Making Watchmen: What Took So Long?
RT looks at the graphic novel's oft-delayed trip to the big screen.
Last December, comics and movie fans eagerly awaiting the March 6th, 2009 release of Watchmen were shocked by the news that on Christmas Eve, Los Angeles federal judge Gary Allen Feess gave 20th Century Fox a big present. Feess ruled that Fox has rights to Watchmen, the spectacular looking and highly-anticipated movie that Warner Bros has been making, and is only a few months from releasing. Fox's lawsuit against Warner Bros hadn't been a secret, but few fans probably thought that anything would really come of it. After all, Watchmen was published by DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Bros, and so they clearly had the rights to make a movie based on the comic, right? Taken in that light, this is sort of like a studio suing over Warner Bros' rights to make a Batman or Superman movie. However, the history of the road of how Watchmen became a movie is much more complicated.
Let's begin at the beginning (the very beginning) with some comics corporate history. In 1934, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson founded a company called National Allied Publications to publish one of the first titles of a new thing called "comic books", in response to another company that had published the first example of a year earlier. Wheeler-Nicholson's first comic books were just reprints of strips from the Sunday funnies, but in 1937 he established a second, separate company to publish comic books comprised of original material that was mainly grittier, crime fighting stories. This new company's first title was to be Detective Comics, and so the initials, D.C., were used for the company's name. A year later in 1938, the company launched its fourth title, Action Comics #1 featuring a new type of character which would become known as "the superhero", in the form of Superman. 
The company was a huge success in the following years, which became known as the Golden Age of Comics. In 1944, D.C. Comics merged with National Allied (although Wheeler-Nicholson himself was out of both companies by then) and was called National Comics, although the DC Comics name was still used on most of the titles. Over the next 25 years, DC/National flourished, publishing comics in nearly all genres, including popular superheroes like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the Flash. Meanwhile, over in the movie business, a company called 7 Arts had bought the troubled Warner Bros movie studio in 1967 for $85 million. Two years later, partly because of the popularity of the 1960s Batman TV series, National Comics was bought by Warner Bros/7 Arts. This history establishes something very important to the Watchmen legal story: DC Comics has belonged to Warner Bros for the last 40 years.
Now, let's speed along to the next page in this particular history book. Enter: Alan Moore. Born in England in 1953, comic book writer Alan Moore belonged to a group of writers and artists whose careers were incubated by England's own comic book industry. The flagship title in the English comics scene was the long-running anthology series 2000 A.D., which spun off a few long-running titles, including Judge Dredd (the awesome comic, not just the crappy movie). In the 1980s, mainstream comic books began to take on a new maturity, urged on by both a growing independent comics scene and the success of edgier, darker storylines like the "Dark Phoenix Saga" in Uncanny X-Men. The edgy British writers were perfect imports for companies like DC, and so in 1983, Alan Moore, who had achieved some acclaim with his V for Vendetta, was hired to write the monster comic, Swamp Thing, which he turned into a sort of gothic/noir romantic epic. Moore's success led to many of those other British writers, like Neil Gaiman (Sandman) and Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol) to also start writing for DC.
Next Page: Alan Moore's inspirations for Watchmen
jokerboy1991 on 02-13-2009 08:08 AM
EPIC article! I just got my mid night show tickets! Also apparently Devin @ Chud saw it and really liked it.
greg_dean_schmitz on 02-13-2009 09:11 AM
Wow, thanks JokerBoy ! I put a lot into this article; been working on it for over a month.