Yes, Virginia:
Watchmen came out in movie theaters. Watching it is up to you, but for my money, you can't do much better than
the nice little piece of writing available here at the comiXology site from Joe McCulloch. If I were going to add anything to his review, it would just be a list of my favorite 90's songs to soundtrack his paragraphs. Movies are what they are: here be comics, that's our bag. DC seems to agree, which is a good point—after all, DC can only reprint the Moore/Gibbons opus in so many different formats before somebody is going to start giggling, if they haven't already.
The plan, if you haven't heard, is called "After Watchmen". It's sort of like the drug rehabilitation center that you send your teenager to after he gets out of detox. The breakdown is pretty simple:
Watchmen hopefully destroyed some of the "comics are juvenile trash for social misfits" sterotypes, and DC wants to get some of the new drug into the hands and minds while the door is still open. It's a good idea, which is why it's the same one that MC Hammer had back when "U Can't Touch This" blew up: as long as that doorway to a wide audience is open, pull as many of your friends through as possible. (One hopes that DC knows to ease up before they end up doing Cash4Gold television commercials.)
It's a predictable enough list of titles—anything that Alan Moore wrote that DC can legally publish is on it, there's a healthy portion of the work of Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, Brian Azzarello, as well as cursory nods to Mark Millar, Garth Ennis, Darwyn Cooke and Kevin Smith. (Kevin Smith?) The push will be met with a marketing campaign, mostly geared towards the internet, cheap reprints of some select issues, as well as a 32 page booklet that will break down the varied titles more thoroughly. (I should say that I imagine it will break down the titles and why
Watchmen fans might enjoy them, I certainly don't know that it will. It could be 32 pages of Dan Didio cartoons telling you not to use bittorent clients to steal comics. It could be 32 pages made out of candied yams. I'm not really a reporter.)
It's not a bad idea, really. As has been noted, almost to the point where you wonder when you're going to have to just use the phrase "ad infinitum" and leave it at that, that the lead-up to the Zach Snyder film has helped foster a renewed interest in
Watchmen. It's always been a stable seller for DC, but the movie pushed those sales even higher—and considering that it also ended up being one of those rare pieces of comics that became a sort of untouchable holy writ, a comic that had no spin-off, no prequel, sequel, or revamp, that's pretty impressive to hear about.
You'd have to play a little fast and loose with logic to come up with solid, provable reasons that those sales are a good thing for comics as a whole—they're good for Alan Moore, because he's still working and can always use the extra press, they're good for Dave Gibbons, whose art ended up being some of the only super-hero art a bunch of non-comics readers ever saw, and they're good for Time Warner because…well, c'mon. Because Time Warner gets to keep a bunch of the money. Okay, sure:
Watchmen comics are good for other comics, because maybe some guy or girl will walk back to the comics shop and say "More, please." That's the person DC's counting on, and for the first time in what seems like a long time, they're taking a more active role in the process of hand-holding.
That's a good thing, I suppose. Every comment section I've ever seen that follows the question "What should I recommend to my friend who just read ____ for the first time?" detoriates into the same thing: the answer is nothing, because the answer is everything. What starts off with the same usual-suspect types that DC's currently pushing in this campaign—things like
V For Vendetta and Frank Miller's
Batman work—always hits about 100 comments, with suggestions like "If you can track down
Solar: Man of the Atom" or "My girlfriend thought
Justice League Europe was totally awesome…"
That's not really the way you want a recommendation to work. It's the equivalent of going to a music store and saying "I really liked John Coltrane's
Giant Steps. Where should I go next?", only for the clerk to smile and say "Buy anything in the store! They're all awesome and spectacular in their own way!" (In a way, that's probably true: thanks to the support of family and friends, you can probably find a die-hard supporter for anything, even if it's an audiotape of John Tesh reading a data print out of Kraftwerk songs.)
Somebody should take a stronger, definitive hand--and while a publisher, especially one that's part of a gigantic corporate entertainment monolith probably tied into a nefarious global munitions empire, isn't exactly the most objective of sources, comics don't have a full-time crew of esteemed intellectual types who can be looked to for advice by a newbie public. There's a lot of great critics online---well, there's Jog and another guy--but there isn't anybody that's got the kind of pull that matches up with the Time Warner marketing department in terms of eyeball grabbing power. Sure, it would be better if it wasn't DC.
(Technically, it would be better if none of what marketing departments did mattered, if great work could find an audience on its own without the hands of advertisers. It would also be awesome if people who believed that kind of fantasy stuff was going to happen would grow up and get a real job, preferably one that put them close enough to the steel combine that they might, after a long night of editing together their favorite Godard sequences for their YouTube page, fall in.)
Will what DC's trying work? I don't know. I think that they'll still run into the fact that they're trying to seek out a new audience while depending on a direct market that's predominately populated by stores that have been handling how they seek out new customers on their own for a long time. Comic stores may find it difficult to figure out how to negotiate their relationship with a company that's now doing a lot more than sending out convoluted, mildly dishonest solicitation info along with ugly posters. It's unlikely that anybody at DC took the time to ask any decent swath of retailers what they thought about After Watchmen in the first place.
Besides all that, a big marketing push from DC doesn't do anything to change a dangerous retail economy, nor does it do anything to repair the way in which Diamond handles trade paperback orders. Finally, there's such a dearth of real information on how well and where comics sell, that it's not like we'll be able to tell how successful the project is beyond anecdotal and fractured evidence. If it's a big success, that'll probably be noticeable. If it's not, or if it's only a mild one, the change will probably be somewhat harder to see.
I'm not a big believer in evangelizing comics--if I had come to them in a different way, through a friend or family member, maybe I would be. It's not that I don't believe that there's a pretty good comic for any reader, I think there probably is. It's more that I just don't care much for the process of recommendations, because that means I have to take yours, which is how I end up spending a Saturday night screening
Watcher in the Woods, because I feel some obligation to meet my side of the bargain. I may tell you that Naoki Urasawa's
Monster is totally awesome, and you would totally love it, but if it means you're going to loan me a copy of
Twilight--well, I think I'd rather keep my mouth shut. But hey: After Watchmen isn't for me. I'm already wearing jeans that can walk on their own, I'm a comic book junkie, I'm a Wednesday lunch break guy. If DC wants to take a shot at those millions who haven't given comics a chance, more power to them. Will it help comics? I doubt it. But if it gets me some more Kirby reprints, I think I'm willing to turn a blind eye.
At least until they make a Hal Jordan movie. At that point, I'm packing up my shelves and getting back into modding old Nintendo cartridges.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
