A Question About Watchmen

[Dr. K]

At the time in the 80's when I read Watchmen I had heard that Moore had originally intended the Watchmen to be a new perspective revival of Charlton characters that had been discontinued when Charlton went under. This seemed to make sense to me: Night Owl and Night Owl II seem very like Blue Beetle, Doctor Manhattan/Cpt. Atom, Rorschach/the Question etc. What I had heard was at the time that Watchmen was in the developmental stage DC bought out the Charlton copyrights with the intention of bringing the characters into the DC universe (which of course did happen) and Moore was then forced to recreate the characters. Does anyone know if this is true or just an urban myth?

[SuperBird]

it's true

[Dr. K]

Thanks. I always wondered about that. I recently pulled out and started re-reading the story and it came into my head and I wasn't sure if I made it up or if it was true.

[DocGo]

Alan's original treatment for Watchmen, which includes descriptions of the main characters in line with the Charlton mythos, can be found in the Absolute Watchmen HC.

[joe_collector]

From an interview on the subject:

 

The Watchmen characters, I've read that they're based on DC Universe characters but I know very little about those old superheroes

 

AM: Well, I mean, it's a fairly minor fact but what originally happened was that me and Dave [Gibbons] had got an idea for a kind of a superhero story which we figured needed a whole continuity of characters, not a big continuity but a whole continuity of characters, like we figured that if there were any superhero characters from old defunct comic companies lying around, that we could take a whole bunch of them wholesale and then tell this story starting with the murder of one of them, that would take these kind of familiar old-fashioned superheroes into a completely new realm. Now, at that time Giordano was working for DC Comics. Now, had previously been working for a company called Charlton comics. Now, while he was at Charlton he had overseen the creation of a number of characters that are still remembered with vague nostalgic affection by comic readers and comic fans. These included a lot of characters that had been created or co-created by Steve Ditko, including the Blue Beetle; the Question, who was as sort of moral extremist vigilante in the Steve Ditko mould at the time; a nuclear character called Captain Atom; there was a character called Thunderbolt, a man who had got control of the full ten-tenths of his brain capacity and was thus capable of astonishing mental and physical feats. You know, these are fairly forgettable superheroes but -

 

- Was there a guy with a hat and a mac?

 

AM: There was a guy with a hat and a mac, that was the Question, who was also very similar to Steve Ditko's far more right-wing character, Mister A, that was too right-wing to put in mainstream comics but which Ditko had published some strips about in independent comics at the time. Mister A was an absolute insane fascist but done absolutely straight. So we originally said that we could do the story about the Charlton characters because DC had just acquired the rights to the Charlton characters and Giordano had asked if we could do anything with them. So me and Dave kind of laid out this plan for what we could do with the characters. Now, although they liked the idea of it, they had only just paid to acquire the Charlton characters, so they didn't fancy the idea of a series where at the end of it a couple of them would be dead and a couple of them would be too messed up to really work with any more, so they said "Why don't you come up with your own characters?" So we said okay and then just took the Charlton characters as a starting point and in a way it was a perfect solution because Captain Atom was a nuclear superhero but he's nowhere near as interesting as Doctor Manhattan!

[joe_collector]

And a bit from another interview on which Charlton characters were intended for each of the Watchmen leads:

 

The Question was Rorschach, yep. Dr. Manhattan and Captain Atom were obviously equivalent. Nite-Owl and the new Blue Beetle—well, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle—were equivalent. Because there was a pre-existing, original Blue Beetle in the Charlton cosmology, I thought it might be nice to have an original Nite-Owl. I can't really say that Nightshade was a big inspiration. I never thought she was a particularly strong or interesting female character. The Silk Spectre was just a female character because I needed to have a heroine in there. Since we weren't doing the Charlton characters anymore, there was no reason why I should stick with Nightshade, I could take a different sort of super-heroine, something a bit like the Phantom Lady, the Black Canary, generally my favorite sort of costume heroines anyway. The Silk Spectre, in that she's the girl of the group, sort of was the equivalent of Nightshade, but really, there's not much connection beyond that.

 

The Comedian was The Peacemaker, we had a greater degree of freedom, and we decided to make him slightly right-wing, patriotic, and we mixed in a little bit of Nick Fury into The Peacemaker make-up, and probably a bit of the standard Captain America patriotic hero-type. So, yeah, these characters started out like that, to fill gaps in the story that had been left by the Charlton heroes, but we didn't have to strictly stick to that Charlton formula. In some places, we stuck to it more closely, and in some places, we didn't.

 

Adrian Veidt was Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt; I always quite liked Pete Morisi's Thunderbolt strip... there was something about the art style, almost bordering on kind of Alex Toth style, though it was never as good as Toth, but it sometimes had a pleasing sensibility and a nice design sense about it that I was quite taken by. And I quite like the idea of this character using the full 100% of his brain and sort of having complete physical and mental control. Adrian Veidt did grow directly out of the Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt character.

[Dr. K]

Facinating. Thanks for the info Joe.

[mschmidt]

If you haven't already, you should really pick up the Watchmen Absolute HC - it's a gorgeous package, and has all kinds of interesting info about the series ...

[kidcolt]

I just finished reading it again, it gets better ever time. Its amazing how much you miss the first few times you read it.