Dr. ManhattanI finally got around to seeing "The Dark Knight" two weeks ago (yes, I was officially the last person in the country to see it), and they showed a preview for a movie called "Watchmen." The title sounded familiar, so I decided to do a little research. I read up on it and found that "Watchmen" is a graphic novel (read: comic book) from the 80’s set in a world that’s influenced by the existence of "super" heros. Most of them, however,  don’t have any significant powers, they’re more vigilante type heros, like batman — with the exception of this dude to the right who was given god-like powers after some kind of nuclear testing accident.

I’ll pause here while you unavoidably force yourself to check whether he’s wearing any pants…

Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

I know the whole "powers from a nuclear experiment gone wrong" is very cliche, and if you saw the preview yourself, you may be thinking that the other characters all seem pretty lame. They do have a kind of "old" feel to them, like something you’d expect to see in a movie 50 years ago. But, it turns out that "Watchmen" is actually supposed to be superbly written. So well written, in fact, that in 2005 Time magazine named it as one of the 100 best English-language novels! That’s not graphic novels, or comic book novels, or anything else… That’s all English-language novels. It’s up there with "The Great Gatsby", "To Kill a Mockingbird", etc. etc. which I found to be pretty impressive, so I ordered a copy off Amazon to read this week.

We’ll see if it lives up to the hype that I just created for it. As far as the movie, I don’t really have any expectations. The preview was kind of cool, but it’s hard to tell with these types of films, and it’s not out for another 6 months, so we’ll see when the time comes.