Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Watch that purpose

Yesssss. Comic bookssss, they are here! My "guide books" finally made it all the way from their start via 3 day ground. Thanks to the 4 day weekend, that's 1 week. Now I have Hitchhiker's Guide 1 and 2 (of 3). For those interested, that means I now need Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 3 and Life, the Universe, and Everything 2 to complete my guide book collection. Or at least the comic book part of it. I also have an extra of Everything 3, not sure how that came about.

Which brings me to the real purpose of this blog. It isn't to tell people about my life, it's to impose my opinion on other people! Yeah, the people who aren't reading anyway. Specifically, I want to tell them Why I Didn't Like Transmet while it is still fresh in my mind. Unfortunately, it isn't fresh in my mind and it was somewhat long and complicated, so I won't get to archive it unless I can find an IRC log from the time. So I'll settle with why I didn't like Watchmen, which is less complicated and not so extreme as to deserve capital letters.
Watchmen, for the uninitiated, is a comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that occupies a space on every comic book collector's shelf. It is the #2 comic book of all time according to Wizard. You can read elsewhere how important and novel, or whatever, this book is. How numerous books and even a movie have taken superheros off in new directions following this book. All that and more, somewhere else. For me, though, there was still the stuff of Superman in this book, and I am Not A Superman Fan. Once in a while, I come upon a book that just seems to be written by and for Superman fans and this was one of them. So I didn't like it.
I am a Batman fan. That gloomy, intelligent, mildly crazy Batman Michael Keaton did so well. So he's a fairly new take on Batman, so what?
Batman and Superman don't belong in the same universe. Someone was referring to everything owned by DC as the "DC universe" and suddenly someone else wanted to put all the characters together, probably. Now I like watching Batman beat Superman as much as the next person, probably more, but they don't live in the same plane of existence.
Meanwhile, if you liked "The Incredibles" but don't think you'd like a superhero comic, you really ought to pick up Watchmen. It's probably at your local library if you aren't ready to invest in your own collection yet.

No comments: