Don’t watch the watchmen
Friday, July 24th, 2009“Everybody should have read the book” – wonderful piece of satire. They even got the accents right.
(via Chris Roberson)
“Everybody should have read the book” – wonderful piece of satire. They even got the accents right.
(via Chris Roberson)

Get your own creative genius wizard here, courtesy of Mustard Magazine. You can even choose between his daily garb, and the wonderful getup he wore at his wedding.
(via Forbidden Planet)

Much like Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters, David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket and Dave McKean’s Cages, Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers is a comic of almost epic proportions. The fact that the book was axed after only two issues, with a third one in the making, surely helped it acquire that status.
That fabled third issue now has surfaced thanks to Pádraig Ó Méalóid, who acquired the first two issues along with photocopied pages from the third one in an internet auction. As the (anonymous) seller put it :
“A number of years ago, I was a member of the CompuServe comic books forum, and I communicated with a number of professionals… One of those professionals was a friend of a friend of Alan Moore, and she had the photocopy of issue #3. She made copies for a few people, and I was lucky enough to be one.” He later said, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’d rather keep my source confidential… Anyway, the story I heard was that Al Columbia completed this issue, had it sent off for lettering and then went a little crazy and refused to release the art for publication … In any event, this art did exist long enough for it to be photocopied.”
Glycon scanned the pages, and has put the issue in its entirety online, with the following caveat :
“A few notes: Firstly, at least some of this art looks like Bill Sienkiewicz’s, but some of it doesn’t, which is presumably Al Columbia’s. A few of the pages are a bit askew, which is how I got them, but I’ve left them as they are, only trimming my scans up to where I felt the page images were, but otherwise leaving them as the were on the pages I have. It certainly looks as if these are not first-generation photocopies, so the images are not as crisp and sharp as they could be, but they’re probably the best we’re going to get to see, except for the unlettered art for some of these pages that was in SubMedia #1.”
As Alan Moore news goes, this is infinitely more interesting than the Watchmen crap that has been flooding the interwebs off late…
(tip of the hat to Gene Kannenberg)
Even though I’m quite hesitant to go and see Watchmen (I’m just afraid that it will be bad enough to spoil the book for the rest of my life), I do like many of the various marketing endeavours that have been undertaken to support the movie. These pages replaced the regular front and back pages of the free Metro newspaper on March 6.
I like the way they continue the series of fake articles and other texts that Alan Moore used to include in the original comics.
(Brought to you by the inimitible Slinky – Watchmen © 2008 Warner Bros, Entertainment inc., Metro © Copyright 2009 Metro International)

Storybook Smith, with a script by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch and lettering by Todd Klein, can be yours for $ 900. All original art, that is…

This strip was created by Katie Cook for the last page of the new edition of George Khoury’s biography of Alan Moore (for sale at TwoMorrows). I just love how Alan looks even more like a gentle giant in this one.
(cartoon © Katie Cook 2008)

This portrait of Alan Moore as a gentle wise man was made by Italian cartoonist Gianluca Costantini as part of his visual report of the 2008 London Comics Festival. You can peruse it in full on his ChannelDraw website, which also contains other reports and examples of his art.

One Year to Midnight reveals (some of) the official Watchmen movie costumes. I like the one above, and I absolutely detest all the rest of them, so I won’t show them here.
Once more, they have fallen in the trap of unnecessarily griming and grittying up the costumes. Part of the appeal of Dave Gibbons’ art was the limited amount of colors, mimicking the limited printing possibilities of typical pulp comics of the fifties and sixties. this is all gone now : Watchmen has been sexed up, and I don’t like it.
As in the book, only Rorschach is true to his cause…
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