Before Watchmen’s Amanda Conner on Finishing With Silk Spectre

With Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre behind her, Amanda Conner’s hectic schedule is…well, still […]

September 6, 2017, 11:00pm

With Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre behind her, Amanda Conner’s hectic schedule is…well, still pretty hectic. Conner writes and draws an awful lot of material every month, even when she doesn’t have one or two DC projects on her plate.Still, there’s something special about a project like Before Watchmen; it’s a book that will be near the top of her bio forever and will help to elevate her already-impressive profile among casual fans. Conner joined ComicBook.com to look back on Silk Spectre and forward to what’s next.Is it kind of odd looking back on a project of this magnitude as something that you’ve done, rather than something you’re doing?I hadn’t really thought about it too much. While I was doing it, I was doing it almost around the clock and I was so exhausted that when I stopped I just sort of crashed. I haven’t really gotten a chance to recuperate from that. The last two issues that I had finished I was sort of working and working and working nonstop on it and getting four and five hours of sleep a night. So when I stopped, I thought I’d be in more of a partying mood but all I wanted to do was just sleep. I keep waking up and going, “I have to go to work!” and then saying, “Oh, no, wait–I don’t have to work quite so hard.”It’s not as though you get all that much of a break – you keep a lot of plates spinning at any given time.I do tend to keep really busy. When I’m not drawing, I’m usually doing something else and sometimes it gets to where I need a little break and I’ll say, “I’m not going to draw anything, I’m just going to do this other thing for a couple of weeks.” I thought I would be doing a little less drawing but it appears that I have stuff lined up now that I’m done with Before Watchmen. the plan was to take a vacation maybe next week but we’re not going to do that.And I like taking on small, weird things, also, every once in a while. I like to do the high profile stuff but once in a while some small thing that I like to get my hands into.

And that ties into Before Watchmen – everyone attached are people who tend to do really well in the bookstore markets. You didn’t have Jim Lee or something for the comics market, but everyone involved was popular both inside and outside of the direct market stores.

Videos by ComicBook.com

It strikes me that almost everybody says, “Well, we’re not going to make Watchmen.” Do you think that kind of reverence for the source material helps or hinders you? How is it different than doing say Superman or Batman? To me, I feel like carrying forth those icons is almost as daunting. Watchmen Watchmen And it’s an interesting book because at the end of the day, she’s young and her life is kind of on the upswing, whereas many of the other characters in the Before Watchmen books have already had their day in the sun and their titles are leading to apocalypse. Watchmen And this is obviously hypothetical, but is this something you’d ever want to do again or do you think you’d had your say in the world of Watchmen? Dan DiDio had said that there’s always room to possibly expand on the world of Before Watchmen, and so it kind of begs the question of whether you folks involved might be interested if they were to do that in a year or two years or five.