Watchmen Structure

Ok, so I haven't finished it - I think I'm about 1/3 of the way through. But I want to talk about it anyways.

For those who don't know Watchmen was a 12 issues "maxi-series" originally published by DC between 1986 and 1987. It's set in a parallel earth of sorts where costumed adventurers ("masks") caught on back in the late 1930s and had a heyday between 1940 and 1977 when they were outlawed. With the exception of one character, none of the masks have powers - the exception is Doctor Manhattan, who can control matter at the molecular level, which provides him with some other capabilities as well.

What's most amazing to me is the structure. First, the comic interleaves multiple situations, such that it can be hard to follow. The often panel-by-panel alternation usually serves to let the two portions of the story serve as counter point to each other. Second, each issue ends with a "primary source document" from the world of Watchmen. These are thinks like book excerpts and newspaper articles that provide you with a timeline for things that may only be hinted at in the comic itself. Really fleshes out the world.

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Does any of this make sense?

Brian K. Vaughan is doing pretty good writing for Buffy Season 8 - based on the 2nd "volume" of the series. That's not the point of this post, but I thought it should be said.

Last night, Andy Ihnatko tweeted, "The X-Men mythos has about as much structure, linearity, and consistency as a David Lynch movie. I just can't get interested in it". At the current point in time you can see my reply to right, but for posterity I said, "I can get interested, but I understand your point. Especially with all the 'futures that must be prevented'. Cable's still cool tho".

Thinking about it, his reply to that is pretty on the spot: "I'm sure lots of the mutant stuff is good! But I feel like I need to go to summer school in order to understand what's going on." You do really need a program to know who the players are. How else are you supposed to know that Cable is Nathan Dayspring is Nathan Christopher Charles Summers, which means that he's the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor (who was a clone of Jean Grey) who was sent to the future after he was infected with a techno-organic virus by Apocalypse.

It really doesn't help that if you want to read any of the major storylines there are always 3-4 titles that you have to keep up with, possibly more depending on what point in time you're talking about.

My solution to this is to focus on following the Ultimate continuity, which was created for just this sort of problem - well, it was created to reach out to a younger audience that didn't have the background knowledge. The storyline is already getting a little messy (we've just recently had our first incursion of future people in the form of Cable - who's actually Wolverine in this version - and Bishop), but it's all contained in one book.

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It's all DNA these days.

"I'll bet you ten quid they're DNA specialists. It's all DNA these days. Like that CSI bullocks. CSI Cardiff, I'd like to see that. They'd be measuring the velocity of a kebab!"
-- Police Constable (PC) Andy, Torchwood, "Everything Changes"

So I haven't managed to get restarted on Persona 3 yet, mostly due to resizing my Windows partition again (thank you, Winclone). Of course, I wasn't aided by my trip to Books-a-Million, where I picked up the latest volumes of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, along with the first volume of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight. Read through all of those and watched the latter 11 episodes of series 2 of Torchwood.

Torchwood, an anagram and spin-off of Doctor Who, is sort of the Doctor Who franchise's opposite number for The Sarah Jane Adventures, that is to say it's the post-watershed series. Set up toward the beginning of the 2nd series of the new, Torchwood is a secret organization devoted to combating aliens and adapting their technology, if possible, to Britain's use. Of course, this series follows Torchwood 3, the Cardiff, Wales office.

Regarding series 2, I need to rewatch the next to last episode as it goes into the backstories of all the main Torchwood characters save Gwen (who we already have backstory on, given she's our PoV character). James Marsters - yes, that James Marsters - had a recurring role in the series and I think he did a fantastic job.

I think that's about all I can say without potentially spoiling people. It should suffice to say that I think it's a good series that can go very dark at times.

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