Before Watchmen Backup Features Online for Free at DC Comics Website

Some fans were worried, when it was announced that Len Wein and John Higgins were doing a two-page backup feature that would run in every Before Watchmen title for the duration of the event, that it was a move on DC Comics' part to strong-arm readers into buying all of the crossover's issues. Well, DC has put the lie to that--they're offering the opportunity to read the entire Curse of the Crimson Corsair tale--whatever pages have been published to date--available on their website for free download. "Click here to read the lastest chapter, along with everything that's come before," the site boasts, pointing out to readers who don't know that Wein was the original series editor of Watchmen when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons wrote it in the 1980s, while artist Higgins was the colorist on the book. It's a double-edged boast; it's an open secret that Moore and Wein did not agree on all aspects of Watchmen and some have intuited that Wein's own writing will reflect his interpretation of the characters and their world rather than being slavish to Moore's--but that's certainly more of an issue in his Ozymandias miniseries than in Curse of the Crimson Corsair, which of course doesn't take place in the same universe, per se.