Watchmen:Minutemen: Some highlights

[domino_blue]

Well I've been dreading this. For the obvious reasons as usual. Blah Blah, creator rights, Watchmen is a sacred cow, this does not involve Alan Moore.....and here's some scans from it. I want to keep it as civil as possible so let avoid personal attacks on creators who are doing this and just critique. I will say this if I was given this job...I would have taken it. Sad but if I was given the chance to work on the Minutemen, I would do it. I would have also said if you want please declare it non-canon and just pretend it doesn't exist because you don't like, please don't let my work color your perception of the original. Well that's enough of that, lets look at the first issue.


Posting this is hard because well it's recent and thus I must stick to 4 pages. So here's 4 of the most interesting pages in the book. The narration is by Nite-owl 1, and is meant to evoke "under the hood",while also going more into the back story of Minutemen.

First the Comedian gets.....a Freudian excuse.



Next up is Mothman, who is revealed to be a genius scared of his own suit. See in the testing phases it was very prone to accidents and the books implies that fear made him ....well have a breakdown later in life.


I got to say, Darwyn Cooke is still one of the best draftsmen in the industry.

Let's move on to the Silhouette, who is treated very sympathetically. Nite-owl goes over her origin while we see her breaking up a child slavery ring.

I will admit I like this bit a lot, and kind of wish she was a original character because I can't help but remember her coming off very coldly in the book and not...this nice.

Next we get Captain Metropolis being...well see for yourself.

Keep in mind word of God is that he is gay, and while they haven't done anything overt yet, I hope they keep it in good taste.

So those are the highlights, good, okay, make you want to stab your eyes out in a blind rage and bomb DC Comics(please don't one of my friends interns there), either way I hope this helps you get a idea of how you feel about it.

Comments

[auggie18]

Well, I like it from I've seen.

Though, keep in mind that while I liked Watchmen, I've never been one of those people who are aggressively into it. Probably not the person who'd be raging at this. (Love Darwyn Cooke. Nothing but love for the man.)

[darkblade]

Giving the Comedian a freudian excuse is a bad idea but not a surprising one.

Kick-Ass destroyed any possibility of a guy with fake wings jumping off a building can ever be taken seriously ever again. Which is a shame because that was an otherwise good moment.

I honestly cannot remember Sillouete having any dialogue at all in the original. All we had to go on about her was what other characters had to say and most of them were heavily biased in one way or another. So it's impossible to say if this is in line with the original version.

I have no real thoughts either way on the Captain Metropolis section.

[darkknightjrk]

"I honestly cannot remember Sillouete having any dialogue at all in the original."

In the second issue, during Sally's flashback, after they leave the photoshoot and are talking about whether they might go to Europe to help Allied efforts in WWII, Hooded Justice says he doesn't know if they should get involved in political situations, and Sillouete replies and an almost sarcastic way, "Perhaps the Poles thought so too, eh? You agree, Sally?"

[blackruzsa]

Ditto on the Kick-Ass bit.

[lonewolf23k]

Well, let's hope Comedian starts to pull a Joker, and give a different Freudian Excuse every time he's asked.

[darkblade]

That could be good but I'd prefer they just went without any excuse at all.

[darkknightjrk]

I think that's just him being sarcastic. There's a reason why he's eating a rotten egg, after all.

[darkknightjrk]

I really liked this--it reminds me of what seemed to be more of the original point of Watchmen at the beginning, to show that while they are human with fallacies and failings, these people do have heroic qualities...well, some of them, anyway. I especially liked The Silloute, and I hope we get to see more of her with this.

Also, it's interesting to find out Metropolis was said to be gay later on, because I didn't get that vibe from him at all. I thought he was more of decadent, vain, and uncaring--his mannerisms weren't anything that screamed "gay" to me, but more rich and drunk with power.

[greenmask]

If everyone knew everyone's sexuality through vibes, though.. Well, one can't just tell, is what im saying. Fictional or real.

[thanekos]

The statues, the houseboy, the honed physique.. it's really like Captain Met's a low-end Ozymandias (at least he's not one in the Who Watches The Watchmen? vein).

[arilou_skiff]

He reminds me of Marburg from Alpha Protocol actually.

[golden_orange]

First the Comedian gets.....a Freudian excuse.

TBH I kind of interpreted that as him saying it sarcastically, or at least him not giving a serious answer.

As for Silhouette, from what I remember we only really got one or two lines of dialogue from her, and most of those were her snarking at Silk Spectre because of some animosity between them, so that might have something to do with it.

[domino_blue]

I probably should have said the why I consider her cold in the book. See the whole point of this mini-series is that it's basically Under the Hood, and remembering in the original he did talk about her. One of the things he said was that she kept to herself and didn't let anybody in. So yeah maybe cold isn't the best word but this seems like too personal a portrayal.

[arise]

Honestly, I like it so far. I quite like the idea of a Minutemen series - it's the rest of the spin-offs I'm not sure about because I feel like there's not much interesting left to do with those characters.

[salinea]

yeah, my opinion, too.

[darkknightjrk]

I think Silk Spectre has a lot of interesting stuff left to do--like I said earlier up, Laurie really didn't have much as her own characseter in the story that didn't involve the people she slept with or her father.

Also, as someone who's read up a lot on the Vietnam War, I'm kinda curious to see what happens in The Comedian.

It would also be interesting to actually see Nite-Owl as a young hero.

[icon_uk]

Liking the look of this rather a lot.

Mothman's scene reminds me of a British celebrity new quiz show thing (I forget which one, it may have been "8 out of 10 Cats") where they were discussing, for some reason, what the worst superpower to have would be. Amidst the usual answers was one I found brilliant; The power to fly... but you'd never be able to know for how long it would last.

Imagine being able to soar through the sky but never being able to because, even if you took a parachute, you'd never know if your power would give out when you were only a couple of hundred feet up, more than enough to kill you, but not enough for a parachute to be any use. how bloody frustrating would THAT be?

[drexer]

Not bad so far. Not worthwhile either.

I'm still more scared of the Dr.Manhattan issue which I'm predicting will be a total trainwreck.

[mrstatham]

I honestly don't see the point of the Manhattan mini. Of all the characters in Watchmen, his was the story covered most prominently, really. I don't see what they're going to cover, and Straczynski has not had the best track record at DC - his books are the ones I'm least bothered about.

[riddler13]

I've got nothing against Cooke... quite the opposite, in fact. Besides, the job was there, someone'd take it.

And having "Watchmen Begins" does nothing to harm Watchmen's legacy. We all forgot DKR2, didn't we?

[darkblade]

I disagree between ASBAR and DKR2 it is hard to see the original Dark Knight Returns in the same light.

That was the original creator shitting on his own work though so not quite the same thing.

[mrstatham]

Not all of us forgot DKR2. Some of us actually prefer it to the miserable and morose original.

[shadowpsykie]

i actually like what i have seen of this book. the art is excellent and the characterization is as well.

as far as "good taste" what are you saying? i recall the love scenes between Nite Owl2 and Silk Spectre 2 and those seemed in good taste to me... i would not mind seeing something similar with Cap Met. i mean gays are not neutered.

[domino_blue]

I use Good taste as in not I hope he won't be a sterotype and a actual good character who may be flawed but with understandable motivations. I don't mind him kissing man on screen when I use good taste, I mean it in him not being horribly offensive.

[beyondthefringe]

While the project as a whole may still be a bit on the dodgy side, I will say that this first issue is excellent and well worth the price of admission. I love actually getting to see more detail on the characters who got such short time in the spotlight in the original. The insights into Mothman and Silhouette especially are wonderful and so telling.

I love the way they gave Sil a fluid, dynamic sense of movement and confidence as she fought. I'm already sad, knowing her ultimate fate.
I always felt like the Minutemen were left far too much in the background, to be rendered jokes and tragedies - this actually gives them life and a chance to breathe before what happens, happens.

[mrstatham]

Pretty much this. This book and Silk Spectre's are the only ones I feel are absolutely justified by the original material alone, because the original Minutemen were really very melancholy and more footnotes for the heroes to come and making comparisons between the Minutemen and the group Ozymandias attempts to form. Laurie is also the most underdeveloped of the leads, plus there's Amanda Conner on art and I think it's Cooke writing, so.. Yeah.

[halloweenjack]

It's not bad, certainly, but it doesn't seem to add anything really significant, so far, and especially compared to Cooke's New Frontier, that's really sad.