The Good: Interesting to see the process
The Bad: EXPENSIVE, Not terribly interesting/detailed
The Basics: Disappointing even to a die-hard fan, Watching The Watchmen was part of the media exploitation of Watchmen when the film was released.
Exploiting current cinema with merchandising is nothing new. It's not new at all and, truth be told, I honestly tend to enjoy it quite a bit (if for no other reason than it means I have more things to review!). But in the case of the cinematic adaptation of Watchmen (reviewed here!) the merchandising seemed particularly shameless. As excited as I was about Watchmen, there was something odd about seeing all of the new books preceding the film. In fact, when my wife and I went to New York City in February before the film was released, we saw so many books and posters around the City it was dizzying. It might seem hypocritical coming from one of the people who saw the trailer to Watchmen and bought the graphic novel (thus putting it back on the bestseller's list!) to say that some of the merchandise that came out around the time of the movie was just crap, but some of it was.
Arguably the book that falls into that category is Watching The Watchmen, a 280 page hardcover monstrosity put out by Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons and assistants Mike Essel and Chip Kidd. Alan Moore, as is his custom, had nothing to do with the release of this book, though Gibbons dedicates it to Moore. It seems fitting that I write this for a Write-Off Tom is sponsoring as he often encourages me to be more brief in my reviews. After taking in the 280 page book, I have remarkably little to say about it. This is, as one might expect, not the desired effect of a book that has a cover price of $39.95!
Watching The Watchmen is a remarkably simple book. Dave Gibbons documents the creation of the graphic novel Watchmen (reviewed here!). The coffee table book is designed for fans of Watchmen who are interested in all of the esoteric acts of creation and development that went into making the original Watchmen comics as well as the effect they had on Gibbons and people he knew. The book is composed of two hundred eighty oversized (12" x 9 1/2") pages and all of the pages are heavy-stock, glossy pages. This is a book designed to last.
By and large, though, what appears on the pages is utter crap. About ninety percent of the book (if not more!) are pages filled with sketches. I'm not talking about refined drawings or intricate designs, most of the pages are thumbnail drawings, hastily thrown together sketches (with pencils), framework concept sketches and early panel concepts for Watchmen. There are sketches with character conceptions for all of the major characters, including an obscene number of sketches where Gibbons tries to figure out how Rorschach's mask will look. But many of these are so far from where they end up that the original drawings are laughable. Well, at the price of this book, laughing is not what I was in the mood for!
Similarly, there are few pages that actually capture the nostalgia or thrill of the actual work. This is a book for the fans who simply must know and must have everything. But as an author, I know there are a lot of ideas that rightly do not take their place in a finished work and Watching The Watchmen is largely a collection of those things that rightly hit the cutting room floor or were developed sufficiently without the process being terribly interesting. The book wastes a lot of space with early sketches of the smiley face button and just how the blood on it would look.
The best way to describe what this book is made up of is to analogize it to a bonus feature from Family Guy or The Simpsons. On both shows, the DVDs have a feature "how to draw characters from . . ." In those, viewers may watch as the artists create sketches of the characters with rough circles, lines and they talk through the process as they go. The sketches end up being sloppy, with flailing pencil lines going all over. Over that sheet, though, the artists put a piece of tracing paper and they then trace only the essential lines needed to make the character and that top page is always a precise image of the character in question. Watching The Watchmen is a big book primarily composed of the bottom sheets; the rough drawings which are just terrible and often unrecognizable. There are notes scribbled in the margins and later in the book, there are some actual original panels (uncolored, uninked) and they are neat. But the book is dominated by the other type of sketches and it is boring to look at more than once and it is not terribly enlightening (even for a fan).
The book is not an absolute waste (though at the price, it is impossibly expensive and unworth recommending). Gibbons writes about the collaborative process with Moore and some of his comments on the original writings and his reactions are interesting. But even more prevalent is Gibbons' sense of gloating or Kidd and Essl's sense of geekish justification for compiling the book. For example, there is a story in Watching The Watchmen about Gibbons giving the first issue to a neighbor who was entirely uninterested in comics. But the next month, the neighbor came back and asked for the second issue, so engrossed was he in the narrative. Fans of Watchmen have those experiences, reading about the same thing from the artist seems . . . well, self promotional.
The best moment in the book is actually a photograph sent to Gibbons as "fan mail." It's a bag with a smiley face on it altered with the Watchmen blood spot on it and a comment on how the book is taking everyone by storm. That's cute and I can see why Gibbons would enjoy it. But why he would share it or ask people to pay so much for it . . . that just seems strange. This entire book would have worked far better as a display at the Museum of Comic Book History in New York City.
Watchmen fans: look at this at a local bookstore or library (support your library!). Those who are not captivated with Watchmen, you'll not want to bother. There's not enough interesting here to get you into it.
For other Watchmen-related books and merchandise, please check out my reviews of:
The Watchmen Film Companion
Watchmen Portraits
Nite Owl II action figure
3/10
For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!
© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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