Looking forward to next weekend’s thread when we all pick this long awaited/dreaded beast apart!

I wonder just how many of the sales of the trade are purchases like this where a comic fan is buying the book for a friend(s)?

I’m a pretty blatant comics fan (anyone that knows me knpws I read ‘em) and I have yet to hear of anyone that has bought this aside from one guy that I know and he only bought it because I was visiting him and wanted to know where a comic shop was and when he took me there, he picked it up because we were in the store. he pretty much told me that he wouldn’t have bought it if we didn’t make the trip that day.

So, if all it is really, is comic fans buyin the book for people that won’t read another comic unless it’s purchased for them, then I can’t see how that’s anything to crow about at all.

Still looking forward to it.

Just as enjoyed the adaptation of Lord of the Rings despite it not having Tom Bombadil or Saruman taking over Bag End…

I like seeing other people’s takes on the same story…

For that matter, how many Bond movies are true to the source material?

I’m just glad it wasn’t made into a movie back in the late 80s… Or Joel Schumacher had got his hands on it…

Please note that the link above spoils the ending. The comments I’m speficifically referring to are ones made by the user names “Calliope” and “abietto. “

I’m eagerly dreading the Watchmen. I want to find a vintage t-shirt place that sells a Squiddley Diddly shirt I can wear to it. I agree with alex that the squid was integral to the story and will no doubt scoff at whatever ending they’ve come up with, no matter how brilliant it may be.

I have no faith in movie critics and especially not top critics. Dark Knight was a shitty turd of a flick, but the critics loved it overwhelmingly, and the ‘top critics” showed even worse taste than the regular critics by rating it even higher than the regular ones.

What are you talking about?
Rotten Tomotoes critics don’t use a scale, although RT does use one itself based on how many critics liked, as opposed to those who panned it – which isn’t the most reliable, as they only have love or hate, and some lukewarm reviews (At best) get rated a love.
But anyway, the standard critics on Rotten Tomatoes had a 94% love for it.
The top critics had 90%.
The fans had 94% as well.

So, that kind of blows you’re argument out – the top critics didn’t like it as much as the other critics or the public.

Also worth pointing out that you are considering it a shitty turd of a flick is because it doesn’t line up with the Batman you like from the comics, not as a piece of filmmaking, which is what all the critics on RT are judging it by.

Watchmen currently has a 76% on the critics meter, but doesn’t have enough reviews posted by the top critics to have a percentage yet, although both that have posted have given it a negative.
It only got a 71% from fans who have posted.

Almost every action sequence features slow-mo in some form. Sometimes it works but it’s over-used.

That’s a quarter of three months worth of sales. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable guess, that 1 in 4 folks might buy another graphic novel.

NOT TOO SHABBY.

Will Watchmen help comics sales overall? Maybe, maybe not. There isn’t a previous case like this that we can compare it to.

This is the first high profile, heavily marketed movie adaptation of a stand alone book that also has pretty broad commercial potential, and is part of popular and widely available genre within the comics industry- V For Vendetta, for example, is not a book that a lot of people will enjoy because of it’s lear political bias and relentlessly dark tone; while Iron Man, Batman, etc all suffer from the problem that people have no idea where to start with the books; and 300, Sin City, Road To Perdition, 30 Days Od Night etc are markedly different in genre from everything else on the comics rack.

This is a superhero blockbuster, with easily identifiable and available source material, that has also, let’s not forget, proven in the past to be a “gateway comic” for a huge proportion of people.

Maybe people will stop with Watchmen, maybe they won’t, but there’s no yardstick for this. The fact that it didn’t work with 300 or Dark Knight has no real significance.

ther IS a difference between being pessimistic and being realistic, but there’s also such a thing as simply having no way of knowing, in which case optimism is entirely acceptable.

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As for the movie? It’s completely impossible for it to stand up to the book. I just hope it’s enjoyable, and it sounds like it will be to me.

The adaptation has bigger problems than the squid, trust me.

None of the ‘top critics’ have posted reviews though.

I have no faith in movie critics and especially not top critics. Dark Knight was a shitty turd of a flick, but the critics loved it overwhelmingly, and the ‘top critics” showed even worse taste than the regular critics by rating it even higher than the regular ones.

Honestly though… regardless of the “faithfulness” of the adaptation, it has already gotten more people reading comics (sales of Watchmen have gone through the roof). For some reason, Watchman seems to have already had a bigger effect on sales that even Iron Man, Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight.

It’s not hard to figure out why? if you are a noncomics fan and you watch Iron Man, Spider-Man and Dark Knight movies, which comic do you go to in order to follow up on the comics? You have over 40 years of comics and trade paperbacks to choose from. If you want to follow up on Watchmen interest by reading a comic book however, all you have to do is by one self-contained graphic novel. Therefore all the Watchmen-generated interest gets focused on one graphic novel while interest generated by the other heroes gets diffused across a ton of books and publications.

The squid is a fiction with a fiction within a fiction. It is the ultimate underscore of one of the most important aspects of the book.

When you remove it, you remove a thematic element that lies at the heart of the plot, and the it’s not just a silly macguffin that look silly on screen (or whatever).

For all the talk about how “realistic” Watchmen is, it’s not, nor is it supposed to be. And the ultimate fiction of the Squid, at the end, is the focal point that these layers of imagined worlds work around.

I don’t give a shit about the movie or what they change, but that’s a pretty hefty chunk to cut, thematically.