Watchmen, the 2009 Zack Snyder adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons‘s acclaimed comic book series of the same name, is coming to the DC Universe app, and DC provided ComicBook.com with a glimpse at their recent discussion with Gibbons about the film. During an interview with DC Universe’s DC Daily, Gibbons talked about the legacy of the comic, which has obviously gone far beyond anything he and Moore coudl have imagined. Noting that when the series was released, most comics didn’t even get a collected edition, Gibbons expressed awe at the story’s enduring appeal, and joked that if they knew it was going to be this popular, they might not have made it.
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Of course, given Alan Moore’s general disposition, and his specific relationship with Watchmen, that might be only about 50% a joke. You can check out GIbbons’s remarks (part of a longer, 30-minute interview) above, though. In addition to thoughts on the comic and the Snyder film, Gibbons praised the recent HBO series.
“When we were doing it, we really just set out to do the kind of comic book we wanted to read,” Gibbons said. “We absolutely believed it would have its 12-issue run. We didn’t even in those days envision that it would be collected in a single volume because that wasn’t done in comics back then. We thought it would just disappear into the course of things and that would have been Watchmen and we’d have had a great time doing it. The fact that all these years later it’s still bringing in new readers is just amazing. In fact, I think if we’d known that at the time, with that expectation it would have stopped us from doing it. It’s been amazing. It does seem to keep coming back ,whether there’s a revival with a big movie as there was ten years ago, or the wonderful version that Damon Lindelof has done for the HBO series. I was absolutely thrilled with that….It had very much the attitude that we had when we did the comic. We wanted to break some barriers and it wanted to be unpredictable and it wanted to go into some areas that you’d never quite imagined before. And along with that, Damon and his team were really faithful to what Alan and I had established. There isn’t anything in the TV show that was embarrassed with what’s in the comic book.”
That includes the “squid” — the fabricated alien menace that closed out the comic book story but was absent from Snyder’s version. At the time, and given the special effects as they had existed in the decades since Watchmen, it was generally believed that the squid sequence was not filmable, and that it would look absurd onscreen. The HBO series managed to prove that wrong.
Watchmen arrives on DC Universe on May 1.
