DC ruins everything with Watchmen "prequels"

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If DC Entertainment hadn't already ruffled enough feathers in the past year with their controversial (read: terrible) redesigns of beloved characters like Harley Quinn, "New 52" reboot of just about everyone, and astounding response to accusations of sexism, now they've gone and dropped their last remaining shred of good will down an elevator shaft.

Yes, according to the infinite wisdom of the DC team, apparently it's time to ponder "What did the Watchmen do before they were the Watchmen?" That's right, folks at home, it's prequel time!

(That noise you heard was Watchmen creator Alan Moore's head exploding. And Twitter exploding, too.)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, here's what we've got to look forward to:

This summer, the company will publish seven prequel comic book mini-series called Before Watchmen, each week unleashing a new title focusing on the characters’ lives and adventures in the years before the original story. Those characters -- Rorschach, Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre and the 1940s superteam The Minutemen – will be featured in stories from such notable comics creators as Darwyn Cooke, J. Michael Straczynski, Brian Azzarello, Adam Hughes, Andy Kubert and Joe Kubert, among others.

While that's a reasonably impressive line-up of comic creators, I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons provided plenty of material, as far as character development and context and ANYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY HOPE FOR, in Watchmen itself to avoid ever needing to revisit that world to ask, for example, "Why does Sally Jupiter drink so much?" or "Oh Rorschach, why you so crazy?"

Then again, DC owns the characters, so evidently they can do what they damn well please with them!

The last word on this, at least until we get to read the bloody things, is probably best left to Chris Sims, who summed it up perfectly:



"Remember that scene in Watchmen #9 where an ornate crystal palace shattered because it was hit with a bottle of a perfume called 'Nostalgia'? I think that might’ve been a metaphor."