HBO's Watchmen (part 3) - Scattered notes

What follows is an edited collection of thoughts and comments originally posted on the facebook group Comic Book Historians. The comments were many (the most comments any of my posts ever generated facebook) but the exchange, however stimulating, suffered of some of the same flaws that affect on-line chicken-coops.
In order to make it more like some sort of platonic dialogue, I removed the name of the commentators and polished it a bit.


So, on May the 22nd this was posted:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjFsj6JHEdq/?hl=en

... aaaaand I don't know what to make of it.

To me the point is not so much that Alan Moore is against any adaptation of his work: he is only half of the creative equation, after all, and Gibbons may feel differently. 

(well actually that is part of the point, but it alone is not enough)

Nor it is the fact that Watchmen is a work crafted for a specific medium (it is a story above all, and its narrative can lend itself to brilliant adaptations in other media)

It is not even the fact that Damon Lindelof of all people is producing the show (I've written it before, I even liked ost quite a bit and I think Lindelof is a commendable writer).

What rubs me the wrong way is that the troubled history of how DC/Warner treated Moore (and Gibbons) form the very start is well known, as much as the way DC/Warner shamelessly exploited it.

No matter how sincere Lindelof's love for the book is, and how compelled he feels to give a shot to this adaptation, I think any artist with an ounce of integrity should stay away from Watchmen (or anything Moore for that matter) as much as possible.

Being a FAN is not enough a motivation to disrespect the author and the CONTEXT.

Or, as Alan Moore himself puts it: "anybody who has anything to do with any of these shitty Watchmen travesties, even as a member of the audience, will be dragged screaming to hell by their nipples."

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I do not even how to take Lindelof's use of his dying father in his story. On one hand it may be something very personal and open-hearted, on the other hand can be seen as a manipulative storytelling trick...

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Does Moore have the right to think he's getting wronged by DC, by keeping his work in print?

Can he rightfully describe the writers involved in project such as Before Watchmen or Doomsday clock as "creatively bankrupt" for working with pre-existing characters when doing that has been the signature of his entire career, including, especially, "Watchmen",  "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and "Lost Girls"?

And if he wished to prevent people from creating unnecessary prequels, sequels, etc., to his work that he why refuse to negotiate with DC? After all Neil Gaiman has been able to keep some authority over Sandman, although the series is owned by DC who could use it as they wish.

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Well, maybe because the condition were these:

The new Head of DC had announced that she really wanted to pursue some of DC’s key properties, by which I assume she probably meant WATCHMEN.  I think she may have even mentioned it, I don’t know.  So I said to Dave [Gibbons] that yes, I had heard about this and he was saying that he knew the thing that I always wanted was the rights to WATCHMEN back.  This was said with the kind of understanding that if they gave me back the rights to WATCHMEN, then I would in return sign over the rights to secondary properties such as, oh I don’t know, Rorschach comic books, sequels, prequels, all of these things…

TV series, things like that?

Yeah, all of these things, potentially, when you think about the different mediums these could be exploited in.  Potentially endless properties that could be spun off of WATCHMEN.  Now, I stepped in and said to Dave that actually, no I had grown so sick of WATCHMEN over these last 18 months that I didn’t want the rights back anymore.  If they had offered them back to me back when I wanted them, ten, twenty years ago, then maybe this could have all been resolved in a friendly fashion.  But no, I wasn’t going to take the rights back at this stage after they had pretty much, in my opinion, raped what I had thought to be a pretty decent work of art.  I didn’t want them throwing me back the spent and exhausted carcass of my work and certainly not under terms that would apparently allow them to go on producing witless sequels and prequels ad infinitum

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It is very possible Dave Gibbons couldn't quite understand Moore's radical, even paranoid stance.

Was DC being deliberately vengeful against Moore for not playing ball? Were they really that annoyed of the bad publicity (the acclaimed author of the material spitting venom all over it)?

Moore seems to have subscribed to an "either with me or against me" policy ever since.

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If HBO's series won't be an adaptation, nor a sequel, nor a reboot, why aren't they just creating a new cast of characters to tell their story? Only for the opportunity to market it as "Watchmen" and benefit from the number of viewers who will be attracted by that? 

Even the letter is pre-publicity, written in a pseudo Watchmen style. Oh how clever. I am and always will be on the side of the whining, manipulative dumbass.

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More living off if the coat tails of Alan Moore!

Since DC hasn't put out anything nearly as important or as creative since watchmen it makes since.

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One of the authors of the book has been very vocal about how his work has lost a lot of its ARTISTIC value because of how DC exploited the property.

In spite of the efforts of the people behind the different Watchmen spin-offs of recent years to deliver quality products, to me "Before Watchmen", "Doomsday Clock", this new show and all the rest, are blatant attempts to milk every last drop of cash from one single stand-alone work that gave DC a lot of prestige back in the day.

DC of course has all the legal rights to do it, but it betrays the original spirit of the agreement (a spirit that Paul Levitz at least tried to honour).

Today, I cannot defend getting involved in a Watchmen spin-off ignoring the whole discussion, although it could well be that Lindelof is oblivious to it (still, ignorantia non excusat).

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I do sympathize with Alan Moore, but he just has to accept reality. DC owns them, they continue to have value, so DC will continue to exploit them. I think DC already did well by Moore in that Moore got to keep his Watchmen concept pristine--unmolested, unexploited--in the market place for about a generation. That's more than Marvel or DC ever did for anyone else or any other project of this magnitude.

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Moore has "accepted reality". He's accepted that his former employers acted in a way unacceptable to him, which is why he has no further interest in talking to them. That's it. You are speaking as though Moore is continuing to push this. He isn't. Other people are. The only reason he keeps giving the same answers to questions about DC that he's been giving for 25 years is because people keep asking him those same questions. Ask him about something else, and he won't mention DC or Watchmen at all.

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I'm closing borrowing an interesting contribution by Ed Brubaker, which helps contextualizing the original contract:

So, I've been trying to figure out how to say something about this for a few weeks, and I'm not sure I know how to express this thought with the clarity I'd like it to have, but I feel like it's worth saying, because it seems to have been forgotten: WATCHMEN was once held up by DC COMICS as a victory for creators rights. I was actually there, as a kid, at the SDCC when Alan Moore and DC discussed this, and it was very much a thumb in the eye to Marvel at the time, who were involved in a very public fight with Jack Kirby and his wife Roz, over the return of Kirby's artwork (most of which was stolen from Marvel's storage facilities and sold to collectors). This was the summer of the creators right era (look up the Creator's Bill of Rights), and even though Marvel had done their Epic line that actually had full creator-ownership, they were still perceived as the bad guys because Kirby had been screwed and he was standing right there telling an industry he helped build that he was pissed. At the time, there were alternatives to DC and Marvel, but it was considered a huge deal at the time that DC was doing "creator-owned" books like Ronin from Frank Miller, and then Watchmen, from the biggest name in comics. Alan Moore was not just the most popular writer of the era, he was also the most outspoken on creators rights. If you only know the grumpy cantankerous Alan Moore who's been pissed at mainstream comics for about twenty years, then you missed the man who inspired many other writers and artists to stop putting up with bad treatment from their publishers. We all know the story of what happened with Watchmen (most likely). It helped spark the graphic novel as a format and became a perennial seller, and so the rights to the work never reverted to its authors. And in fact, the contract is so bad that DC's public statements of creator-ownership have turned out to be completely untrue. DC has the rights to Watchmen, and they can and will do with them whatever they want to.

Now, I'm a freelance writer with many books in print, so I know that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons make a good living from Watchmen, but I also know it's nowhere near what they could have made if they'd owned it outright, or if DC had decided to renegotiate their deal when they realized the book would never go out of print. We can debate the merits of legal rights versus moral rights all day (we won't because it's a waste of time) but Paul Levitz at least respected the spirit of DC's deal with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, even if he couldn't give them back ownership of Watchmen (can you imagine how quickly he'd have lost his job if he'd given back the rights to their best-selling book?) he at least let it stand on its own. There are various stories about why Alan Moore left DC but what it basically comes down to is they did what all comics publishers used to do, they promised something that turned out not to be true. I've signed deals I regret. I don't know anyone in comics that hasn't. It's almost a fact of life as a freelancer. Sometimes you need the work badly enough not to care or you don't have a lawyer and you don't notice the loopholes. It's less common now, because most creators have good lawyers, but back in the days of Watchmen, few creators had their own representation, and lots of bad deals were signed. When Before Watchmen happened after Paul Levitz left DC, I was angry at DC for disregarding their promises to the creators, but I also knew that the life of a freelancer is spent waiting for that big book, for those moments that the money truck might somehow get backed up. Few are lucky enough to get those moments in comics. It's never happened for me, and I co-created The Winter Soldier. So I couldn't hold it against any of the people working on the various mini-series, some of whom are friends of mine, because I know how hard it is to make a living in comics as a freelancer. But at the same time, I was dismayed, because there was Alan Moore screaming "Don't do this!" and a lot of people basically said "screw you, you made a bad deal, live with it" or "this is comics" or wrote think pieces defending a giant corporation's legal rights, which no one was actually questioning. So look, I made a living writing Captain America for a long time, and I know the history of comics. I know that Martin Goodman promised Jack Kirby things he never honored. I know every story about creators getting screwed over or lied to or betrayed by other creators (like Bob Kane who helped DC fuck Siegel and Shuster a second time in the 40s), but the thing that keeps sticking for me is, I can't ever remember a time when Superman or the Avengers was held up as a victory for creators rights. But Watchmen was. So, now Dr Manhattan is in DC's new reboot, even though Alan and Dave were not even asked about it this time, and almost no one has said anything this time. The floodgates were already opened five years ago, and this is how it is, so we all just shrug. But I feel like it's important to point it out. I think this sucks, and I think it's very sad that Watchmen again has to serve as a reminder for how poorly creators can be treated.