A “Watchmen” prequel in the works? Has DC Comics lost their minds??

I grew up with a comic book collection.  My tastes gravitated toward Marvel’s lineup of comics – mostly Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man and Incredible Hulk and the like.  But I did have an appreciation for DC’s comics, including Green Lantern and The Flash and a few others.

And, of course, I appreciated one of the greatest comic book runs of all time – Watchmen.

Watchmen was a 12-issue mini-series in which a group of costumed heroes try to discover who has murdered one of their own.  The comic broke ground in everything from subject matter to literary exposition, and it’s the only comic book / graphic novel to be listed among the 100 greatest literary works of the 20th century.

This wasn’t a “here I come to save the day” type of superhero saga.  These were superheroes with angst, with regret, with bitterness and with emotional issues.  These weren’t your typical Saturday morning costumed crimefighters; in fact, it’s their very existence – or denial of their existence – that drives Watchmen through its 12-issue run.  And after years of stop-and-go planning, it was made into a much-anticipated motion picture in 2009.

Watchmen, like other literary classics, is a finite story.  There’s a beginning and a middle and an end.  Just like Gone With The Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies – there’s no need to continue the story after the final page.

But apparently that hasn’t stopped DC Comics.

According to this New York Times article, DC Entertainment / DC Comics is set to announce today that it will produce a prequel to the Watchmen comic.  The prequel, to be called Before Watchmen, will be several different graphic novels / comic books that will reveal more of the histories of Alan Moore’s creations – stories of Rohrshach and Dr. Manhattan and both Silk Spectres and the Comedian and both Nite Owls and Ozymandias, etc., etc.

Which begs the question – why in the world would you even bother doing this?  The stories themselves stand on their own.  Those twelve issues of Watchmen are among the greatest comic book storytelling ever published – you could put Watchmen in a college syllabus all its own.  Imagine the term papers that could be written from it – “Discuss and contrast the appearances of Tales from the Black Freighter that are interposed into Watchmen.”  “Is Rohrshach the truest superhero in Watchmen or one of its most diabolical villains?”  I expect 1000 words, double-spaced, on my desk tomorrow, class.

Again – why would anyone water down such a great and fantastic story by adding prequels and sequels and derivative works?  Did we really need a sequel to Gone With The Wind?  Well, someone wrote one.  Did we ever need a prequel to the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?  Well, a movie studio made one.  And the only thing these prequels and sequels do is completely cheapen what the original stories have achieved.

Let’s face it.  There’$ only reason that DC Comic$ i$ even con$idering thi$ project.

This is a cash grab, pure and simple.  The creator of Watchmen, Alan Moore, isn’t even involved with this concept – well, considering that he and DC parted ways on very bitter terms, mostly involving royalties and rights to created characters, I wouldn’t expect Moore to even return DC’s phone calls – and without the creator of Watchmen involved in any of this, in my personal opinion the finished product is going to look like someone put aluminum siding on a historic brownstone.

And it’s not like DC Comics hasn’t cheesed off its readers of late.  Don’t even get me started on them ending the character of Oracle.  And I guess that reboot of Wonder Woman’s costume lasted about, oh, six months at best?  And how many Robins has Batman gone through lately – five, six or so?

I just don’t see any tangible reason to add anything to what is essentially a perfect comic book.  It’s clearly as Alan Moore commented in his interview with the New York Times: “As far as I know … there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to ‘Moby-Dick.’”