GAIMAN: How much feedback is there between the two of you to create what we see now? The thing seems to have taken on an identity of its own since we kicked it off, which is always nice. There’s the plot there, but it’s what’s happened since then that’s the real surprise because there’s all this other stuff that’s crept into it, all this deep stuff, the intellectual stuff. The thing was that with Watchmen if you read that original synopsis it’s the bare skeleton. There were projects that we’d talked up that we both wanted to do, and it all just came out. We’d done quite a lot of things that we’d tried to get done with DC - we were going to do Martian Manhunter and Challengers of the Unknown, and some of the aspects of that led into Watchmen. People ask me how I got involved in it, and I can’t really remember. Me and Dave have been wanting to do something together for a long time, so when this came up I said I’d be happy to work with Dave and Dave said he’d be happy to work with me and that’s it.ĭAVE GIBBONS: Yeah, I’ll go along with that. ![]() It’s worked out much better than it would have done if we had used Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and all the others, and I’m pleased with it. I’m much happier now doing it with original characters. ![]() He said, “Can you change the characters around and come up with some new ones?” At first I wasn’t sure whether that would work, but when Dave and I got together and started just planning these things out, it all really snapped into place and worked fine. Dick loved the stuff, but having a paternal affection for these characters from his time at Charlton, he really didn’t want to give his babies to the butchers, and make no mistake about it, that’s what it would have been. We were going to treat the Question as a lot more extreme than he’d been treated before. We sent all this stuff to Dick Giordano and some of it was extreme. So I started mapping out a few ideas, and originally it was just a murder mystery, “Who killed the Peacemaker,” and that was it. They were just a nice, innocent little bunch of characters, which is always fair game, really, and there was a self-contained universe with four or five characters, and I thought it’d be nice to just take that and do whatever you wanted with it. I just thought that they were all lying around, up for grabs, and I hadn’t heard of anything else that was being done with them. NEIL GAIMAN: I thought I’d start off by asking Alan and Dave a couple of questions about the genesis of Watchmen - how it started out way back when Alan was asked to do something with some Charlton superheroes, and how it evolved into the rather remarkable comic it is now.ĪLAN MOORE: We weren’t asked to do anything with the Charlton superheroes. Moderating the panel discussion is British comics writer Neil Gaiman. The following is a discussion on the influences and thought behind Watchmen between series creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons at the UK Comic Art Convention in London on Sept. Scheduled to finish its 12-issue run this summer, Watchmen has shown comics fans and professionals alike that a comics series employing literary techniques - such as the layers of theme and plot inherent in each issue, the intricate and precise attention to detail evident not only in the writing, but also in the artwork, and the desire to portray the genuine crises the world faces today - could be both a commercial and a creative success. Riding the crest of DC’s explorations of the adult comics market in ’86 and ’87 was Watchmen, perhaps one of the most thoughtful renditions of the superhero genre. From the TCJ Archives A Portal to Another Dimension: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Neil Gaiman
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