The Four Color Media Monitor

Warner Todd Huston at Newsbusters is not looking forward to the upcoming movie based upon Alan Moore's Watchmen from 1987. It may have been crummy and leftist, but with what the past couple years have yielded, one can only wonder if the movie will be worse, because of the likelihood it'll be updated to "reflect" more contemporary times.

Towards the end, Huston says:

Moore has lamented that his work with Watchmen had “started a whole genre of pretentious comics or miserable comics,” but since he insisted on taking that low road, but what could he expect? His politics, if emulated, ends up at this very place.

Yep, he's got a point. If you use that kind of political approach, it's possible that it'll only result in a vision that's - what else? - much too dark. Moore needs to ponder his past approach and determine where he went wrong if he's to make things better.

Still, I suppose Moore could earn points for what he told MTV a few years ago, a short time after the abortive movie based on V for Vendetta came out:

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

[...]Presumably it's not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America...

I have no idea if that tells that he's changed, but it does suggest that he realizes that liberals too can be pretty awful, as the Wachowskis were being at the time.

The possibility that the Watchmen movie will be turned into another impotent liberal fantasy that apes the original isn't the only thing to dread: DC is promoting a couple books by left-wing writers that are meant to cash in on anyone who reads Watchmen first:

Five “AFTER WATCHMEN, WHAT’S NEXT?” Specials featuring a cover price of just $1.00:

SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #21 SPECIAL EDITION
TRANSMETROPOLITAN #1 SPECIAL EDITION
PLANETARY #1 SPECIAL EDITION
PREACHER #1 SPECIAL
IDENTITY CRISIS #1 SPECIAL

3 of the books shown are written by Warren Ellis, a boilerplate leftist. That Identity Crisis would make this list is particularly disturbing, but recalling this article originally published in the Colorado Springs Gazette, which, dishonest as it was, did give a clue to what kind of political standing was behind it, maybe it shouldn't be too surprising that they're promoting it on this ballot of theirs.

I won't be surprised if the Watchmen movie turns out to be very bad, nor if Moore asked for his name to be removed from the credits, as I think he did with V for Vendetta. And based on at least 4 of the 5 books they're promoting in its wake, they apparently intend to promote leftism in the worst way.

Labels: dc comics, moonbat writers, politics, violence