Damon Lindelof is in pre-development talks to work on a Watchmen television adaptation, The Hollywood Reporter wrote last night.
In April, we heard that Warner Bros. was at least considering giving Watchmen an R-rated animated adaptation, presumably to capitalize on the controversial success of last summer’s The Killing Joke movie. And Watchmen is slowly but inexorably being incorporated into the DC Comics Universe for the first time, with Dr. Manhattan as a deadly and mysterious antagonistic force preying on modern continuity.
Warner Bros., stop.
Stop making Watchmen adaptations
I know why Warner Bros. and DC are investigating and implementing ways of capitalizing on Watchmen. It’s arguably the company’s most famous comic, a historic document in American sequential art. If the art of comics had a canon — and I mean a literary canon — Watchmen would undoubtably be on it. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be critiqued, but that its achievements, in speaking to superheroes as a genre and advancing the language of sequential art as a form, are undeniable.
And the best-selling DC graphic novel of 2016 wasn’t anything connected to Rebirth, the New 52 or any of the company’s other modern publishing initiatives. It was 1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke.
But this has to stop.
Not because rebooting the ‘80s has been done to death. And not because everybody is just so very tired of dark deconstructions of the superhero genre from Warner Bros. movies. Damon Lindelof could very well turn out a good translation of Watchmen to screen. And DC’s slow rollout of Watchmen elements in Rebirth has been surprisingly smooth.
This needs to stop because Warner Bros. should care about showing a modicum of respect for creator rights.
Watchmen adaptations are against the wishes of Watchmen’s co-creator
The original pitch for Watchmen was that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons would populate the story with the flagship characters of the shuttered Charlton Comics (Blue Beetle, the Question, Captain Atom and more), which DC had recently acquired. Along the process, DC editorial changed its mind and requested that Moore create original characters instead. (The Charlton characters would wind up being integrated into the core DC Universe itself in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.)
Moore and Gibbons created and designed a new superhero universe from whole cloth, inspired by characters from DC, Marvel and Charlton comics. And when they signed on for the book, it was with contracts that included the provision that once DC stopped publishing Watchmen books and merchandise, the rights to the characters and setting would revert to the creators. Moore and Gibbons could have expected, reasonably, to gain control of the rights to Watchmen and its characters a year or two after its publication.
In 1986, there was no “book market” for superhero comics in America. That’s a concept that was essentially invented by the success of Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and other blockbuster “comics are for adults!” hits of the time. By making Watchmen outrageously good, Moore and Gibbons made it too lucrative to be given back to its creators. DC could maintain control of the characters as long as it kept the books in print, and luckily there was a lot of money to be had in keeping the books in print.
This and other conflicts between Moore and DC editorial led to the writer famously cutting ties with DC, after years spent writing some of the company’s most indelible superhero stories.
Watchmen became popular in part because Moore and Gibbons were able to create a original story and setting, with the expectation that they would control their creations once that story was told. This would allow them to say no to movies and spin-offs and all the other ephemera that can dilute or sometimes weigh down the stories that reach the level of “pop culture phenomenon.” Watchmen was created with that design in mind, based on a contract that the two men assumed would allow that to happen.
But Moore’s work has never managed to escape Warner Bros. legal grasp, despite his clear wishes that his original characters not be adapted or expanded upon by other artists. V for Vendetta and Watchmen received film adaptations — not to mention The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which Moore wrote as a creator-owned series for an independent comics publisher that was later bought by DC Comics and Warner Bros., and adapted for film.
Warner Bros. and DC executives’ attempts to curry favor with Moore have reportedly constituted offering him control of Watchmen — so long as he still allows the company to make adaptations and sequels to his work at its discretion, i.e., the very thing he has repeatedly expressed that he does not want. A win-win scenario for DC and Warner Bros., with no true gain for Moore. Refusing payment and association with adaptations of his DC Comics work, what Moore truly seems to want is the ability to say “no.”
Superhero comics have a long, terrible record of ignoring creators rights
From Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s battle to gain compensation for Superman, to the family of Jack Kirby’s similar struggle — the history of American superhero comics is one of oft uncredited, underpaid work-for-hire art that now underpins the biggest money makers of our largest entertainment industry.
If DC really is “the house that Batman built,” as the character’s Lego counterpart asserts in the opening of his solo film, then it is by proxy the house that Bill Finger built. And yet Finger, who by all contemporary accounts invented the lion’s share of vital elements to Batman’s story, remained uncredited on all Batman stories and adaptations excepting a single episode of the Batman television show, while his co-creator Bob Kane took credit for his inventions for decades.
Finger died penniless in 1974. His first credit as the co-creator of Batman was in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, following a suit brought by his single grandchild.
The continual release of Watchmen content is lemon juice in a paper cut, knowing that one of the people most responsible for the comic’s existence would want the exact opposite. And it’s a creativity-stifling warning to every aspiring artist who might consider working in the genre: Give a superhero company your ideas, but only if you could stand to have them taken from you.
Yesterday, DC Comics chief creative officer and Warner Bros. producer Geoff Johns characterized the DC Universe as a home for “inspirational and aspirational” heroes, a “hopeful and optimistic place.” It is frankly embarrassing that in the year 2017, Warner Bros. would abide by the letter of their agreement with Alan Moore and not the spirit.