Jeremy Irons to Don Johnson, HBO’s Watchmen premieres Sunday and has inspired much excitement and, yes, suspicion. Whereas the movie (sorry) was a brutally faithful adaptation of the source material, the prestige-TV version is an expanded-universe deal (similar to Lindelof’s beloved HBO jam The Leftovers) that will attempt to grapple with a bewilderingly sprawling metaphysical universe, much like Lindelof’s beloved (for the beginning) and derided (for the ending) Lost. It looks dark, and grim, and hellbent on providing us with Trenchant Sociopolitical Commentary, which is all as you’d fear and/or expect. It also appears to be very much its own rabid animal that treats the comics as a sandbox, not a rigid blueprint. Just as you might’ve hoped.
The most comics-recognizable face in the HBO trailer belongs to Rorschach, an ultraviolent vigilante (née Walter Joseph Kovacs) with a creepy-cool inkblot mask with mutating blobs of black and white that never, ever betray a shade of gray. Unfortunately, in the TV show, he appears to have inspired a white-supremacist death cult, which, also unfortunately, tracks somewhat with his character in the comics. Lindelof has admitted that “on a meta, pretentious level,” it interested him to write a Watchmen appropriation that itself involves the far-right appropriation of one of Watchmen’s main characters. I can think of a few people who are probably way less psyched about it.
“The original is something that we always saw as standing alone, and it never in our mind required prequels or sequels or homages or pastiches or anything like that,” Gibbons told Deadline in October 2018, ostensibly as early promo for the HBO series that he described as “exciting, entertaining, and absolutely worthwhile” through visibly gritted teeth. “It isn’t that we thought it should be treated with great reverence. It’s just that we thought, if you’ve done something right, just leave it alone.”
Not in 2019, bub. Returning to the original Watchmen comics now, the highest possible compliment you can pay this story is that it’s brashly, grotesquely unfilmable. The second-highest compliment is that very talented people keep trying. That is also, of course, arguably the biggest possible insult.
The collected 1987 Watchmen is often heralded as the single greatest graphic novel of all time, and was famously included on Time’s 100 best novels of all time, period, slotted alphabetically between Under the Volcano and White Noise. Last week, I took my copy of Watchmen to my mechanic, who immediately began quoting the sad tale of the great clown Pagliacci; my 8-year-old son keeps trying to read it as well, entranced by the smiley face on the cover, which means that I need to get my copy out of the house ASAP. This story has, to put it mildly, endured. In 2016, the BBC further praised it as “the moment comic books grew up,” which is a dangerous notion, as anyone who’s slogged through Joker—or for that matter most movies in the super-gnarly DC Comics Extended Universe—will tell you once they’ve scraped themselves off the floor.
Alan Moore, the reclusive engine also behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and other comics milestones, has, let’s say, a strained relationship with perhaps his finest work, or more accurately a nonexistent relationship with anyone foolhardy enough to try adapting or expanding his finest work. “I do not want to see it prostituted—this has always been my position,” he told the comics site Bleeding Cool in 2010. “I don’t want to see it prostituted and made into a run of cheap books that are nothing like the original Watchmen, which, anyway, wouldn’t work if it was dismantled. Those characters only work as an ensemble. A comic book about Dr. Manhattan would be really obtuse and boring. A comic book about Rorschach would be really miserable.”
Moore’s not wrong; on matters of sheer narrative impact, he rarely is. The full tale of his seemingly lifelong battle with DC Comics is as complex as it is dismaying as it is grimly amusing. (The part when he leaves the company and starts his own comics imprint, only to watch DC buy that imprint’s parent company, is especially hilarious.) Suffice it to say that he wanted nothing to do with the Watchmen movie in 2009, and wants nothing to do with the Watchmen HBO show now. (Even HBO conceded that he was “not thrilled.”) As he told The Guardian in ’09:
”There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn’t do in any other medium,” he says, with just a hint of the exasperated schoolteacher. “Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it’s just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience—it’s a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It’s not the same when you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.”
The graphic novel is plenty horrible and sensationalist and unpleasant on its own. There are masked heroes, yes, but there is also wanton murder and genocide and a pirate raft of bloated corpses and the fuckin’ squid thing and some weird sex stuff that in the movie got even weirder. (Sorry, sorry, sorry.)
Watchmen is also, as a tactile universe, thrillingly overwhelming, and every panel bursts with vital information. Read the signs and the newspaper headlines and the copious graffiti. Watch for reflections in the windows and puddles and doorknobs. Luxuriate in the pirate-themed comic-within-the-comic (hence the corpse raft). Every page is a basket of rancid Easter eggs. Every offhand reference to the locksmith company’s name, every salvo in the ferocious headline war between the right-wing and left-wing paper, every radiation symbol slapped on a building deep in the background pushes you closer to the most vivid and disturbing vision of Armageddon imaginable, before or since. It’s Thanos via Cronenberg. It’s revolting. It is also, as an issue-by-issue proposition, transfixing, and the Tolstoy-deep origin stories for Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan in particular.
Ten years on, the Watchmen movie is best remembered for its ultra-lurid fixation on Rorschach: It’s basically a $130-odd-million excuse to film the “you’re locked in here with me” scene. Rereading the comics now, he is definitely the most, ah, relatable character in this dystopian age of superhero fatigue and grim-reboot overload: The graphic novel begins with an excerpt from his diary, which reads, “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.”
Sound familiar? Sound fun? To describe yourself as “rooting for” anyone in this universe is perverse, but Rorschach is an admirably precise shade of deplorable, and a TV show devoted to the idea that treating him like a hero automatically turns you into a villain shows more promise, on paper, than most attempts to bolster the Watchmen canon. In a 2019 landscape menaced by outright horrific superhero movies—see Joker or Brightburn, or maybe don’t—and stylishly cynical deconstructions like the Amazon Prime series The Boys, Rorschach’s voice is most definitely the loudest in the room, overwhelmingly for ill, though that sort of nausea can be effectively weaponized. Not by Zack Snyder, certainly. But possibly by Regina King.
The original graphic novel is a bracing reminder that HBO’s Watchmen is a slap in the face, just like all the threatened adaptations and reimaginings that have come before it. (“Fuck you guys, I’m doing it anyway,” is how Lindelof describes his new philosophy, citing Moore, of course, as his inspiration for that, too.) Spoilers are an arcane notion for a story this old and hard-coded into the global superhero consciousness, but let’s just say the graphic novel climaxes with our none-too-surprising supervillain reclining in a secret lair and staring at a giant bank of television screens, which is what supervillains used to do back before Twitter came along and everybody started doing the online equivalent of that all day, every day.
“I need information,” he crows. “Information in its most concentrated form.” That’s Watchmen. What you do with that information says a lot about whether you’re the hero or the villain. The HBO show might be great. But the right thing to do, from Moore’s point of view anyway, will always be “nothing.”
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
