Thats for all you @#$%s out there who think that bloated, extreme seriousness and the amateur laying of other peoples ideas into a given work to give the illusion of complexity by confusing is great writing! Don't worry... you probably think all gangster movies are inherently superior to other film genres as well! You are just another ego freak like Moore is who needs something that is "in your face" smart instead of something clever!!! Go back to your local museum and stair at that paint splattered canvas if it makes you feel smarter so you can rub it in some poor smucks face for having better taste than them.

I think your post is "the amateur laying of other peoples ideas into a given work to give the illusion of complexity by confusing is great writing!" Probably you shouldn't be telling people how to think when you can't express a thought coherently. Cheers.

Also, he would never taint his tastebuds with Funyuns. Bruce Wayne is more of an Andy Capp's Hot Strings kinda guy.

As an added bonus, it always ships on time.

Happy Holidays to all the @$$Holes and talkbackers.

Lone man who with extreme views on justice and a dark view of the world that writes in a journal? Try Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Uncovering conspiracies involving our idols and elite? Winter Kills, Parallax View and pretty much all the paranoid thrillers of the 70s. Dark family secrets revealed? Chinatown anyone. An alien invasion faked to stop a nuclear war? Even Alan Moore admits that was taken from the Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Feat”. Hell, even the best scene where Rohrshahk chains the man up is stolen from Mad Max. Now throw in elements of Fail Safe, 7 days in May, All the Presidents Men, and a bunch of Twilight Zone episodes, and you pretty much got every scene in the Watchmen.

I am not saying “The Watchmen” is bad; far from that, I think it is a great piece of comic story-telling. I just don’t think it is the most innovative and the most influential. To me that goes to two comic books: one about a alien who was rocketed to earth to became our savior, and the other involves a teenager who gets bit by a radioactive arachnid and becomes the ultimate metaphor for teen and young adults angst.

And I didn't say...

"people who appreciate art as being, what, some kind of poseurs? So art appreciation and its history is just some 3,000 year-old conspiracy for dumb people to make themselves feel smart?"

Where you get that from? Oh yes, you made that shit right on up!

Superman isn’t just the first super-hero, he also managed to become a metaphor for American power and morality, the quest by immigrants to assimilate, and the quintessential power fantasy (where a wimpy persona is only a disguise for a powerful being). While I am no fan of Kill Bill, the scene where Bill uses Superman as a comparison to the Bride shows the power of that character and what he represents. I don’t think even as good of dialogue writer as Quentin Tarantino could use the Watchmen in anywhere as nearly as powerful as statement.

My problem with the Watchmen isn’t so much that they plundered or were inspired by other sources as much as that they didn’t really come up with a totally unique concept from what they borrowed. They came up with only a collage and pastiche of other mediums materials. They came up with the comic book equivalent of a 70’s conspiracy thriller – the Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor or Chinatown. In fact, I think Chinatown is the most apt comparison, where we go from what looks like a simple case to a much larger, more complex conspiracy that is being committed against the public, and in the end our hero is powerless to stop it. But Robert Towne and Polanski came up with this original concept; all Moore and Gibbons did was transplant it to a story about a bunch of guys in capes and mask.

As for being first superhero deconstructivism story I am not so sure. While it might very well be the first story involving heroes who are actually assholes, jerks and self-centered, this isn’t so much deconstructivism as it is revisionism. In all honesty, I find the term deconstructivism to be the almost meaningless. By that term if you mean presenting superheroes as so unlike traditional heroes as to contradict with them, than once again the Watchmen was beaten by Marvel when Lee, Kirby, Ditko and the others were presenting heroes who were monsters (The Thing, The Hulk), self-centered (Spider-Man), hated (the X-Men), fought amongst themselves (Fantastic Four, the Avengers) and were willing to kill and not obey the rules of society (Wolverine).

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Even though I have read the trade more times than I care to count, I still invested in the original issues a few years back at the local Philly show.

Usually I say, "If it had done that, it would have found a way to work in optomism and idealism, too."

But while I don't think it's the greatest comic of all time (I think that's kind of a personal issue: if some guy thinks the one where Superman fought the Mole People is the greatest of all time, he's not wrong), I think the real revolutionary thing about the WATCHMEN, the thing that hasn't had as much influence as it should, was the love, the detail, the care and the serious which Moore and Gibbons brought to the work. Whether it was the Black Freighter (an angle I don't care for but a lot of people understandably love) or the excerpts from the original Nite Owl's memoir, or news accounts, or even the intricacy of the plotting (and the page layout is key; I can't explain what's going on, but there's something going with parallelism throughout the book)the sheer dedication that the creators (and these guys actually are CREATORS unlike the dudes who got hired to do Ultimate Man-Thing or whatever this month) showed should be the rule, not the exception.

For me, Alan Moore's best work will always be 1963, a perfect parody to early Marvel, down to Stan's bullpen bulletin page written by "Affable Al", that manages to draw huge laughs without insulting the source.

Fellow Cogs, you already know how much you are loved.