watchmen

so, i'm a dork. i enjoy star trek, star wars, star other things, and i read a lot. i am not, however, a comic book geek. not that there's anything wrong with that, some of my best friends enjoy the comic books. i do tend to enjoy the comic book movies, well, some of them. i enjoyed the first spiderman, though 2 was eh and 3 sucked anus, though that had more to do with my dislike of toby mcguire and skinny titerson's shitty acting than the story being told. i enjoyed xmen, and i really like xmen 2, xmen 3, however, while enjoyable, somewhat, doesn't hold a candle to the other two. hellboy? meh. ron pearlman is too wierd looking for me to really be able to enjoy that. i really enjoy the new batman series though. even though, as batman, christian bale seems to grunt more than talk, but whatever, posthumous or not, heath ledger's joker was fucking awesome and even batman begins wasn't bad. so yeah, all of this is to say, i enjoy comic movies, somewhat, but never really got into the source material. until now. well, actually, i suppose it started in august. i had heard that the comic nerd community had it's nuts in a vice about this movie i'd never heard of called "watchmen". it was like they were going to make Jesus: The Movie (which i suppose has been done ad nauseum, but you know what i mean). so i'm up in ithaca, visiting some college friends. we're tooling around town, and we stop by this comic book store. now, ithaca trips are where i buy most of my books for the year, there's a lot of good, cheap used book stores and i tend to load up, so i'm in book buying mode. i go into this comic book store, making it the second time in my like i've been in one. i figure, hey i enjoyed sin city, maybe i'll check out some frank miller jawn, or maybe they'll have some old doonesbury books (yes, sunday comics should be sold at comic book stores dammit). so i look at the frank miller, and, although very stylish, i don't think i could take a whole book drawn like that. then i see watchmen. i flip through it, it looks kinda cool, i knew is was something of a nerd bible, so i decided, what the hell. 20 bucks later i leave. watchmen sat in my travel bag for the next 6 months, till i came out to bumfuck PA and had nothing to do but watch a broken tv in a shitty little motel room. so i broke it out. holy shit dude. for starters, talk about dark. i mean, i guess it's not all that uncommon for comic books to be dark, adult themed if you will, but as someone who's primary exposure to comic book stuff is movies, being a hero is either about being unbelievably violent, a la sin city, or annoyingly high minded, like spiderman. to actually explore the psychology of what could possibly drive a person to dress in some ridiculous costume and exact vigilante revenge on the ills of society. it actually delves into the obvious issues of sexuality and morality associated with such endeavors. then it explores what such beings would actually do to society. how that would effect the history of the past 60 years. and you have more than just the vigilante batman type of superhero. you have the accidental super powered hero in dr manhatten who was just a regular guy until he was changed by an accident which gave him power over time, space, and matter. because he was injured in a government sponsored experiment, he was immidiately recruited by the US government for actual military use. along with a vigilante type called the comedian, he wins the vietnam war for us. he changes the balance of power during the cold war such that nuclear escalation between the USSR and america is ten times that of the real life cold war in order to compensate for dr manhatten. i haven't finished the book yet, but it's really fascinating to me how these individuals became what they became and i appreciate how the author attempt to realistically predict how that would affect history. so yeah. i really wanna see the movie now. i hear it's equally badass.

one final note, this post was written in chunks. i had to keep getting up and dealing with work stuff so that is why it's kinda rambling and repetetive. i'll try and tighten it up in the future. or maybe i won't, fuck you, it's my blog and no one reads it anyway.