“Making Watchmen a movie experience.”

Despite the film’s many revisions of its source, reviewers hurled back the marketing’s rhetoric: “Watchmen’s biggest problem, ironically, is that it’s too faithful.”[101] The movie “takes loyalty to new limits. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with it.”[102] Many called Snyder’s fidelity “slavish.”[103] The reviews confirm George Bluestone’s 1957 observation: “Whenever a film becomes a financial or even a critical success, the question of ‘faithfulness’ is given hardly any thought.”[104] The marketing had worked too hard to court perceived fans of the comic.

Scholars have tended to discuss the film in terms of its adaptation of the book. Liam Burke contrasts its marketing with that of 20th Century Fox’s adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003): “Unlike The League, fidelity was fetishized at each turn in the production and promotion of Watchmen.”[105] Bob Rehak argues that the movie “embodied the many paradoxes of contemporary blockbuster film production, so capable of outré visualization yet so constrained in its operations.”[106] Rehak also calls the film “fanservice with a $120 million budget.”[107] Anime fans use the term fanservice to refer to media creators’ gratuitous attempts to please their imagined core audience, especially at the expense of momentum or plausibility; I would therefore disagree with Rehak’s characterization, in that I read the Watchmen not as an attempt to serve fans of the book but to serve an intellectual property holder by expanding the audience for that property. We could therefore better describe the film as brandservice, an attempt to recruit new customers for Watchmen commodities.

Those commodities included the six different Watchmen home videos that Warner Premiere had developed:

• a 163-minute theatrical cut;
• a 186-minute “director’s cut”;
• a disc containing anime and live-action films based on intradiegetic texts from the graphic novel;
• a 215-minute “Ultimate Cut,” which integrated the anime and other footage; and finally,
• Watchmen: the Complete Motion Comic, which digitized parts of the comic-panel sections of the book (but not the epilogues) in the manner of a self-reading pop-up book.

The case of the 215-minute “ultimate” cut riffs on the film’s version of the book’s blood-spattered smiley to create two new Watchmen logos. Photo by the author.

As producer Deborah Snyder, wife of director Zack Snyder, explains in the film’s press kit, Watchmen

“has always been more than the sum of its parts. There were aspects we knew we couldn’t include entirely—like Under the Hood […] and Tales of the Black Freighter—but we knew we could do something with these ancillary bits on the DVD. For Zack, the key for doing this massive project was to always stay true to the graphic novel.”[108]

Deborah Snyder works backwards from the planned product line to a reading of the source text, such that integral parts of the book become “ancillary.” Her claim about Watchmen as “more than the sum of its parts” pays lip service to the book as an integral whole, but her implication that parts can be excised and re-packaged undercuts that idea. Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter appeared on 24 March 2009, while Watchmen still screened in theaters. Special features include a featurette, “Story within a Story: The Books of Watchmen,” in which executive producer Lloyd Levin explains:

“Watchmen, the graphic novel, is always going to be there. It was all of our job to try to create the analogous movie-going experience. So in handling the supporting material, as a Black Freighter anime, or an Under the Hood documentary, finds the perfect tone for making Watchmen a movie experience.”[109] [sic]

Levin, like Deborah Snyder, treats integral parts of the book as “supporting material,” parts of an “experience” composed of many commodities.

In the DVD featurette “Phenomenon: the Comic that Changed Comics,” which came with the director’s and Ultimate cuts, former DC president Jenette Kahn claims that aesthetic and ethical concerns motivated DC. “We really felt very strongly that the medium allowed for the most sophisticated stories,” she says, “the most offbeat stories, the most independent stories.”[110] One can only guess what independent might mean in this context; maybe Kahn means smaller comics publishers like Wildstorm, which DC later bought, and which Moore left again in disgust. Kahn calls the Charlton characters “the inspiration originally, but Watchmen became a thing of its own.”[111] She writes Moore out of this process, turning Watchmen into a generative force. Against Kahn’s claim, I would argue that under her leadership, DC turned Watchmen from a thing potentially of Moore and Gibbons’s own into a thing DC’s own. Nowhere in “Phenomenon” does Kahn mention licensing, or DC's strategy of using top artists to generate intellectual property for the conglomerate, or the circumstances of Moore’s departure from the company.

These ads for other Watchmen products came in the cases of the DVDs spun off from the film. Photo by the author.

Each DVD case contains ads for the Deadline Games’ Watchmen: The End is Nigh computer game (for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360) and various Warner Home Video releases, as well as an ad for the graphic novel itself. The latter calls the book “the runaway bestseller!” and draws blurbs from Jensen’s “Watchmen: An Oral History” in Entertainment Weekly, and Grossman’s entry for Time’s hundred-novels list. A photo shows the trade paperback, the hardcover, and Absolute Watchmen. The theatrical release had boosted sales of the Absolute edition, and now the videos aimed to buoy them.[112] According to DC’s website, Absolute Watchmen

“will be the cornerstone of any serious comic book collection. Each page of art has been restored and recolored by WildStorm FX and original series colorist John Higgins and approved by Gibbons to appear as originally intended. Additionally, this grand tome will include 48 pages of supplemental material […] rare and historically valuable treasures, including samples of Moore’s Watchmen scripts, the original Watchmen proposal, Gibbons’s conceptual art, cover roughs, and much, much more!”[113]

Not even the trade paperback can compete with such fullness. Absolute Watchmen offers rarity and historicity, origins and intentions: a (mechanically reproduced) Watchmen reliquary.

In 2009 DC released a promotional booklet, After Watchmen… What’s Next? Its yellow-on-black cover bears a design that merges the smiley-face badge and doomsday clock motifs from Watchmen, but this clock shows five minutes after midnight. The inside front cover bears an ad for the three print editions of Watchmen, “the only graphic novel selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.”[114] This ad also includes a plug for “one of the most hotly anticipated motion pictures” of 2009, Snyder’s adaptation.[115] However, the first page of the booklet proper makes a sales pitch not for the range brand, Watchmen, but for the corporate brand, DC. The booklet compiles full-page and double-page ads for twenty graphic novels that “answer the question” of the title, advertising four of Alan Moore’s books (more than any other writer’s), as well as Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man:

“Each award-winning, best-selling title reflects an aspect of Watchmen’s broad appeal, and is a great entry point for new fans just discovering graphic novels as well as established readers looking to try something new. [….] Experience the unique storytelling power of graphic novels from DC Comics, the #1 publisher with the most diverse line of titles in the industry.”[116]

Here, a booklet with a cover modeled on Moore and Gibbons’s work for hire deploys that work in service of the corporate brand. Midnight has come and gone, but the monster remains: dead, but still broadcasting its message.

The inside cover of After Watchmen…What’s Next? repeats the company line about the book’s excellence but culminates in a claim about DC’s excellence as a corporate brand, “the #1 publisher with the most diverse line of titles in the industry.” Photo by the author.

Conclusion: the corporate pietà

Before 1986, the duopoly avoided killing characters because corporations don’t kill sources of profit. Moore and Gibbons sought freedom from this, and they negotiated both greater autonomy as artists and also potential ownership as creators. By opening Watchmen with the death of a superhero, Moore and Gibbons signaled what they took as their freedom from DC’s managerial norm that treated all characters as revenue streams. Since the mid 1980s however, the duopoly has used character death as a marketing tool, most infamously with the 1992 “Death of Superman” arc, which generated record sales. In this series, Superman dies only to return to life some issues later. Batman v Superman performs this reversal in its final minutes: after Superman dies defending the Earth, Lois Lane holds his corpse as Batman and Wonder Woman look on in a corporate pietà, a sorrowful guarantee of resurrection. Just before the credits roll, we see dirt rising into the air above Superman’s coffin, surprising nobody familiar with the duopoly’s strategies.

Yet the moment in DC Universe: Rebirth when Batman finds the Comedian’s badge does surprise, for it breaks with the company’s precedent of keeping Watchmen self-contained. The decision to integrate the book’s characters into the rest of the DC universe seems to erode the distinctiveness of the Watchmen range brand, but maybe DC has become desperate to regain its footing in the superhero marketplace now dominated by the Disney-owned Marvel. Batman’s discovery of the badge retroactively converts the Comedian’s death into a marketing stunt like the “Death of Superman,” and it converts the self-contained and industry-defying elements of Watchmen into merely temporary provisions. Watchmen becomes, in hindsight, DC’s joke, played on audiences and work for hire artists alike.

In his 1940 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg wrote, “Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard.”[117] In the history of the Watchmen media franchise, such a division applies, with Moore and Gibbons as the advance guard, working to expand the formal horizons of superhero comics, and with Zack Snyder as the rear guard, simplifying and domesticating their work to serve corporate goals. Moore turned a form widely seen as commercial and instrumental into something relatively autonomous and self-contained, but Snyder turned Moore’s work back toward the commercial and instrumental, adapting it to the idioms of television advertising. Greenberg notes the temporal dimension of the relation between the avant-garde and kitsch:

“The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. […] when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new 'twists,' which are then watered down and served up as kitsch.”[118]

Snyder’s film discarded both the book’s politics and its formal complexities, reducing it instead to an advertisement for the book. Then in 2016, DC Universe: Rebirth used that book as a means to inject novelty into “Golden Age” properties like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

Yet the narrative that I have presented here only emerges if we read against the grain of the conglomerate’s marketing campaign, and only if we examine corporate utterances against their contexts, both in the temporal dimension of Watchmen’s emergence from Hollywood development hell, and also in the spatial dimension of Time Warner’s network of properties, corporate and intellectual, news and entertainment. To use the idiom of comic-book layout, we cannot confine our attention to the single panel or the single page when trying to understand something as complex as a media conglomerate’s franchise. We must instead correlate information scattered in different chapters, even chapters that do not appear to belong to the text.

If my suspicion of Time Warner seems paranoid, then maybe media scholars need a little paranoia: we owe it to our students and to our fellow workers to adopt suspicious, resistant stances toward the secretive, profit-seeking, and undemocratic corporations that produce and own so much of the culture we inhabit. The optimism of Nite Owl may help us get to sleep, but the pessimism of the stinking, fascist Rorschach can help us resist the commodification of our pleasures and our virtues. A little paranoia can help us see through corporate attempts to hide exploitation behind rhetorics of creativity and fidelity, truth and justice.

You’ll Believe a Brand Can Die™: Superman gets a state funeral at the end of Batman v Superman (Warner Brothers, 2016), but the film makes clear that he won’t stay dead.