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‘Watchmen’ climbs book charts

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‘Watchmen,’ the comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that debuted in 1985 and was first reissued as a graphic novel in 1987, is now climbing the bestseller charts — it’s currently at No. 15 in USA Today and No. 9 on Amazon.

The renewed attention is due to the upcoming film, of course, which made a splash at Comic-Con last month. The trailer, which debuted in July, has gritty, gleaming CGI and is set to a pulsating song by Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.

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But the movie won’t be out until March of next year. Could the graphic novel remain on the charts until then?

If it’s a superhero ‘Moby-Dick,’ as Alan Moore hoped, it just might. More after the jump.

Some fans of the graphic novel have considered it too textured, too layered, to complex to work as a film. In 2000, director Terry Gilliam gave up his efforts to make a movie version. ‘The problem with Watchmen is that it requires about five hours to tell the story properly,’ he said. ‘And by reducing it to a two or two-and-a-half hour film, it seemed to me to take away the essence of what ‘Watchmen’ is about.’

In a rant at io9, Graeme McMillan seems to agree: ‘I don’t care how faithful the movie looks to the comic, it’ll still be unable to be replicate the level of depth of writing and experience of the comic.’

Writer Alan Moore had literary aspirations when writing the ‘Watchmen’: In a 1988 interview (online here), he said he wanted to create ‘a superhero ‘Moby-Dick’ — something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density.’

But Herman Melville wasn’t his only literary influence. Another was William Burroughs:

I’d say Burroughs is one of my main influences. Not the cut-up stuff, but his thinking about the way that the word and the image are used to control, and their possible more subversive effect.... I always thought that comics would be a perfect medium for Burroughs. With ‘Watchmen’ I was trying to put some of his ideas into practice; the idea of repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning. You could almost play them like music. You’d have these things like musical themes that would occur throughout the work.

Sounds like some of these things ideas may work best on the page — and perhaps they’ll resonate that way, with a new set of (pre-movie) readers.

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Carolyn Kellogg

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