RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books First of the "Before Watchmen" minis arrived today.....world survives.

This is it."Before Watchmen" is a reality as of today. Darwyn Cooke's "Minutemen" hit the shelves and surprisingly there was no apocalypse by it showing up. I sat down to read this with no expectations good or bad. I just wanted to read the issue. Guess what? It's pretty good reading. It gave a nice backstory on the Minutemen from Hollis Mason's(Nite Owl)POV and it was solid storytelling. Cooke's art was,as always,beautiful in it's simplicity and conveyed the story very well.

Here's the thing about this particular story....it's essentially a blank canvas. Moore only very briefly showed backstory on these particular characters and rightly so as "Watchmen" wasn't about them,so Cooke is able to take the very basic of what was known and go from there. Most of what I read didn't ring false with what I read in "Watchmen" and really,this is what I'm looking for from these books. After I read 'Watchmen", I wasn't so much interested in a sequel as I was in reading what went on prior to that story and this issue filled in a lot of what I wanted to read. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the story and hope the other minis are as good as this.

allan1 for Comic Book Mod...

Yeah, this is the one title in the "BW" series that nobody, including Moore, should complaining about. Moore never gave any of these characters any real backstory and there's plenty of room to tell a story that doesn't conflict or detract from "Watchmen." Furthermore, Cooke is one of the best writer-artists working today and his style is uniquely suited for a golden age story.

This is the one book in this project that I'm excited about and I'm glad to see it's getting good reviews so far.

I honestly think WATCHMEN is only a "classic" for its time. The take on comic book characters being deconstructed has been repeated and copied to the point of it being a near industry-standard now. That's why the movie didn't "impact" viewers like the book did in '85. It's nothing special....just ahead of its time. But that "time" has come and gone now. So, BW is no more 'ethically' offensive than the STAR WARS prequels...

A friend and I started to talk about that very thing. Deconstruction has become the norm now, not just of comic books. It's no longer clever. It's the status quo. Pretty soon all this cynicism will get pretty depressing.

No.