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The Watchmen Thread.
Topic Started: Jul 17 2008, 10:17 PM (3,139 Views)
Quillian
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again; if you can tolerate looking at Michelangelo's David, then a nude Dr. Manhattan shouldn't be a problem. Or even Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, for that matter, which is actually referenced in the graphic novel itself.

Mind if we keep this thread going? Because I just realized a couple of other possibly Watchmen-influenced things...
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HAL OVER 9000!!!
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Quillian,Apr 5 2009
02:40 PM
Mind if we keep this thread going?

Yeah, I'm game.
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Quillian
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Maybe I'm getting a little crazy here, but I think I'm seeing signs of Watchmen in other fictional stories... (And I don't mean The Incredibles, which is essentially a family-friendly version of Watchmen.)

One of them being that HBO series Rome; at one point in the first season, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo get shipwrecked, and, like the protagonist in that comic Tales of the Black Freighter, they get the idea to use the bodies of their dead comrades to build a raft. Then again, neither Watchmen nor Rome may have been the first story to show such a thing...

However, the thing which really sticks out in my mind is that novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Like Watchmen, it's a murder mystery in an alternate history setting. Shall I go into further detail about this? (I'd also like to figure out how to do that thing with the text with spoilers so that you have to highlight it in order to read it.)
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Pixellated
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Quillian,Apr 5 2009
09:06 PM
(And I don't mean The Incredibles, which is essentially a family-friendly version of Watchmen.)

...I'm afraid you'll really have to explain that reasoning.

With the highlight, all you have to do is change the colour of the text to white. Just used {color=white} and {/color} to end, replacing the {} brackets with [].
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Jeffk38uk
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Pixellated,Apr 5 2009
09:09 PM
Quillian,Apr 5 2009
09:06 PM
(And I don't mean The Incredibles, which is essentially a family-friendly version of Watchmen.)

...I'm afraid you'll really have to explain that reasoning.

HONEY, WHERE. IS. MY. SUPERSUIT!!!!
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Sabre_Justice
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Quillian,Apr 5 2009
09:06 PM
Maybe I'm getting a little crazy here, but I think I'm seeing signs of Watchmen in other fictional stories... (And I don't mean The Incredibles, which is essentially a family-friendly version of Watchmen.)

One of them being that HBO series Rome; at one point in the first season, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo get shipwrecked, and, like the protagonist in that comic Tales of the Black Freighter, they get the idea to use the bodies of their dead comrades to build a raft. Then again, neither Watchmen nor Rome may have been the first story to show such a thing...

However, the thing which really sticks out in my mind is that novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Like Watchmen, it's a murder mystery in an alternate history setting. Shall I go into further detail about this? (I'd also like to figure out how to do that thing with the text with spoilers so that you have to highlight it in order to read it.)

Heroes basically cribbed it's first big plot from Watchmen.
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Pixellated
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Sabre_Justice,Apr 6 2009
02:02 AM
Heroes basically cribbed it's first big plot from Watchmen.

Yeah, I was thinking that when I watched it. One relatively small disaster to prevent a possible larger one, but the characters deemed less intelligent try to stop them.

Watchmen wins for it succeeding though. And for not being three seasons of crap with sugary sprinkles in Sylar form.
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Sabre_Justice
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The Incredibles actually does have some elements in common with Watchmen... but they seem to be more along the lines of using a similar justification to tell a rather different story.

Watchmen really was always meant to provoke discussion like this. The whole story can be considered a deconstruction of superhero comics- taking all the absurd elements of the genre and showing them for how dysfunctional they are in a realistic context. You don't see many works like that, though Evangeleon did the same for anime.
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Dark Comet
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Re Watchmen and the Incredibles -

Capes.

That is all.
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Quillian
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So, let's see... Watchmen vs. The Yiddish Policemen's Union (for anyone who cares)...

(NOTE: Watchmen = WM; The Yiddish Policemen's Union = TYPU)

Like I said, both are murder mysteries taking place in alternate histories. I won't go into summarizing WM, since I assume that most of not all of you here have read it, so I'll give a brief synopsis of the divergence in TYPU: The United States governments grants millions of Jewish refugees temporary refuge in Alaska; only 2 million Jews die in the Holocaust instead of 6 million; WWII ends in 1946 with the nuclear destruction of Berlin instead of in 1945 with the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the fledgling state of Israel shockingly falls apart in 1948 after only a few months; and so now the Jews of Sitka, Alaska, after 60 years, now have to deal with an upcoming Reversion with the land going back to Alaska.

(Also please note that I'm only about one-third or one-half of the way through the novel itself; I'm going on what the Wikipedia page for the novel says.)

Like WM, TYPU starts off with a victim already being murdered before the start of the story, and when the story begins, we see the detective protagonist investigating the scene. However, over the course of the story, the detective slowly learns about how the murdered victim ties into the plot and how it shakes the world...

We know what ultimately happened in WM (highlight to reveal spoilers): With all the rising tension between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., Ozymandias pulls off his hoax alien invasion, killing half of Manhattan, and the other heroes (with the exception of Rorshach, of course, who is later silenced by Dr. Manhattan) agree to go along with the charade, for the sake of not ruining this new global peace bought on by the deaths of millions of people.
And as for what ultimately happened in TYPU (again, highlight to reveal spoilers): The detective protagonist uncovers a plot to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and thus bring about the Messianic Age... however, this would also include destroying the Dome of the Rock, which sits on the foundations on the mount. With the support of the current American president, who's an evangelical Christian and a Zionist, this group gets away with the plan, bombing the Dome of the Rock, and the protagonist claims he'll keep quiet about it.

So, did Michael Chabon get any ideas from or even ever read Watchmen? I don't know; he possibly could have. Another one of his novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, even takes place during and deals with the Golden Age of Comics during WWII, so I guess he could be a comics fan.
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HAL OVER 9000!!!
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From the guys who brought you the Dark Knight Interrogation spoof!
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Jeffk38uk
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I lawled.
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Pixellated
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Ehh. Nowhere near as good as the other one.
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Quillian
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HAL OVER 9000!!!,Apr 13 2009
05:45 AM

"This city is like a stinking - oof, oh goddammit!"

Hahaha! :lol:

Thanks for sharing!
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Quillian
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Yes, I know it's been a while, and yes, I know it's after the fact, but I just found this and felt compelled to share it...
"Ombudsmen"
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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