I very nearly passed over this Guardian article about the ongoing lawsuit regarding ownership of the rights to the Watchmen movie. After all, Hollywood people sue each other the way normal people shake hands (“Hey, good to see you buddy, here’s a law suit, no hard feelings…”). However, I was struck by the opening line:
Watchmen, the violent, bestselling graphic novel of all time…
Violent? Watchmen??? What, you mean like Sin City? Or 300? Or even Judge Dredd. Nope, I suspect this is just knee-jerk journalism at work. It is a popular comic, therefore it must be full of graphic and unnecessary violence.
The journalist prolly saw the defenestration sequence at the start and read no moar.
While I’m willing to believe the reporter is either thinking of something else (Sin City and 300 are both good examples), one should not forget that Watchmen is quite a violent graphic novel. In the end you have more than three million dead people, after all.
And yes, there is quite a lot of graphic violence there. All pretty much necessary to the plot and done in the “best possible taste” as Cupid Stunt might say.
There are some nasty scenes there, mostly related to Rorschach. The finger-breaking interrogation is quite memorable.
Folks, you are missing the point. Of course there is violence in Watchmen, but when a journalist writes “the xxx comic” then the adjective “xxx” is supposed to convey a defining characteristic of the comic in question. The use of “bestselling” with respect to Watchmen is entirely reasonable. You might also use “pornographic” to describe Lost Girls, “feminist” to describe Dykes to Watch Out For or “hilarious” to describe Calvin & Hobbes. However, “violent” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Watchmen.
Alternatively, consider The Lord of the Rings. There is plenty of violence in it. Thousands of people die in battles. Poor old Frodo almost gets eaten by a giant spider. But if someone wrote “the violent, bestselling fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings“, you would do a double-take, right?
For me, it’ll always be “the romantic, exciting graphic novel”. Back in Finncon 1991 there was a Watchmen group in the masquerade. Among others, there were Johanna Sinisalo as Rorshach, Petri Hiltunen as the Comedian, me as Silk Spectre II/Laurie and certain M. Uusitalo as the Night Owl/Dan. And that is how I got involved with my hubby-to-be.
Sorry to intrude – I just had to share. 🙂