Actually, you know what's sad? Any artist or writer who goes against the wishes of the original creator and participates in this project. I don't care if it's Darwyn Cooke or Rob Liefeld or Stan Lee himself. It's quite simply disrespectful. Just because they and DC have the legal right to do it doesn't mean it's morally right. And if you think it's morally right, I can't help you. Is that enough "elaboration"?
Conclusory statements don't pass muster.
OK, I'll quit being a dick. I actually sympathize to some degree--I like the idea that a work may be "untouchable" to the degree you hold Watchmen in. And if any work was to be untouchable, damned if Watchmen isn't the work. It's the closest example of "perfecting a medium" that I've seen. There are movies that are really good, novels that are really good, paintings that are really good, but nothing that I think approaches the ideal of the form like Watchmen does for comics.
And yet--it'll still be
there, and shall always be so for as long as our civilization endures. They're not taking it away.
And it was made by men (and Jeannette Khan). Men who have profited from it; men who intelligently allocated their rights to it by contract.
There is no one whose rights are being violated. If no rights are violated, what morality is there to invoke? The immorality of crass commercialism? Of aesthetic blunder? Unsteady support for such vehemence, I think.
But, no, let's assume someone's moral rights to the integrity of their work are being violated. Very well.
Certainly no more so than when Alan Moore violated Mick Anglo's "rights" by turning his Marvel Family ripoff into brooding transhumans (one of whom was an irredeemable psychotic butcher):
Miracleman.
Certainly no more than when Alan Moore violated J.M. Barrie's, Lewis Carrol's, and L. Frank Baum's "rights" by turning their heroines into the protagonists of a
porno comic:
Lost Girls.
And certainly no more so than when Alan Moore violated Steve Ditko's "rights" when he took his objectivist Charlton monsters and turned them into a crazy libertarian madman who smelt like feet, a fat ornithologist who had erectile dysfunction, and various other unpleasant reimaginings:
Watchmen.
Now, maybe such a "right" to maintaining the artistic integrity of a work, in perpetuity, does indeed exist. What I want elaboration on is, why is it cool when Alan Moore does it to someone else's work, with enthusiasm, aplomb, and a discernible glee, but it's a fucking war crime when someone else does it to him?
Admiral Young said:
If great care is taken to make the material entertaining and fun and in the same sort of tone that the original was created...then I don't see what the problem is. Are fans just overprotective of Watchmen's prestige or something?
Watchmen Is Special. It has nothing to do with how corporate-owned fiction is created Because It's Watchmen.
The fact is, if one thinks that Watchmen 2 is a moral abomination--as an aesthetic abomination, I'm rather expecting it will be, regardless of the talent involved--they should not read
any Marvel or DC comics.
Nor watch Star Trek. Nor the Transformers movies (shouldn't do that anyway, but there's another reason). Nor avail themselves of a great percentage of our society's fiction. Because that's how it's made: by standing upon the shoulders of giants, whether they like it or not.
And not just our society's. Where's all the hate for Virgil's Aeneid? Motherfucker resurrects Homer's franchise eight hundred years later? It's simply not morally right.
