So what do you get when you mash a World of Warcraft fanfic together with elements of 8 Bit Theatre, Drizzt D’Urden and a writer of an established Mary Sue webcomic? Why, you get Looking For Group, yet another gaming webcomic that is inexplicably popular despite the fact that it is a rather bad strip.

LFG is the brainchild of the two guys who also write/draw Least I Could Do, another terrible webcomic that has been savaged by others for being a horrible, unfunny, Gary Sue, misogynistic turd. Amazingly, their biggest claim to fame in webcomic sins aren’t of their own creation, rather, it’s being behind Blind Ferret Entertainment, the, and I use this term about as loosely as possible, ‘animation’ studio that brought us this (click for the full effect):

Yup. If you were wondering who were the idiots that unleashed the most poorly animated piece of crap this side of the CD-i, look no further. Blind Ferret apparently came to light as a result of Sohmer’s burning desire to see his other masterpiece animated. And really, given the exceedingly high quality that this company is known for and the artists/writers Blind Ferret has worked with in the past, surely LFG is one of the gems in the Internet’s set of Crown Jewels…right?

Well, while LFG isn’t as bad with the blatant wish-fulfilment and unfunny jokes about sex that LICD is notorious for, that’s like saying you don’t beat your girlfriend, rather, you simply get angry while playing video games and accidentally lash out at the closest human being who isn’t entirely sick and tired of your bullshit. Who happens to be your girlfriend. Okay, I’ve run that one into the ground. While you might be lucky enough to come across a baby alligator or something equally cool amongst all the waste that is the free flowing deluge of sewage that is the Internet’s webcomic community, you are far more likely to come up with something that looks like a baby’s leg, but smells a whole hell of a lot worse. And is made out of shit. Which brings us to LFG.

I’ve never really bothered with being a regular LFG reader. Unlike my other webcomic review with GU Comics, my experience with LFG has consisted of reading the first few comic strips going ‘this is fucking stupid’ and then accidentally lashing out at the person who recommended I check out the site. Total time wasted? About 5 minutes. So, in the interest of fairness and in order to delay getting around to doing any actual work at my job and thus actually justifying the paycheck that is given to me in these tough economic times where other people are not so lucky, I sat down and tore through the first 200 strips of LFG’s roughly 250 comic strips. I figure that would let me see if the strip truly is as bad as I initially made it out to be, or whether I was being unfair in my 5 minutes of looking at the damn thing. I mean, the least I could do (GET IT? HA HA HA) is actually examine the damn thing before I dismiss it ocmpletely.

Sadly, LFG is just not that good. The comic originally started off as a ‘comedic’ strip before it got ’serious,’ which is sort of like being a staff writer who gets tasked to work on a ‘very special’ episode of Blossom: it doesn’t work very well. I’ll say that it’s been handled better than Tim Buckley’s abortive attempt at veering into Seriousville, but then again, you could say the same thing about Michael J. Fox performing neurosurgery. I didn’t really notice any sort of dramatic shift in tone whilst reading through,  although the strip started moving away from being completely nonsensical to only slightly nonsensical, so there’s that. Anyway, I said at the top that LFG reads as a WoW fanfic and, after going through the first 200 or so pages of this webcomic, I stand by that assertion. Having dabbled in World of Warcraft and now guaranteeing the fact that I have just doomed myself to never having a girlfriend again, I’m familiar with the universe and have paid attention to the lore because I’m an idiot that way. While I haven’t read any of the books (and I seriously doubt that will change anytime soon) I am familiar with the basic plotline of the War of the Ancients trilogy. You know, the one that had a bunch of time travelling and characters going back in time and, okay, your eyes are glazing over so I’ll shut up.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: generic group of fantasy characters go back in time to a mighty elvish empire right before ‘the fall.’ Said empire seems to be carved entirely out of white marble. Said characters go back in time to stop some poorly defined tragedy from befalling the world, interact with mysterious draconic characters and then are flung back into the future having made things better.

Oh, but apparently I’m mistaken. According to the comic’s official Wikipedia page, the very existence of which makes me contemplate suicide: “outside of artistic similarities, the strip’s plot bears no resemblance to the Warcraft setting and Sohmer has stated that it is set in an independent universe.” As if we needed further proof that Wikipedia is full of shit. Despite being completely different from WoW, there’s constant parody going on with the fantasy genre and “pop culture references in medieval guise abound.” Gee, you’re right. World of Warcraft never references anything pop cultural or parodies the genre itself at all, boy oh boy. How silly of detractors to think as much.

At least I think that there’s parody and pop culture references ‘abounding’ in LFG, as nothing is ever really all that clear, which brings me to my biggest complaint with this webcomic: it is written fucking horribly and trying to figure out the ‘plot’ of this story is annoying for someone who isn’t a devoted fanboy who will gobble up anything that is thrown up without question. Look, I know that fantasy writing has a reputation for being shit, despite there being a ton of talented and smart authors out there, but there’s also a large portion of fantasy out there that is complete and utter crap. Sohmer happens to fall into the latter category, being guilty of coming up with nonsensical dialogue, plots that don’t make a ton of sense, relying FAR too much on having crap happen ‘off screen’ and basically using every single goddamned fantasy cliche in the book and running it into the ground.

Evil empire looking to conquer the world? Check.

Honorable (but fucking retarded) ignoble savages? Check.

Dwarves that speak in Scottish accents? Check.

Gnomes that love to tinker? Check.

Ancient prophecies up the fucking wazoo? Check.

Ancient prophecy that revolves around a MacGuffin? Check.

And on and on and on. I imagine if you were to open up TV Tropes and randomly select a page and then randomly select a LFG comic you’d, more likely than not, get a match. And before anyone tries to tell me that that’s the point of the comic, I’d like to thank you for pointing out the obvious, but LFG is apparently a ’serious’ webcomic now, so you can only play the parody card so much before your ’serious’ story becomes a joke.

But Jesus Christ, the writing is the major reason why this webcomic is terrible. From the very early stages of the comic, we have a bar fight that magically shifts to the characters being in the middle of the woods, with zero explanation as to how they got there. Sohmer has absolutely zero sense of pacing, tension, drama, whatever you want to throw out, he’s not catching it. You build up this confrontation, set things up for a fight and then…PHEW, glad we lost them! That just reeks of shitastic writing. Think that’s an isolated incident? Here’s another example. Here, we have the Bad Guys, with the utterly creative name of Legion, are in pursuit of our heroes. For some reason. We’re not sure how they know where they are, but who cares, dammit, this is about ACTION. So, the captain of the ship gets her crew ready for battle…and then goes on to brag about how her ship is so fast, they needn’t worry about battle in the next strip. Again, shitty writing that breaks up the story and makes it look like 9 year olds doing a reenactment of the old He-Man cartoons. Here’s yet another one. Up to this point, readers have been given the impression that this person is ALSO wanted by the Legion, but, hey, that annoying thing called a plot is getting in the way, so let’s just handwave our way through it to make way for the author’s insipid storytelling, because, really, details are Fucking Stupid. Here’s yet another great example.  There’s some sort of epic fight going on between two groups and the main characters are down in some CATACOMBS. We see them descend underground and yet here we see the roof caving in and griffons and soldiers who were previously fighting a massive army are now suddenly duking it out with these guys and oh god my brain. To quote the great philosopher Stefani: this shit is fucking bananas.

Another great example of this is when Richard (and, believe me, more on HIM in a moment) is banished to the ‘Plane of Suck’ (LOL!) and is robbed of his magical powers…only not, because…well, it’s never really explained. NOTHING is explained at all, which makes reading this thing a fucking chore because you have to simply accept shit happening. Deus ex machina is Sohmer’s favorite tool as a writer  and to hell with  constructing a narrative that makes any sort of goddamned sense. There’s also a point at the very start of this strip where Benny is expected to pony up some gold to the Bad Guy…which then magically turns into something called the Sword of Truth somewhere along the way. That last bit can be a bit of a nitpick, as this once again goes back to the argument that this was originally a ’silly’ webcomic that turned into a ’serious’ one and hey, maybe things weren’t planned out. Regardless, this serves as evidence that Sohmer doesn’t plan things out at all and is flying by the seat of his pants. Awesome!

As well, it seems that the only way that Sohmer knows how to advance his plot, if he’s not using offscreen methods or simply ignoring what he’s already written in favor of whatever current direction he wants to go in, is through battle or wholesale slaughter and again, I can appreciate that in a fantasy comic strip, where you expect to see a lot of fighting going on, but this again goes back to pacing problems. If you keep building up epic battle after epic battle with NOTHING else going on in between you’re going to have your audience get burnt out and disinterested because, well, if you’re having sex with two Swedish supermodels every night, how long does it take until it becomes routine and boring? So then you go out and try and spice things up. Maybe some handcuffs. Next thing you know, you’ve got a Doberman tearing off your private bits and your entire family has stopped speaking to you. Same principle here. You don’t want to be having these huge armies fighting each other all.the.goddamned.time because it winds up giving you the exact opposite result you were hoping for. Yeah, great, hack and slash is awesome, but mix it the fuck up for once and try to resolve your plotlines in ways other than HURR DURR STABBITY STAB STAB, which, if you think about it, is also how the majority of the plots are resolved in LICD, so really, he’s experienced zero growth as a writer. Hurrah!

Then there’s story details which are just completely illogical. Take the situation where some village is besieged by elementals. Somehow, the fact that some of these elementals are made out of fucking fire is irrelevant, because, hey, what the fuck good is fire when you’re laying siege to a settlement?

To be fair, these problems with the plot could be explained away if we were provided with interesting, dynamic and compelling characters. Unfortunately, this is yet another area where LFG falls far short. Let’s start with arguably the most recognizable character of the bunch, who has taken on a sort of cult following amongst fans: Richard. Fucking Richard. I can see the appeal with someone like Richard: evil sociopath who thrives off being a complete bastard. Why, it worked so well, it’s actually been done before. You see, Richard is nothing more than a thinly disguised ripoff of Black Mage from 8 Bit Theatre, essentially being the same damn character used for the exact same purpose. But see? He does a hadoken AND a shoryuken, so he’s like, totally different from Black Mage, so it’s cool.

Then there’s Cale’Anon, an elf who dual wields swords and has a pet panther. Oh, and he’s also the only non-evil member of his particular group of elves. At least, that’s what we’re told, as we’re never really SHOWN exactly how evil these elves are, outside of laying siege to this one castle. But yeah, that TOTALLY doesn’t sound familiar. At all. Because that’s what Sohmer would lead you to believe: that Drizzt was very clearly NOT an inspiration for Cale’Anon. Despite this strip initially starting off as a parody of fantasy and fantasy gaming. Despite having AD&D having a clear influence with the strip. But yeah, Cale’Anon is totally not a Drizzt clone. And Richard is totally not a rip off of Black Mage!

What else is there? Well, there’s the fact that the dialogue can be laughably bad. Here’s some examples:

His hair, like a helmet. Pubes? Like a wheat field.

Unfortunately, the script was lost on its way overseas to the Korean animation studio!

“We shall do well with bauble, eh!”

As for the so-called humour of the strip? Well, there’s Rickroll jokes roughly 2-3 weeks after that particular fad had officially jumped the shark? Or a 300 joke? Or ripping off 8 Bit Theatre’s whole burning down orphanages joke and running it into the ground? If you’re going to have a running gag, at least make it your fucking own and not one blatantly stolen from someone else. Yeah, there’s not a lot of humour to be had. Oh, there’s the utterly fucking hilarious attempts at geek humour, such as implying that elves might be, LOL, EFFEMINATE. Or there’s such a horrible, hamfisted attempt at shoehorning in a joke that it comes out as being absolutely retarded. The worse thing about all these attempts at humour? More often than not, you see the characters being drawn laughing at the jokes. Now, I might be out to lunch here, but I view that sort of thing as being something you just don’t do. Drawing your fucking characters cracking up at your jokes shows either how much of a big fucking ego you have or how much of an insecure dipshit you are.

With Sohmer, though, you have to assume that he’s completely and utterly full of himself. Nevermind the ridiculous wish fulfilment that goes on in LICD, we have a guy who thinks that he’s King Mother Fucking Shit because he happens to update his webcomic and posts garbage like this:

On the frontpage of LFG’s site. For those curious as to what the link is, here you go. What kind of arrogant shitheel does this guy think he is? Sign a petition because, damn it, I should be writing a comic book put out by a professional company that has standards. Also, how’s that for fucking irony? He’s bitching about people’s sense of entitlement in the post immediately preceding it. Wow.

He’s also made comments where he thinks he should get into the video game business because LFG has been so successful. Yeah, I’m right there with you, if only a) your previous attempts at branching out into other forms of media weren’t affronts to God and b) your source material wasn’t so pisspoor.

As for the artwork? Lar DeSouza is pretty good and is great at mixing things up, although there’s the odd misstep here or there. Nothing really to get bent out of shape over, though, and completely understandable when you’re working on 2 different comics at a time. The cartoony look isn’t really my cup of tea, but I’m not going to hold it against him. He’s a good artist and is capable of cranking out some solid stuff. Hopefully he’ll keep up the good work with someone who can actually write. Honestly, the art is not the major problem with this comic. The biggest problem is the proliferation of B^U syndrome that’s going on, with character faces, but given that he’s capable of drawing in multiple perspectives, can draw things like feet (something which King B^U is incapable of doing)  it’s a minor quibble and can be chalked up to a stylistic choice. Is it a good one? No clue, but the art is something that just doesn’t appeal to me all that much.

And honestly? LFG could be a much better comic if there were an editor kicking around or if Sohmer actually exercised some planning and self-editing himself. It’s a problem that plagues a LOT of online material, be it webcomics, writing in general or other mediums. There’s no real quality control process for people. Whereas an actual comic book will have a ton of people looking at a single work, there’s a lot of crap that proliferates online because there’s no attempt at revision or editing. A lot of the problems that I found cropping up here would have easily been picked up if there was someone else going over things behind the scenes looking at things with a critical eye. Given that Sohmer gives the impression that he’s incredibly full of himself, though, I highly doubt that will happen anytime soon. Hence, shitty webcomic.

Okay, so this will hopefully be the last post talking about GU Comics for a while now. To recap, I gave a bit of a history lesson regarding GU and some of the problems plaguing the comic that, in my eyes, make it look unprofessional, lame and unfunny for someone whose primary job is to be working on the comic. I talked about how artwork has been recycled repeatedly, the reliance on guest strips in lieu of his own content and lazy-ass comics that feature literally no artwork or show that the cartoonist is too damned lazy to actually do his job. There’s more to it, though, that rankles me with regards to GU and its owner, so, let’s get into it, shall we?

To add to the problems with the comic itself, there’s Woody’s Garfield-esque tendency to overuse jokes in lieu of providing actual content. To use video game parlance, it’s the equivalent of a palette swap. That example? Not the only time it has happened, as it should be painfully obvious that he loves going to the well again and again. The sad thing is that I haven’t even touched on one of Woody’s favorite old standbys: the game zapper. A quick search shows that he’s made over 50 comics referencing “TEH ZAPPER”, with a good chunk of them being in the last couple of years. Another quick look shows that, over the course of 2008, guest strips, ‘poopy’ strips and zapper comics made up 12% of the GU’s content. That’s not including comics that were ‘written’ by someone else, strips that used recycled gags or artwork or were just speech bubbles with zero artwork.

Can I repeat that one more time? For a full calendar year of updates, GU Comics consisted of, at most, 88% original content. Again, not factoring in comics with recycled artwork or recycled gags. I’d imagine if one were to go through and catalogue all of that, that number could be brought down to roughly 75%, if not more so. I don’t have the time to pour through a year’s worth of comics, though, so bugger that.

And this is someone’s full time JOB? Amazing.

Yes, out come the knives. Speaking of original content, why is it that Woody loves drawing characters as though they are fans of the Rock? This is a silly criticism, perhaps, but it again indicates just how lazy Woody is when it comes to his artwork. Much like how Buckley’s artwork over at CAD consists of a vacant stare with a half opened mouth, Woody’s default facial expression for characters consists of pursed lips and a raised eyebrow. Once you see it, it is everywhere. What was that I saw in the last 3 strips? Gee, it looks like more recycled artwork.

Let’s stay focused on those last three strips for a second. Woody has come across as a prude more often than not, not wanting to use foul language and keep a ‘PG-13′ rating for his strip. He’s also highly sensitive about stereotypes, at least, when it concerns him. Yet it doesn’t stop him from making a cocked eyebrow strip using foul language or using prostitution as punchlines to his jokes. Look, I have no problem with wanting to have a ‘PG-13′ strip if that is what you want to be doing, but if you’re going to bitch about how ‘rednecks’ are portrayed or get on your moral high horse and look down upon people who are media pirates, you shouldn’t be using demeaning, dehumanizing treatment of women as a source of humour in your comic strip.

That’s not the least of the depths of Woody’s hypocrisy, though. While he himself hates being characterized as a redneck, because he grew up in the south, it doesn’t stop him from taking potshots at people who really don’t deserve it. Nice incredibly thinly veiled ‘censoring’ there, too. How risque! Let’s take a crack at someone who took the time to speak about a project they are working on and bash him because, I don’t know, Uwe Boll is a horrible director or something. Wonderful. But let’s also talk about how ‘great’ the film about Watchmen is while admitting you haven’t seen the original source material.

Does anyone else see the complete hypocrisy going on here?

It gets better, though. Woody HATES being criticized. The post I just linked is attached to the comic that I posted up above. The comic would have been funny enough and shown that Woody doesn’t let what anonymous people on the Internet have to say about his comic get to him. The subsequent rant where he runs down Wikipedia saying he doesn’t ‘like’ it (why, because they didn’t ‘check their sources’ like he whined about in his post?) and then runs down the vandal who made the original changes just screams insecurity and bitterness. Especially since this isn’t the only instance where this has happened. The rant that’s attached to that comic in particular (scroll down) starts off with praise, trying to show that, yeah, Woody’s not bothered by the comic, before going into a totally unfunny passive-aggressive rant against Yahtzee.

I guess Woody didn’t get the memo that Yahztee had his own webcomic, thus making his self-cognizant, self-depreciating stabs in his original rant all the more barbed? Okay, okay, enough mocking Woody’s own passive aggressive responses to criticism.

And all this from someone who makes a living from criticizing and making fun of developers, gamers and pop culture in general.

It gets worse, though. Make any sort of comment that gaming could have a negative connotation to some people and Woody’ll be there, histrionics at the ready. Don’t believe me? Here’s another cocked eyebrow strip with Woody working himself into a frothing rage over someone daring to insinuate that World of Warcraft has addictive qualities, a rage that’ll occur anytime someone speaks ill of gaming in general. If one were to speculate, I’d daresay that he’s taking such comments about gaming personally, which either speaks of a guilty conscience or…insecurities of some kind or another! It would help to explain why he decided to make fun of Yahtzee when his comic was blatantly targeting CAD in particular and not webcomics in general. You know, outside of trying to hitch his wagon to people who are actually funny.

Here’s another example of ANOTHER popular (and funny) gaming critic saying nothing about Woody or GU Comics, yet Woody still somehow takes it personally. Again, he goes on to say that ‘oh, no, I know he’s not talking about ME’ but then goes on to personalize it at the very end ‘we’re not all bad.’ Make up your fucking mind, alright?

Of note is the line “I don’t use a lot of symbolism or visual metaphors but I use my comics to poke at the very industry that supports me.” Yeah, continually using a bug zapper or representing gaming companies as pieces of paper aren’t modes of symbolism or kinds of visual metaphors. Suuuuuure.

In closing, I want to say that I used to read GU quite frequently, but started to cut down on how often I’d visit the site until I was no longer reading the thing at all. Someone linked one of Woody’s cartoons on another website, which made me think about why. So, these 2 blog posts are basically examining why I don’t find GU Comics to be all that particularly interesting or funny anymore. Woody is a talented artist, but his laziness, both with his work ethic and his creativity has led me to tuning out GU Comics. There’s no grudge, no blood feud, nothing like that, really. His comics are unfunny to me and these are in large the reasons why.

Sorry about that, folks. Life sometimes gets in the way of things and causes all sorts of HILARITY.

So, I think before I get right back into the swing of things, I’d like to take a minute and talk about web comics. Specifically, video game web comics.

No, I’m not going to go after the easy target that is CAD. That’s already been done to death by people much funnier than myself. Rather, I’m going to look at the tragic headcase that is GU Comics’ Woody Hearn and his rather horrid comic…which will hopefully segue into a larger indictment of creative types in general.

For those who aren’t aware, /gu (as it is ‘properly’ called) is a comic that initially started off as a comic strictly about the dinosaur of MMORPGs, Everquest. It was a one panel strip that dealt strictly with the game’s ‘in-jokes.’ I’ll admit, even as someone who didn’t really play EQ all that much (I dabbled in it before going ‘fuck this shit’ due to the inane time constraints the game had and the fact that, well, I wasn’t exactly on the most stable of internet connections ‘back in the day.’) some of the jokes were funny. It didn’t hurt that it was one of the few well drawn webcomics out there, and one of the few webcomics about video games that didn’t consist entirely of recycled Megaman sprites or were drawn by people who were suspected pedophiles (hi2u CAD)

This strict devotion to Everquest, and ONLY Everquest, was a huge deal. However, there are only so many times you can make jokes about how women in fantasy games wear skimpy clothing, lol, before it got old. So, when Woody decided to switch over to do comics about non-EQ stuff, it was ’serious business.’

Over the years, GU has seen a number of scheduling changes and has devolved to provide some of the stupider cliches that permeate gaming comics. Namely, the man-child character who, were anyone sane actually living with said individual, who have killed him or had him committed to an asylum. Yes, I’m talking about Ted the hee-lar-ious ‘wacky’ character who does all sorts of zany things while Woody’s Mary Sue plays the straight man to him. Ho-fucking-hum, ain’t this a tune we haven’t heard a million times before. Other transgressions include multiple caricaturizations of Jack Thompson, something, which, again, every single gaming webcomic out there has done, making ‘Ted’ an employee of a gaming store (I think, I’m not what you’d call an ardent follower of GU…) and so on and so forth. Enough with the history lesson.

The problems with GU, though, are many and varied. The first is the art style, where Woody seems content on recycling artwork over and over and over. The particular example I provided, of the orc, whose only real differences consist of the odd change in facial expressions, can be found in other examples. It’s not necessarily a problem, per se, other cartoonists have have their characters in a default ‘costume’ (eg, Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade, Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt) but when you’re relaying the exact same drawing over and over? That reeks of laziness.

Especially when you look at the number of guest comics that he uses in lieu of his own content, or his own self-professed throwaway comics. Or artistic gems such as this one. There’s also his use on the Stickman ‘Poopy’ comics, which are essentially Woody’s way of going ’sorry, no comic today!’ To me, it screams of someone doing the bare minimum to scrape by, which is funny, given that he has taken other game companies to task for being lazy, either in releasing a title, or for releasing crap games. Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour can be seen as a sort of an epidemic amongst web-cartoonists. ‘Guest’ comics, to me, are ones that are done by another, well known artist (or writer, in some cases) and are not done by rabid fans. Somewhere along the line, though, accepting the offerings from your fanbase has become an accepted practice and is one that is done by other webcomics as well. The worst example of this, off the top of my head, would be VG Cats, which has a horrid release schedule and has been using ‘guest comics’ as a way to staunch the bleeding. The difference, though, is that VG Cats, which is run by Scott Ramooholycraphisnameisworsethanminetospellar, is a side thing and Scott isn’t doing this as a full time gig. Woody, on the other hand, has GU as his main job and when you write comics that are of a stickman going ‘Sorry, too busy playing [Game X] to make a comic, piss off.’ Well…I’d like to know what employer would tolerate that sort of behaviour if given a similar response when asked why they weren’t doing any work. Have a little bit of professional pride, for pete’s sake.

Okay, this is getting sort of long, so I’m going to do some more ranting about GU Comics in a later post. I’ve got other things I want to talk about.

Originally cribbed from Newgrounds, c/o Happy Harry productions. I have to say that this is absolutely brilliant. So horribly 80s, so horribly divergent from the source material and so utterly hilarious. I’m not sure if my favorite part is the bit with Nite Owl being a blatant shout out to Michaelangelo’s scene from the old TMNT cartoon or the part with the Comedian and Laurie, which is the creepiest bit in the whole thing.

Watch this. It’s solid gold.

Some real content will be coming soon, too. Just incredibly busy with other stuff at the moment. Don’t know when I’ll post my thoughts on the cinematic Watchmen, either. Popular consensus is that it will do strong opening weekend numbers and then plummet off the face off the Earth. Not sure about that, as I think people who are looking to sate their Dark Knight cravings will eventually go and check this out and ‘word of mouth’ will carry this film for a respectable showing.

Of course, if this film does great you know what that means, right? SEQUEL-TIME, BABY!

Some ideas,

- Somebody’s killing heroes…again. An angry Rorshach is back and is hungry for vengeance. Watch out!

- 40 years into the future, all of the ‘old’ Watchmen are now dead or on their last legs. An aging Dr. Manhattan (played by Mickey Rourke) tries to re-connect with his old flame and looks back on his life, wondering if he did the right thing.

- Since the idea of a gengineered space alien was ‘too weird’ for regular film goers to wrap their heads around, director Zack Snyder opts to use an old Hollywood standby for the sequel to the ‘critically acclaimed’ Watchmen. Also, a subtle wink to the ‘competition’ is incorporated in the sequel, which sees the Comedian rising from the dead to command a horde of zombies and to seek vengeance on Ozymandias. A ‘brilliant’ twist to the zombie genre where the good guys are the monsters!

So, okay. I’ve been seeing a lot of excitement and publicity launched over the latest comic book sequential art adaptation, Alan Moore’s instant-classic, Watchmen. The movie debuts this Friday, barring any last minute histrionics on the behalf of 20th Century Fox, and it seems that it is going to do fairly well at the box office. Zack Snyder gets another notch in his belt and all seems well for comic book fans.

Right?

Well, not quite. Discounting the rabid fanboys who will hate the film simply because it exists (a sin that I’ve been somewhat guilty of with regards to the Lord of the Rings films, so please, don’t think I’m getting on a high horse!), there are some issues about the forthcoming film that make me more than a little apprehensive about it.

I should also mention that Watchmen star, Matthew Goode, has had some choice words for critical fanboys, giving a new take on the term ‘fan service.’ And honestly? I can agree with him to an extent: it is a movie, and one’s enjoyment of the source material will not be impinged upon because the movie has come out.On the other hand, though, it is also understandable as to why fanboys are up in arms about this movie and that there are legitimate complaints that can be made about the film. Yes, even before anyone has watched the damn thing.

First off, for those of you who aren’t that well informed when it comes to Watchmen, it was a comic book mini-series that was released in 1986. Plot-wise, it focused on the anxiety of nuclear war and mutually assured destruction that was so prevalent during the era of the Cold War, framed within a murder mystery. Writer Alan Moore also went on to deconstruct the superhero and inserted a wealth of material that helped to supplement the plot. It was one of the first books that helped the mainstream to start considering comic books as a serious artform and earned a place on Time’s Best 100 novels list. Okay, now that I’m done cribbing press releases and Wikipedia, let’s move on.

Watchmen is a story that really utilized the strength of the medium it was constructed in and did things that other forms of media can’t. Compare a comic book to a regular book, a film, a piece of art and an audio recording. A book and a piece of art are two forms of media that exist on one ‘level’, one is pure text, the other is a pure image. A film is a mixture of different forms (audio and visual, primarily, although text can be introduced and utilized, usually sparingly), while an audio recording is pure sound, nothing else.

A comic book is the mix of two mediums, text and image. Moore and artist Dave Gibbons utilize both to great effect, drawing them together, as well as using them separately (such as with the book excrepts or scenes that do not have any dialogue.) While few of the things that were done in Watchmen had not been done before in some way or another, the depth that Moore and Gibbons went with their work was a first and, again, went a long way to legitimize comic books as ’srs business’ to people. There are some things that are done in the comic book that simply can’t be replicated in another medium, which should be cause for concern for some folks.

Now, fast forward 20 or so years. Comic book fans are enjoying a sort of cinematic renaissance with the films about their work, cinematic monstrosities such as Shaq’s depiction of Steel or the godawful Batman & Robin have been thankfully forgotten, while films like Sam Raimi’s Spiderman and the first two X-Men films went a long way at showing folks that yes, there can be good super hero movie flicks. Throw in the Christopher Nolan directed Batman flicks as well, and there is some serious noise being made about superhero flicks. Heck, you can even look at the Hellboy films, 300 and Sin City for further evidence of the proliferation of comic book films. Let’s just not talk about Elektra, though, alright?

So, that is the climate we are in with the approaching Watchmen film. People are sitting up and starting to take notice about these strange and mysterious ‘funnybooks’ and see them as something more than fare for children. This Watchmen film has the potential to do the same sort of thing for comic book movies that the Watchmen miniseries did for comic books.

However, a recent clip that’s been making its way around the Internets. It features the jail break scene, with Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre, and is highlighted by some of the most ridiculous looking fight chereography seen this side of a Scott Steiner wrestling match. That’s not what has put me off, though, it’s the little smirk that is shared between the two heroes that’s had me worried about this film. The thing that worries me is that Snyder has been so worried about ‘accurately’ capturing the film is that we’re going to be subjected something that LOOKS very much like the comic book, but comes across as being insincere. I mean, it is one thing to meticulously recreate every scene from the source material, it’s another to convey the emotion that exists within the work.

And that’s what worries me. Amidst all the marketing and trailers I’ve seen, I’m seeing a film that looks very much like the comic book, but is leaving me with doubts as to how authentic a recreation it will be. The trailers and posters and everything else seem to be spinning this film as a typical superhero flick, which is absolutely not what Watchmen is, nor ever will be. There’s more of a sell being made about the action and the ’suspense’ of someone killing off superheroes than it being a ‘complex story’ or anything along those lines.

I’d like for Watchmen to be a dynamic film that challenges viewers and is able to push comic book movies to that ‘next’ level, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

(PS, I made mention for a post showing that Metallica is educational. Unfortunately I cannot recall AT ALL what the hell I had meant by that, so, nothing doing on that front. Them’s the breaks!)