Most of us are riding in steerage

[learnedax]

Just finished reading Watchmen, long delayed. Darn you Alan Moore, darn you all to heck.

At least I can bug metahacker for most of the back catalog that I will now need to devour.

(Without spoilers: the style struck me as extremely cinematic, to the point where some panels looked like nothing so much as crossfades. The density of information also seemed like an occasionally over-deliberate attempt at meaningful multilayering, particularly when juxtaposing two narratives against each other for pages at a time, with e.g. only half of a relevant piece of information visible. I could easily see this being called pretentious and intentionally convoluted. Luckily, it's done so excruciatingly well that I can't help but love it. Curse you again Alan Moore for controlling your release of information so cleverly. Finally catching the strangely triumphal Pyrrhic end on the last page even though it was quite dramatically set up long before was, I suppose, transcendental.)

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

As for From Hell, I made the possible mistake of seeing the film first, not having actually realized that it was a comic. I understand the adaptation was far removed from the original, but it's probably still unfortunate.

That depends. Did you enjoy the film? If so, you picked the right order, because you certainly wouldn't have enjoyed it as an adaptation (and if not, then reading the book first wouldn't have helped). For one thing, the book version isn't at all a "whodunnit". There were a wide variety of "viewpoint" characters, with the murderer being perhaps the most prominent among them. The book is a detailed dissection of Victorian England, not a murder mystery, so the film is in no significant sense a "spoiler" for the book. The film did have lots of (extremely brief) visuals that were taken directly from the book, which was neat to see, but that wasn't enough to make up for the raping of the actual structure of the story.

Oh wait. I suppose the very ending of the film is a bit of a spoiler, since, though the same thing happens in the book, it is presented (in the book) in a manner subtle enough that many readers actually miss it. But it's a relatively minor detail; in such stories, the journey matters far more than the destination.

kestrell and I actually first got to know each other well through my reading From Hell aloud to her. So she likes to say "Alan Moore was our Cupid." :-)

We actually went out to see the film (for Valentine's Day? I forget) together. A few months later, she said to me, having seen a mention on the net, "Hey! Did you know they made a movie of From Hell? We should go see that!" She'd totally blocked out the memory. I figure that's got to be one of the most amusingly-bad movie reviews ever :-)