Watching the Watchmen HC (DC, 2008)

Watching the Watchmen is a retrospective look by the guy who illustrated the ground breaking limited series, Dave Gibbons. What with the movie version scheduled to hit the screens in 2009 and Alan Moore more or less having burned his bridges with DC, it's up to his collaborator to pony up some stuff to fill a 250+ page coffee table book. And I fell for it. Now don't get me wrong. Watching the Watchmen isn't a complete waste of money. Gibbons shares with the reader some trips down memory lane: his first meeting with Alan Moore, the genesis of Watchmen, his and Alan Moore's status from nobodies in the world of American comics to superstars after the success of Watchmen among other tidbits. Intersperse that with pictures of Watchmen merchandise, Alan Moore's first draft and a lot of preliminary sketches of the Watchmen characters, and you get a quite interesting book even if you, like me, don't really care about sketches.

But then we reach the bulk of the book: a "dissection" of Watchmen issue by issue. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than Gibbons rummaging through his files and giving us a look of his thumbnail sketches of each issue. And Watchmen was a 12-issue series. So a lot of page after page of rough pencils that were later inked, coloured and lettered. Big whoop.

Okay, the book was advertised as an art book and Dave Gibbons is primarily an illustrator and serves me right for hoping to read about a comic book's history in an art book but dude...valuable trees were chopped down just to print Dave Gibbons test pencils of Watchmen before he actually sat down and drew it for real?? Even a budding artist would find that boring.

Wait till next year after the movie has ended its run. I guarantee you this book will be in the bargain bins by then. Get it then if you still want it.

(The book comes with two different covers. The more commonly advertised one with Dr. Manhattan and the one you see at the top, with the Comedian's mug leering at you. That's the version I bought. Other than that there are no other differences).

World's Finest (DC, 1990)

It was only by chance, while surfing the 'net, that I discovered DC had just released a "Deluxe" edition of the 1990 3-part mini series, World's Finest by Dave Gibbons, Steve Rude, Karl Kesel and colourist Steve Oliff. Either there wasn't much publicity done by DC or I was just looking at the wrong places for this book to go under my radar. Probably the latter. Anyway, I remembered that I have this mini series so I dug it out and read it again for nostalgia's sake and maybe write a few words about it here.

After I turned the last page of Book Three, I figured either it hasn't aged well or my memories are playing tricks on me. Because I remember loving it the the first time it came out. What's not to love? Two of DC's biggest icons teaming up to fight their respective arch enemies, Joker and Lex Luthor. But I was surprised to find that after reading it again, 18 years later, the book did not satisfy. The older me is much more harder to please it appears. I blame Dave Gibbons' writing.

World's Finest plot requires too much explanation. There's a mystery about a Fagin-like character who used to employ orphans as his well trained thieves but he's dead now. No, he's not. Yes, he is. No, wait...somebody's dead but we're not sure who. Then for some reason, Lex Luthor wants to spread his empire to other cities so he buys up property in Gotham. At the same time, Joker wants to see the sights in Metropolis. So the two villains cut a deal and trade bases of operations for a month. Also for some strange reason, Superman and Batman feel that they too need to trade cities to pursue their respective enemies. Why? Why couldn't Batman stay in Gotham and chase Luthor while Superman remain in Metropolis and take care of the Joker? The pretext given so that Dave Gibbons could put the heroes in each other's cities is that Superman was humiliated by his first encounter with the Joker and Batman too felt played by Luthor. So they figured better to move to an unfamiliar city chasing the villain they know instead of staying home and be humiliated by the villain they don't. Sorry but I just could not buy that.

There were missed opportunities, I feel, when Gibbons failed to portray the differences in style between the two heroes and even between the two bad guys. What we get instead are caricatures of the villains. Joker the grinning maniac and Lex Luthor the cold, calculating businessman. Yawn inducing? You betcha!

The only good thing about World's Finest is Steve Rude's art. You can't go wrong with "The Dude" and the alliteratively named Karl Kesel inking. But pretty pictures cannot save a book if the story is boring as this one is.

Not recommended, sadly.