One more Watchmen commentary amongst foundations makes little difference

I saw Watchmen on Friday. Like all good fanboys, I was tremendously excited, but also trying to temper my expectations, for fear of having my hopes and dreams crushed.

I thought it was great, but then again, I'm not a very critical viewer of movies. Spencer Ackerman has a nice and thoughtful post about what the movie did well and not so well that I'll pass along. I more or less agree with most of it (how equivocal).

If you've read the book, or are familiar with the seemingly interminable struggle to get the movie made, you can understand that the fact that Watchmen movie exists, and that it makes narrative sense, is in itself a triumph. Matt Yglesias pretty much made this point yesterday: the curse of Watchmen is that it's only 12 issues, so there's a temptation to look at it as capturable on film. It is, in a way; the current movie is proof. But you don't get the reputation of being the greatest comic ever without being incredibly dense and nuanced; so much of the original wound up getting left on the cutting room floor (or who knows, not even being filmed), that the book and the movie are essentially different stories. Both good. But different. Here's a money quote:

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

I was very pleased to read this comment, to say the least. Not only because I agree with it, but because I've always felt that the actual best graphic novel ever written deserves the sort of high quality cable treatment that we've seen out of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men.

I'm talking about Preacher.

Wasn't Preacher, the tale of the minister Jesse Custer, who was imbued with the power to command men by an angel/demon hybrid spirit, built for a five-season run on HBO or Showtime? Preacher is a comic that does exactly what comics are supposed to do, and it does it better than anyone: create a unique, American folklore. It's got God. It's got cowboys. It's got vampires. It's got a cross-country quest. Fast cars. Trucks. Women. Booze. Watchmen is a superbly crafted tale with a powerful political message, but it's very firmly rooted in the 1980s and the Cold War. Watchmen engages history to that point, but in the end, it ends. Preacher, in this writer's myopic opinion, is a little more ambitious in its tackling of wider themes of love, friendship, faith, and Americanness. It obviously can afford to be, being 66 issues in length. Short of doing an actual close reading (sorry, dearest readers, I'm not going to do that much homework for a dopey comic book blog post), I feel like I took more out of Preacher than I did Watchmen. Then again, I'm a romantic.

But this is all to say, the series has the right number of twists and turns, memorable characters, huge explosions, emotional moments, and cliffhangers to make an awesome, unrated television series . . .

And of course, in the process of writing that paragraph, I decided to Wikipedia Preacher to see if, in fact, there were any film projects in the works. And of course there was an HBO series in development, and of course it got canned in favor of a big screen film, the script of which was still being written as recently as January. Punch me in the face. They better not mess this thing up.