superheroes

Okay, 95% of the people reading this will already know, and the other 5% are probably not interested – but for the remaining 0% (yes, that means you!), here’s the Watchmen trailer that came out recently:

Now, part of me looks at this trailer and thinks, “Wow… that is almost picture perfect!” Another part thinks that the last thing Watchmen is about are pretty pictures. This is a trailer, yes, which has one purpose: to get people excited and put asses in seats. But Zack Snyder strikes me as a director enamoured with glossy, stylised images – and that sort of thing tends to detract from the humanity of the characters. And one of the major points of Watchmen is that the superheroes in it (excepting Dr Manhattan, although that would make for a longer discussion) are utterly human. And the book is about ideas, not about wowing the audience with cool visuals.

Having said that, I like much of the casting. I like that Snyder didn’t go for the superstars (although I do think that Adrian Veidt could easily have been played by a good-looking star, since he is pretty much one of the biggest celebrities in the world he inhabits). I like the visual metaphor of the clockwork in the trailer. And I find the CGI representation of Doc Manhattan strangely affecting, especially in that shot where you’ve got three of them.

What worries me, though, is what I’ve heard about the ending. If it’s true… well, there’s one way of pretty much ruining Watchmen, and that’s by screwing with one or two elements of the ending. I just hope that they will be able to resist killing the ‘bad guy’.

Oh, and one last thing…

While I think that From Hell and Watchmen (and, to a lesser extent, V for Vendetta – it’s rougher around the edges in terms of tone and style, and its inconsistencies can be a bit jarring) are amazing, rich and exciting works, I have a lot of fondness for some of the comics that are sometimes considered ‘minor Moore’. In many ways, the Moore titles that I’ve enjoyed most are Top 10 and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

On paper, Top 10 especially didn’t sound like my cup of tea. I’m not that much into superheroes, so the idea of a whole city of superheroes didn’t exactly appeal to me. Except, of course, if everyone has superpowers, they’re no longer variations on the Nietzschean übermensch. There’s something very humane to the shlubs of Neopolis, where every Joe Shmoe wears a cape and blue-collar shapeshifters rub shoulders with telepaths heading for a boring day at the office.

Top 10

It’s the characters of Top 10, together with its Where’s Waldo? appeal (there’s riches of funny little allusions and throwaway gags on every single page, the little iMac-bot building a snowman being one of my favourites), that make the series come to life. And while much of it is ‘just good fun’ (as if that were in some way less important than deep, large volumes about serial killers and our fascination with evil), there are vignettes in there that are surprisingly touching, such as the aftermath of a teleporter accident in volume 2.

I also enjoyed Promethea, although less so. In it, Moore started to go off on his post-structuralist New Age tangent. And he started to become too infatuated with his cleverness and wealth of erudition, I sometimes feel. The effect is, at least to me, that some of Promethea reads less like a good story with fascinating themes and hidden depths (which it starts out as) and more like an educational comic on magic, tarot, religion and myth with a lot of input from Peter “Prospero’s Books” Greenaway.

Promethea

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was more in the vein of Top 10, and accordingly I enjoyed it more than Promethea. Again, the characters made it into more than it seemed to be at first (which was a witty, exciting pastiche of Victorian ‘superheroes’ and monsters, deconstructing the cultural politics of the era) – especially the Invisible Man and Mr Hyde turned out to be quite disturbing and brilliantly ambivalent in their depiction.

More than that, though, Moore told a rollicking tale in his League books, perfectly complemented by Kevin O’Neill’s art: the mock-Victorian counterpart to the ’50s sci-fi world of Top 10. It’s ironic that the god-awful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film is so much less cinematic and exciting than the book… In the first two volumes of the League’s adventures, Moore managed an almost perfect balance between cleverness and erudition on the one side and fun on the other.

Next: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.