Bruce Baugh drew my attention to this delightful Watchmen remix by Chip Zdarsky in which the end of the book is refashioned into a parody of the Spider-Man comic “One More Day” and the reaction to it. This inspired two thoughts:
1) Watchmen is a really good comic.
2) I’m really curious as to what the critical reception of the movie version will be. On the one hand it’s got the right politics and is sort of the apotheosis of the current pop-culture trend in favor of comics (“the Godfather of comic book movies” will be a hard pullquote to resist delivering; I predict Peter Travers will be the one to pull the trigger), but on the other there’s the Ron Rosenbaum-y “graphic novel” backlash and the fact that thanks to 300, critics feel obligated to hate Zack Snyder HARD. For example, in terms of the story’s politics, I’m guessing that contra 300 they will be correctly attributed to the source material’s creators and temporal context rather than incorrectly attributed to the movie’s, because to do otherwise would be a point in the movie’s favor, and we can’t have that. We shall see.
I didn’t like 300, but that had more to do with my disdain for the original source material rather than Snyder’s skill at replicating Frank Miller visually. Which I admired, even as it gave me a headache.