Before Watchmen

[RGApples]

How do yall like the story so far? i havent read them yet dont know if they are worth getting what do yall think?

[Shaven Kev-migration]

I'm not buying any of it. Seems pointless.

[DomUga]

Same

[Ares]

How do yall like the story so far? i havent read them yet dont know if they are worth getting what do yall think?

[Whizzer]

I've read all the first issues so far and have enjoyed them. I think a lot of thought went into the plotting and the creators have treated the source material with respect. Stylistically, great trouble has been taken to get the 'look' right.

 

I will enjoy these for what they are and let the Moore zealots be damned.

[Beige]

Nice quality in story and design.

I have happily grabbed 10 x each no1 and will archive them for X amount of years and sell them as lots of 7 X #1's.

Seems a no-brainer really.

Watchmen original goes for $30 - $40 so I'm happy to wait the appropriate amount of time for BW.

$4 into $40 seems fair even if it takes 10 yrs.

But thats just me.

[UnRested Spectre]

I've read all the first issues so far and have enjoyed them. I think a lot of thought went into the plotting and the creators have treated the source material with respect. Stylistically, great trouble has been taken to get the 'look' right.

 

I will enjoy these for what they are and let the Moore zealots be damned.

Hiyo!

 

Source-material was not even DC property nor was it Alan Moore... Alan Moore always gave credit where it was due, even when it was first released; characters that spawn Alan Moore's The Watchmen were public-domain property that DC got really-really cheap, despite the point and fact that that property was seized sold and pretty much stolen along with all the original-creators entirety to the childhood-characters he created.

 

P.S.

Also... the guy who originally created the characters, not dead and still living!

[Whizzer]

Please, put me on ignore. I have no interest in anything you have to say.

[thirdgreenham]

[Whizzer]

 

 

Who, me or him?

[dr_manhattan]

Dreadful writing. Not a fan of this series at all.

[Ares]

so far so bad

 

To many mini series.

[zombizzy]

minutemen just felt like an old comic book missing POW!s and BLAM!s

silk spectre was awful in both, writing and art.

comedian was just in bad taste, just skimmed it after the whole Marilyn Monroe bit.

 

will assume everything else is garbage.

[Prince Namor]

Here's a funny review of Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #1 from the Comics Journal's Joe McCulloch

 

Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #1

By Len Wein, Jae Lee, June Chung

Published by DC Comics

 

This is an account of the beloved corporate-owned superhero property Ozymandias’ troubled childhood and virile coming-of-age, expanded from two-and-one-third pages (eighteen panels) in Watchmen issue #11 to twenty-three pages of $3.99 modern funnies. Approximately half of the original’s narrative captions are paraphrased or restated directly in the expanded text, the action of which appears to be set at or near minute zero of “thirty-five minutes ago”; the title character narrates, in flashback, from his wall of television screens. The issue is titled “I Met a Traveler…!” in acknowledgement of the Before Watchmen project’s status as prequel, evoking the opening line from Shelley’s Ozymandias, and thus necessarily preceding “Look on My Works, Ye Mighty…”, the title of the original chapter 11.

I will resist any bankruptcy metaphor, however, and instead observe that the opening to chapter 11 of Watchmen, as written by Alan Moore, also sees Ozy narrating something:

 

It’s a commentary on very act of staring into multiple television screens, positing a means of discerning some meaning from contemporary media overload; William Burroughs’s cut-up technique is cited, and, insofar as a wall of television screens is analogous to the stern grids of artist Dave Gibbons’s page layouts, the alert reader is duly congratulated for having sifted through the unorthodox POV shifts and fragmented character histories of the past ten issues to arrive at this point of a nefarious master plan’s gala revelation, though Moore, being Moore, slips in a final puckish joke through the issue’s title: a statement of bravado which the English majors among the readership will know is the last-standing legacy of a doomed ruler’s supreme plans. Basically, Moore is giving away the book’s ending, beyond even the seeming ambiguity of the famous corporate-owned ketchup dripping onto the world-renowned corporate-owned smiley face t-shirt of that fat guy whose childhood I am dying to explore.

Len Wein, in contrast, spends his opening page basically explaining the concept of ambiguity to the slower readers, via a block of metafictional rib-nudging wherein Ozy goes on about how very nearly flawless his crazy plan is, though history will be the judge in the end — because his plan totally might not stand up to history at all, that was the ending of the original book, remember? It’s dramatic irony!

 

Beyond this opening salvo, there are two other sequences that best summarize the book, though they are best taken together.

First, there’s a panel with baby Ozy playing with alphabet blocks, in which he stacks the blocks to spell the word “GENIUS,” so as to indicate to the reader that Ozymandias is a genius. Initially this image confused me, as I thought Len Wein, or possibly the artist, Jae Lee, might be cracking a joke at the terribly vain title character. This is not the chummy, toxic idealist of Moore’s delineation; the Ozy here is a squinting, sneering, pompous psycho of the type portrayed in the Watchmen movie, a villain you can spot from way down the longbox end of the comics store and totally the kind of baby that would announce his excellence at home to mom and dad.

All became clear, though, later in the story, when adult Ozy, standing nude and playing the stock market over an old-timey phone in front of — yes — a giant clock, says: “I have goals to achieve, dreams to make come true.”

This, of course, is a supremely awkward phrasing totally unbecoming of a man of Adrian Veidt’s supreme refinement, so I was initially very shocked, until the Sexy Girlfriend Character laying in Ozy’s bed responds with: “Well, then, let’s see what else you can make come in the meantime, shall we?”

I’m leaving open the possibility that Ozymandias, in his “GENIUS,” was actually playing 4th-dimensional chess with the poor girl and deliberately molested grammar in anticipation of his lover jumping on the opportunity for a terrible pun, thus reinforcing his sense of superiority over her, but coupled with that thing with the blocks the circumstantial evidence becomes persuasive that Len Wein is simply writing a spectacularly -script, the kind of misbegotten effort that flails at edgy sexuality by presenting one panel implying that the title character might have had sex with a man — thereafter defaulting to black lingerie routines straight out of an era when Moore was doing backups in American Flagg! – and seeks to match the richness of the original text with little more than soggy fan service. When little Ozy sulks in his bedroom, he sits under a movie poster showing a giant squid-like alien because.

I feel I am perhaps too charitable. But couldn’t some of this be the fault of Lee, the artist?

The problem is, Lee presents here that rarest of superhero occurrences: art that seems to be making textual contributions exclusive of the scriptwriting. Lee is reunited here with frequent colorist June Chung, who applies an uncharacteristically bright-ish palette (directly, it appears, upon pencils) to accommodate a wholesale transformation of Lee’s aesthetic into a bizarre cross between Alex Raymond (circa Flash Gordon) and J.H. Williams III. Everything, suddenly, is bent to serve the page: clocks and posture and the curve of shoulders and knees.

[Prince Namor]

Part 2

 

Circular and arcing motifs are everywhere, on almost every page. Privately, they seem in communication with Dave Gibbons’s relentless squares, replacing the chilly god’s eye view of Watchmen with a sense of enclosure, a mathematical construct elegant enough for our Ozy but also suggesting a futility to his mission. Perhaps Wein is demanding all of this in his -script, but I doubt it. I suspect Lee is even making his own discreet citations to the original text, as a confrontation with ultra-cliché bullies:

 

…is symmetrically complimented by the moment when lil’ Ozy gains the upper hand:

 

…in homage, no doubt, to the “Fearful Symmetry” of chapter 5. I still prefer the super, super, super Jae Lee panels the best — Ozy dressed in black in a cemetery of shadow headstones with roses dropping from between his fingers; Ozy and Sexy Girlfriend Character dressed in black in a construction site composed primarily of geometrically precise slashing black lines; young Ozy striking a cat pose in half-silhouette having sent a classmate’s kneecap exploding out of his leg — but it appears Lee’s career-long build toward frustrating the cinematographic expectations of superhero comics by applying a sense of theatrical dramaturgy has now pivoted to accommodate Moore-like symmetries into its very mise en scène. In other words, it rejects Dave Gibbons, almost totally, in favor of absorbing Alan Moore into visuals.

It’s not a perfect whole, mind you. Lee & Chung are still prone to odd compositional hiccups, so that children’s arms at one point seem to jut through a solid banister, or Ozy’s foot vanishes into a classmate’s torso from inadequate color differentiation. Fans of inking will probably deem the art unfinished, and admirers of nuanced character acting will note Lee’s extreme favoring of tableaux over panelized interaction, to the point where a long description of the title character’s wanderings gets slapped in captions atop a page-length map — Lee’s the only superhero guy whose transition to mostly cover art seems less financially inclined than a natural evolution of his art.

But sometimes, when the -script calls for completely silly extrapolations from one panel of the original that finds Ozy, say, processing his parents’ deaths by standing in front of a gigantic bust of Alexander of Macedonia day after day and thinking really hard — Wein loves the “Alexander” in Adrian Alexander Veidt so much he references the conqueror explicitly on about 1/3 of the issue’s story pages (8 of 23, I counted) — it comes off very nearly like opera, albeit a stagecraft coerced to elect the most obvious images at every possible opportunity, by which I mean when lil’ Ozy goes to learn martial arts, he stands in front of a gigantic red banner bedecked with Chinese characters while a bald monk in a robe stands piously in a darkened window. In New York City.

 

In the end, this comic confirms everything I’d expected from this particular wing of the Before Watchmen franchising opportunity: a freakish blend of emphatic, imperfect, searching visual style with a goofy, purplish -script that only seems capable of banal “homage” to the original, and only then on the most superficial of levels. You know what finally prompts Ozy to slip on the purple & gold? Len Wein kills off the Sexy Girlfriend Character to spur him to vengeance. Jesus F. Christ. Yet when Lee & Chung depict the sorry girl’s descent into drug abuse from her boyfriend’s neglect, she enters the top-most panel through a red curtain and pouts her way through a hellish void of scarlet mist and white silk that recalls the Rectum from Irreversible as framed by F.W. Murnau, with a Luciferian villain pulling giant hooped-plunger syringes from his velvet coat.

Then Ozy poses in black before an umpteenth giant clock, in silhouette — ticking, dear reader, down to midnight — after which Wein has him narrate: “Whoever was responsible for supplying poor Miranda with the filthy drugs that had killed her had best beware, I thought.”

I’m thinking the remaining five issues are all about Ozymandias’ war on ’80s cocaine, though I can’t know for sure, since he doesn’t put the goddamned costume on until the final page. Yet if the extraneous exclamation point in the issue’s title is due warning that we are to expect a more classically superheroic take on this material, then it can at least be said that while Wein does not seem especially empathetic to the book he once edited — noticeably less so than his artist, amazingly enough — he does grasp the modern genre necessity of withholding the proper superhero stuff until the reader has paid at least eight dollars.

 

And that’s all a modern corporate-owned hullabaloo needs, here in our stronger loving world.

 

 

[Bill Robinson]

I am reading these for their own merit. The best of the number ones for me was Minutemen.

I have read Minutemen 2 and all I can say is, wow! I was blown away. I thought that it was everything the first one wasn't. The first one was a recap of what we knew about the characters from reading Watchmen and the backup material. the second really took off for me. If you have read the #1's and given them a solid "Meh," read Minutemen #2. It has really brought me around. Maybe the other series won't match it, but I think its brilliant. Not Alan Moore Brilliant, but who is?

 

[Joe Kim]

I gave it a shot, and its not for me. At least its introduced some new people to the OG Watchmen book though.

[He11blazer]

Well, I just NOW heard that this exists. Yeah that's me, finger on the pulse of comicdom. Snarky reviews aside, the artwork looks quite lovely. I shall look forward to reading these - possibly as a guilty pleasure and with a pinch of salt - though I shall wait for a nice big hardback edition. I'm too old for all the fuss of delicately handling new comics with 1:25 covers.

[Whizzer]

Mr Joe mcullough of the Comics Journal really needs to get out of his mum's basement occasionally and throw back a few beers. People take this stuff waaaaay too seriously.

[He11blazer]

Funny thing is, that sarcastic review has got me thoroughly interested in reading the comic. Looks like fun.