Hub Comics

The best thing for my shop coming from the success of the new Batman movie (which, no, I haven't seen yet, although I've heard mostly rave reviews) is the trailer for the upcoming Watchmen movie. (annoying window-maximizing link)

I've watched the trailer at least a dozen times. And, no, that's not something I usually do. It's just amazing, and I can't wait for the movie.

When the trailer was released online, I dug out my old copy of the trade paperback of the collected Watchmen. I hadn't read the series in almost 20 years, and I know I didn't catch it all the first go-around. Re-reading it really made me appreciate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and their very integrated storytelling. For example, while I was reading it at the shop one day, a customer noticed, and she mentioned that she'd done some time as a letterer for comics in the pre-computer-lettering days, and that she had done a paper in college about the lettering in Watchmen.

Usually, lettering in a comic is a throwaway art. Once you have chosen the font and know the right proportions and placement of word balloons, it's fairly straightforward. However, there is no letterer noted for the Watchmen book, so I'd imagine that Gibbons lettered the book himself, which is unusual outside the world of self-publishing.

In Watchmen, there are several different fonts, indicating different facets to different characters. The word balloons, themselves, the woman said, seem to indicate the characters' loss of innocence. Golden-age (1940s) flashbacks have golden-age-style bulbous, multi-lobed, smooth word balloons. Early 1960s flashbacks have Silver-Age-style smooth word balloons, transitioning for certain characters, at key moments, into more angular balloons, made from many straight lines. Rorschach, one of the main characters, has very angular word balloons and a lettering font that's raspy and loose. His alter-ego, however, speaks softly and has only the usual angular balloons, like other characters with similar loss of innocence. There's a scene where he dons his mask, and you see the transition happen.

There's a lot to be said about the book. It's multi-layered in a way that only a comic book could be. The lettering and art contribute to the story as much as the words themselves. A story-within-a-story (a kid reading a grisly pirate comic at a newsstand), headlines on newspapers and background TV reports all lend plot elements and clues to the milieu. Time magazine named it as one of the 100 best novels of 1923-2000, and the book has sold millions of copies and stayed in print since its 1986 debut.

That said, the movie looks like it is going to live up to the source material in the same way that the new Batman movies live up to the darker Batman incarnations. This is really a great time for comics-based movies.

Ah -- so, my original point was that the trailer has been good for the shop. I ordered a dozen copies of the book when we sold out of the three we already had in stock on the day after Dark Knight opened. We sold that dozen copies within three days.

To put that in perspective, we have sold maybe 17 copies of "Y: The Last Man" volume 1, which was our previous bestseller, and something we recommend to everyone who asks for a recommendation. And that's since we opened in January. We've sold 15 copies of Watchmen in the past two weeks. Y is a $10 book, and Watchmen is a $20 book.

So, I've ordered another 20 copies to have in stock, since people still come in asking for it. Not to mention that, in the past two weeks, I've seen two different people on two different days sitting in the MIT Coop bookstore reading Watchmen.

If you haven't read the comic, go get it and read it now. It will take longer to read than most comics, as it is a lot denser, since it contains ancillary material, as well -- faux book excerpts, news articles, police reports, and other items.

One last thing, though: If you're already an experienced comic reader and have read things like "Fun Home" or "Maus," you may not think Watchmen is as amazing as many of us believe. It's kind of like a modern eye looking at "Citizen Kane" without the historical context. Yeah, so what? Camera angles, various storytelling devices and transitions -- all things that are commonplace in current movies. It's just important to note that Watchmen (or Citizen Kane) did it first, and sometimes best.

Watchmen will be out around March of next year. Before then, we have Will Eisner's Spirit and rumors about the upcoming Captain America movie to hold us over.

It's a good time to be a comic geek.