Last month the trailer for Zach Snyder's movie adaptation of Watchmen premiered with The Dark Knight. Since then, sales of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have skyrocketed, with publisher DC Comics ordering up a 300,000 print run. Not bad for a comic book that came out 22 years ago.
Via a link from Neil Gaiman, here's a reprint of a 2002 interview with writer Moore. Despite the occasional typo, this is one of the most in-depth conversations with Moore I've ever seen. The Manchester Northampton comics master cultivates the image of a wild-haired, wide-eyed, magic-practicing outcast -- and he is indeed that -- but here he's also revealed as an erudite, insightful and very generous writer.
... Watchmen was about a number of things. It started off as a silly-ass superhero story. We wanted to do a superhero story where we saw what would happen if you'd got a group of superheroes existing in a credible, real world, and what if these were credible, real characters emotionally-speaking, or at least as credible as we can make them. I suppose that was the basic premise – we thought we might get a darker than usual, grittier than usual superhero story out of it. We had got to round about the third issue when all of a sudden we started to realise that there was something growing out of the storytelling that we hadn't really anticipated. There was something happening within the structure of the story – slightly interesting sparks, coming to life ...
for a few years there, when i was really into my poetry, i'd have a journal with me 24/7. i was always writing. every fragment of a thought went down on paper. my friends thought i was crazy, but some great stuff came from that.
Posted by: vrtualme | August 12, 2008 at 02:07 PM