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Media Madness features reviews and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

by Matt. Murray

It’s some point after Monday, March 9th, 2009.  12:00 PM. You are reading this post.

It’s Wednesday, February 25th, 2009.  2:29PM. I have just purchased my ticket for Watchmen: The IMAX Experience via Fandango. Most of the weekend’s screenings have already sold out and the first available show is on Sunday March 8th, 2009 at 2:00 PM.

It’s Wednesday, March 4th, 2009.  12:00PM. I am walking out of Best Buy, having just bought a copy of Warner Premiere’s Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic.

It’s Monday, February 23rd, 2009. Wired publishes an interview with Watchmen writer Alan Moore in which he states:

If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on “multiple platforms,” as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I’m concerned.

It’s Friday, March 6th, 2009.  4:00PM. I have just started to write this post.

It’s Friday,  March 6th, 2009.  12:00AM. At the IMAX theater at Lincoln Center in NY, lines of people fill their seats as they get ready to watch the film adaptation of Watchmen. I am at home in Pennsylvania restarting the last third of Disc 1 of Watchmen: The Motion Comic. Approximately 62 hours from now I will be in New York, walking in a line of people as we fill the Lincoln Center movie theater to watch a screening of Watchmen: The IMAX Experience.

It’s Monday, February 23rd, 2009. Wired‘s interview with Alan Moore reads:

(Terry) Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, “If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to.” I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn’t be made into a film.

It’s some point after Monday, March 9th, 2009.  12:00 PM. I saw Zack Snyder’s Watchmen no less than 22 hours ago. Since I wrote these words no more than 70 hours before then, I do not include my thoughts about it in this post.

It’s Thursday, March 5th, 2009. I am watching the fourth chapter of Watchmen: The Motion Comic. In its original printed form it serves as perhaps one of the finest piece of sequential art literature ever created. I wonder how the concept will work if I try to use it in creating a blog post.

It’s Thursday, March 5th, 2009. I have realized that Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic is a strange cross between a poorly produced audio book and the Marvel Super Heroes Saturday morning cartoon show that debuted in 1966. Voices layered over intermittently animated artwork. I wonder why the director has elected to keep the dialogue bubbles, when the lines are spoken quicker than the words hit the screen.  Very distracting.  Hurm.

It’s whenever Ralph Bakshi watches Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic. He goes on a curse-laden tirade about how he’s a genius and the world was never ready for his talent. He compares his paintings to Degas. He calls Kim Basinger “a dried up old c@nt.” He wipes the drool from his mouth, and then quietly notes the similarity between this “adaptation” of Watchmen and the episodes of Marvel Super Heroes show that he directed. He claims his animated projects are far superior to any of those that have come before or since. Although he says this every day, and most times without provocation – in the case of Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic, he’s actually right.

It’s Thursday, March 5th 2009. I understand why they have opted to call this a “motion comic” as not to insult the medium of animation. The characters don’t move correctly. They have disproportional limbs and inconsistencies in their details which are forgivable when on the static comic page, but are glaringly horrible sins when presented on a moving picture screen. The one cool element is actually seeing the blot on Rorschach’s mask morph into its various configurations. While noble in its conception and execution in the comic book, animation fully realizes the concept in a way static images couldn’t.

It’s Thursday March 5th, 2009.  8:45 PM. I have just loaded up my DVD player with both discs of Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic. It’s approximately 325 minutes long. I realize that if I watch it straight through I will be done no earlier than 2:00 AM on Friday, March 6th.

It’s Monday, February 23rd, 2009. Wired‘s interview with Alan Moore reads:

With a movie you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier. You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons’ brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they’d be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details.

It’s Thursday March 5th, 2009. I come to believe that animators’ effort to directly translate Dave Gibbons’s artwork to the screen has actually done more of a disservice to it, than celebrated it. They’ve violated the integrity of the art by restructuring the individual panels to meet a standardized 16:9 aspect ratio. Smaller panels are blown up to the same size as a panel that would have been larger on the screen. Characters go from having fully detailed emotion-filled faces to being barely sketched blobs of color of roughly the same size in a single cut. There’s also a sense of drama and pacing lost in removing panel structure. For example, in the scene where Rorschach and Nite Owl II first speak, there’s an intimacy and patter that is created by the close arrangement of four dialogue-filled, dark, narrow panels that are punctuated on the page by a large bright white panel of Dan Dreiberg by himself after Rorschach leaves. Emotionally, it sucks the reader into a vacuum of the character’s loneliness. In removing the visual structure of the paneled page, and reconfiguring the panels themselves the directors have severely lessened the scene’s impact.

It’s Friday March 6th, 2009 4:58 PM. Feeling distracted, I wonder what Wonder Woman would look like with a bundt. I pick up the 3.75″ action figure of her that came with her recently released DVD and I swivel the lower part of her body around at the waist. I laugh. I write about it. I’ve wasted 1.75 minutes. I’ve also plugged a past post in an effort to get you to read it.

It’s Thursday March 5th, 2009. I am watching the fourth chapter of Watchmen: The Motion Comic. In its original printed form it serves as one of the finest piece of sequential art literature, perhaps ever created. It loses something in trying to translate it to the screen. I wonder how it will work in – hours when I see Zack Snyder’s attempt to adapt it to live action film.

It’s some point after Monday March 9th, 2009 12:00 PM. The words you are reading here were actually written on Friday March 6th, 2009 between 4:00 and 6:00PM. The light that carried their shape to my eyes died no less than 70 hours ago. These words are time capsules that have been entrusted to word processors and the internet, meant to be shared according to my scheduled blogging time. I will never see the light that carries them to your eyes.

It’s Thursday March 5th, 2009. I am laughing at the unfortunate efforts of actor Tom Stetschulte to bring vocally the entire cast of Watchmen to life by himself. His voice has a distracting similarity to George Lowe’s performance of Space Ghost in the Cartoon Network’s seminal comedy series Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Stetschulte seems to have only a few stock voices and none of them is a believable New York accent which sucks, considering that Watchmen in set in New York. He’s also burdened with the unfortunate task trying to voice the women, which is just a mistake, plain and simple. It undercuts any attempt at “dramatizing” the story in any sense of the word.

It’s Monday, February 23rd, 2009. Wired publishes an interview with Watchmen writer Alan Moore in which he states:

My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven’t changed. I’m reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books “ruined” by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They’re all fine. They’re fine. They’re not ruined. They’re still there. And I think that’s pretty much the attitude I take.

It’s Thursday, March 5th , 2009 11:30 PM. I have just woken up after falling asleep in the middle of chapter five of Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic. In my dreams Hugh Jackman sang to me and danced at a birthday party I was having in an underground diner. I don’t know what it has to do with the rest of what I’m saying here, but it happened. In 30 minutes, Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Watchmen will open in theaters on the East Coast of America.  I will see it in 62 hours.

It’s Friday, March 6th, 2009 3:00AM. I wake up realizing that I had again fallen asleep during chapter five of Watchmen: The Motion Comic. I turn off my DVD player.  In all I’ve watched approximately minutes, and I have minutes left.  I decide to try to watch the rest of the project some other time.

It’s some point after Monday March 9th, 2009 12:00 PM. You are about to finish reading this post.

It’s Sunday March 8th, 2009, sometime between 2:00 and 5:30 PM. I am sitting in a Lincoln Center movie theater watching the film adaptation of Watchmen in IMAX. Although they are the exact same images that flickered across the same movie screen as they were 62 hours ago, the light that carries them to my eyes is different. As my mind is different from other viewers,  I receive the same images but not see the same movie.

It’s Friday March 6th, 2009 6:00PM. I have just finished writing this post.

All characters and images are property of their respective copyright holders.

Addendum – Best Watchmen adaptation ever:

 

Matt. Murray earned his BFA in film, television and radio production from NYU. He has curated exhibits focusing on the art and commerce of Saturday Morning cartoons and the adaptation of illustrated media into live actions films and animation. Murray is the country’s leading (if not only) Smurfologist. His personal blog, It’s Time for Some Action, can be found at http://actnmatt.blogspot.com/