Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons has some insight into the upcoming HBO series based on the seminal comic book series and he seems optimistic about how it’s shaping up.
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Gibbons was just inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame. He spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the honor and the Watchmen legacy and revealed a bit of what he knows about the Damon Lindelof’s HBO Watchmen series.
“I do know a little about it,” he says. “I’ve had conversations with Damon, and I’ve read the screenplay for the pilot. I don’t think it’s my place to say too much about it, other than I found Damon’s approach to be really refreshing and exciting and unexpected. I don’t think it’s gonna be what people think it’s going to be. It certainly wasn’t what I imagined it to be. I think it’s extremely fresh. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on the screen.”
This reaction seemed to surprise even Gibbons himself since he’s been put off by DC Comics attempts to build on the Watchmen universe with projects like Before Watchmen and Doomsday Clock.
“I’ve been resistant to the comic book prequels and sequels, but what Damon’s doing is not that at all, it’s very far away from that,” Gibbons says. “While it’s very reverential and true to the source material (by which I mean the Watchmen graphic novel that Alan [Moore] and I did), it’s not retreading the same ground, it’s not a reinterpretation of it. It approaches it in a completely unexpected way.”
Gibbons even went on to say that what Lindelof is attempting to do is similar to what he and Alan Moore did in the original Watchmen.
“Other people have done it with some success, coming to the basic material with a fresh approach,” Gibbons says. “I feel like the comic prequels and sequels don’t really do that. They’re done by very talented people, but they don’t expand the scope of it at all. Grant Morrison did a thing with Multiversity, where he came up with some very fresh approaches to comic stories, and in one of them (Pax Americana, with Frank Quitely) they did something similar to Watchmen, but in a new way. I heartily applauded that. My feeling is that what Damon’s doing is like that, it’s not a retreading of something we already know, but it’s a fresh and unusual approach.”
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