New Watchmen Trailer Released at SDCC

San Diego Comic-Con is officially underway, and it looks like HBO is pulling out all of the stops. Today, the premium cable service officially debuted the first full trailer for their live-action television adaptation of Watchmen.

This serves as the best look yet at the highly-anticipated series, after some rather-ethereal teasers and videos were released earlier this year.

Watchmen will serve as a love letter to the iconic DC Comics graphic novel of the same name, in which superheroes are seen as societal outlaws. The series will star Regina King as Angela Abraham, Don Johnson as Chief Judd Crawford, Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass, Lous Gossett Jr. as Old Man, Adelaide Clemens as Pirate Jenny, Andrew Howard as Red Scare, Jean Smart as Agent Blake, and Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.

"We have no desire to 'adapt' the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago," executive producer Damon Lindelof wrote in a social media post when the series was in its early stages. "Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted."

"They will, however, be remixed." Lindelof continued. "Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we'd be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica."

"I do know a little about it," Dave Gibbons, who co-created the series, said late last year. "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."

"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."

What do you think of the latest look at Watchmen? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Watchmen will debut later this year on HBO.