Comic-Con: Who Watches the Watchmen?

photo credit: Warner Brothers

Tom Russo here in San Diego, gearing up for another day of diving into the increasingly chaotic (but always addictive) pop culture fray that is Comic-Con International. Friday actually saw the geekfest’s main event, an hour-long presentation on Warner Brothers’ “Watchmen,” a superhero deconstructionist tale being adapted by director Zack Snyder from the landmark mid-’80s graphic novel. Rock-star-vibing Snyder was on hand, basking in all the fan love still coming from his last comics adaptation, “300,” and was joined by his calculatedly low-profile cast: Billy Crudup (Mission: Impossible III); Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Grey’s Anatomy”); Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson (“Little Children”); Matthew Goode (“Match Point”); Carla Gugino (“Entourage”); and Malin Akerman (“27 Dresses”), decked out in some sort of vaguely superheroic, definitely fan-fetishy red leather heels-and-leggings ensemble.

Structured as a murder mystery with a literally explosive climax, the highly literate comics story by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons wrestles with thorny moral issues about social protectors’ responsibility, entitlement, and sometimes misguided purpose in doing what they do. Or, put another way, Moore and Gibbons chew over the idea that a guy would have to be a little nuts to put on a Halloween outfit and go play superhero. (Sound familiar?)

So if you’ve quickly paddled out to catch “The Dark Knight” cultural wave and been surprised by just how, well, dark it is, know that “Watchmen” is just as dicey. In fact, “Watchmen” is almost always cited as one of contemporary comics’ sacred texts in tandem with writer-artist Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” one of the influences on the new Bat-movie.

At Comic-Con, an SRO crowd of 6,500 in the San Deigo Convention Center’s giant exhibit hall cheered an extended “Watchmen” trailer – more so than the partly intrigued, mostly perplexed audience I caught a more basic trailer with a couple of weeks ago, before the “Dark Knight” promo screening at the Jordan’s Imax in Reading. Still, you wonder if the core audience is really a gauge for how “Watchmen” will hit the mainstream – or how it will hit its intended creative marks.

Most of the questions during the audience Q&A session were of the “Is it gonna be cool” variety, glossing over the complexities of the material. The story’s intelligence is what’s actually made it a landmark, but among the faithful, it’s the story’s violence that often seems to get the credit. One fan wanted to make sure that the adaptation will be genuinely hard-hitting, mature-audiences material – and voiced his concern clad in the costume and ink-blot mask of Haley’s character, the vigilante Rorschach. “It’s cool you’re saying ‘a more mature audience’ with that outfit on,” Snyder joked.

A.O. Scott wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/movies/24supe.html?ref=movies this week wondering whether the superhero genre has been played out – and while Scott gave “The Dark Knight” a partial pass for its seriousness, he faulted it for raising provocative issues without following through by truly exploring them. Still, the movie’s record-breaking grosses seem to indicate this is a non-issue. But Batman is an icon – and “Watchmen” riffs on icons, but features none. Will “Watchmen” work for the face-value crowd? The subtext crowd? Both? Neither? To quote Rorschach’s signature, contemplative mumble, “Hurrrmmm.”