Even now, say "comic book" to most civilians, and they will expect something FUNNY.

On the plane to San Diego last week, I overheard a rather loud conversation between a gaggle of passengers who had evidently first met earlier in the airport lounge (thus helping to explain the loudness of the conversation). Their chat spread to some other passengers on the plane, who shared they were enroute to the big Comic Convention.

"Oh," was the surprised and delighted chirp, suddenly keenly interested. "That's, like, Seinfeld or something?"

All I can say is that if Watchmen, taken as a whole, is "groundbreaking", then what Howard Chaykin did with American Flagg must be "earth shattering".

There are so many storytelling innovations in comics, from McCay to sterret, to Foster and Raymond to Sickles and Caniff, Crane, Kriigstein, Kurtzman and Elder, Eisner, Kirby, Wood, Steranko, Adams and on and on.

Yet Alan Moore restricts himself to a 9 panel grid, does a few voice-over transitions and shape-to-shape transitions (and I would think Gibbons gets some credit for it), uses some obvious fanfic stuff to make the characters more "realistic" (like: "wearing costumes and being heroic cures my impotence", "if I had Dr Manhattan's powers I'd clone myself and have a foursome with my girlfriend", "The way Silk Spectre dresses, she must want to be raped". "If I were the Queston or Batman, I'd kill the really bad villains" or "why don't superheroes create world peace?")

He does it very well, but it's not that innovative.  The one major advantage he had was that he got to do subplots that dobvetailed into the finale, but didn't make much sense before. Like showing "man on the street" sequences throughout the series. They flesh out the story, but they don't really have anything to do with the superheroes until the end.

If this were a monthly comic, the question would be "why are you wasting pages on some kid reading a pirate story when the superhero action ends up getting squeezed into a 9 panel grid. Use some splash pages, for chrissakes. "

Alan Moore is the Quentin Tarantino of comics.

Tarantino has made a career out of cobbling together the best bits of a lot of obscure films, adding a bit of shock factor and -- voila! -- he's made art.

Moore's had a somewhat similar career trajectory, to the point where he's become (for me) unreadable.

I've always hated the term graphic novel because when you say graphic people think extreme before they think pictures, and because rarely are we dealing with novels in the pure sense of the term. In serial fiction, the central character does not undergo a profound change through the course of the book.

If movies can dress themselves up as film and cinema when they want to go out with the elite, surely comics can find an equally elegant name. We haven't quite got there yet with graphic novel, sequential art or picto-fiction. Too many syllables.

Laren Farmer wrote: People who find Watchmen to be brilliant (aside from the artwork) lack knowledge of comic books and their history.

How very contemptuous of you.

I've often heard Raging Bull spoken of in lofty terms, but when I finally saw it it didn't register much for me. Haven't felt an impulse to speak of its fans with derision yet, though.

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How very contemptuous of you.

••

As contemptuous as is WATCHMEN for the superhero form?

Lauren's comment is not really contemptuous at all. Rather, it expresses something unfortunately true. Those who heap great praise upon WATCHMEN fall, in my experience, into two general groups.

First is civilians, who are quick to praise the work DESPITE the fact that it is a comic book. These are the ones who seek another term, in fact, and who demonstrate ignorance of the history of this industrial art form over the past thirty years or so. Tell them that many of the points for which they praise WATCHMEN were already addressed by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams in GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, and your claim will be dismissed as instantly preposterous, since GL/GA was "just" a superhero comic, not something, like WATCHMEN, that transcended its lowly origins.

Second is that strata of fandom who are blissfully ignorant of that same history, and who are ferociously protective of their ignorance. I was shocked upon first coming online to discover how many people actually got ANGRY when I informed them -- politely, I assure you! -- that their views were based on a limited knowledge of what had happened BEFORE they started reading. This extended from those who accepted retcons as canon, if those retcons were already in place when they arrived, on thru those who knew little or nothing of the history of the industry, of who did what, when, where and why.

To these people, these two groups, WATCHMEN was astonishingly fresh and innovative. To me, with thirty years of reading the books twenty years of studying the history, under my belt, WATCHMEN was familiar territory, and tiresome after five issues.