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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHow many 55yearold shutins could confidently lead off their next job application with \"Have changed the face of one or more art forms\"? So far as I know, the only one in captivity is comics creator Alan Moore. In the brave notsonew world of pictorial fiction, he's as seminal a figure as James Joyce. He's also as arcane as Joyce to noninitiates. Suppose the greatest graphic novelist alive were to materialize in Times Square tomorrow, which isn't too likely\u2014notoriously, Moore seldom ventures out of Northampton, England, his glamourchallenged lifelong home. I guarantee a dozen acolytes who spotted the legendary author of V for Vendetta and From Hell amid the pretzel fumes and digitalized neon would blink in awe. But everyone else would size up Moore's trademark wild mane and Rasputinesque beard and hope he didn't start shouting about the endtime before they scurried by.\n\nThat's how it goes with subcultural fame, and Moore apparently has no complaints. But thanks to his huge influence, even audiences unfamiliar with the man's work are living in his cathedral.\n\nYou know it better as your den. From The iles and Buffy the Vampire Slayer up through Heroes and Lost, our era's grubby, spooked TV mythography wouldn't exist without Moore's epochal Watchmen\u2014the sordid epic about caped crusaders at endgame time he cooked up with illustrator Dave Gibbons back in Ronald Reagan's prime. Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon, is one highprofile acolyte who's said so.\n\nMovies still have a long way to go to catch up to him. As most of his devotees know and filmmakers keep learning to their sorrow, Moore doesn't suffer Hollywood gladly. Or even profitably, since he now cedes any movie income to his collaborators and insists on having his own \"created by\" credit removed. People have been trying to wrestle Watchmen onto the big screen for two decades, but even though he can't stop them\u2014he and the rights parted ways years ago\u2014his disgust is well publicized. The book, he says firmly, is \"inherently unfilmable.\"\n\nWe'll soon find out if he's wrong. Succeeding where Darren Aronofsky, Paul Greengrass, and Terry Gilliam (twice) all failed, 300 alum Zack Snyder is the lucky director whose Watchmen adaptation will finally see daylight. Snyder does have big credentials from one angle, since 300 did better at approximating the visual effect of a graphic novel than any previous liveaction facsimile. I didn't think it was any good, understand, but it was definitely some sort of feat. All the same, the book he was working from then, unlike Watchmen, wasn't holy writ to fetishists all over the planet.\n\nPresumably, Snyder will be too savvy to dick around much with a plot most fanboys could recite in a coma, starting with the breakthrough that cemented Moore's rep. Watchmen's brilliant premise was that its flawed, alltoohuman (with one formidable exception) characters had been influenced by the same Action Comics classics our realworld elders gobbled up, inspiring two generations of them to turn costumed vigilantes themselves. Then society put its foot down and banned them in the '70s.\n\nAs Watchmen opens a decade later, the wondrously named Rorschach\u2014the only selfmade freak who's refused to hang up his disguise or crimefighter alias\u2014is investigating the murder of his onetime cohort the Comedian, which he alone suspects is the first step in somebody's master plan. Right he is, too, even though the apocalyptic resolution is a little too Dr. No for my taste. Moore may have reinvented comics, but that doesn't always mean he transcends them.\n\nThat said, describing Watchmen in terms of its plot is like calling Citizen Kane a movie about a sled. Its greatness is all in the vaulting ambition of Moore's approach: the fabulous tangents, the baroque flashbacks that exhume the characters' embittered motives and twisted relationships, the inventive skewings of history\u2014it's 1985, but Nixon's still in office\u2014and the sense of the past's weight on the present. At its best, the language of Rorschach's journal fuses Chandler and Nabokov: One entry notes \"a pair of Keds strangled by [their] own laces, tongues lolling out horribly.\" Yet Rorschach's undergroundman jottings are only one of the formal gambits that deepen and enrich Moore's narrative, including Tales of the Black Freighter, the ghoulishly drawn sagawithinasaga one bystander spends half the book reading\u2014at once a loving homage to vintage '50s horror comics and a phenomenally sustained counterpoint to the action.\n\nWithout those extra dimensions, the movie won't be Watchmen as we know it. Whatever you think of Terry Gilliam, he's one director who's not daunted by difficult material. But after struggling with the obvious question\u2014\"How to make a film of a masterpiece?\"\u2014Gilliam decided that more would be lost by filming Moore's magnum opus than could possibly be gained. \"Everything does not have to become a movie,\" he later wrote, a heresy Entertainment Weekly's mavens will no doubt never forgive him.\n\nMoore himself has no plans to take in the upcoming juggernaut, dashing Snyder's hope that he might watch the thing on DVD one day and decide it isn't too awful. \"I'm never going to watch this fucking thing,\" Moore told one interviewer. \"I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come,\" he cheerily promised another.\n\nProving that possessiveness is ninetenths of the law, some fans groused that Watchmen's creator was raining on the movie's parade\u2014which is by now, make no mistake, their parade. Not only have they been waiting for it since Lindsay Lohan was a zygote; they've been hyped all their lives to believe that nothing validates a comic's greatness like seeing it reproduced on film. Yet the rapture of community aside, the basic\u2014and all too often only\u2014gratification involved is as primitive as can be. At heart it's the adolescent version of what makes kindergartners thrilled to see the \"real\" Snow White at Disney World.\n\nThat doesn't mean I can't empathize. Back in my pregeezer days, the sacred texts my peers and I pined to see Hollywoodized were plain old novels, not graphic ones, but we felt the same way. Just like the bloggers bitching about Moore's perversity, people my age used to be puzzled by J. D. Salinger's refusal to sell The Catcher in the Rye to Hollywood. In hindsight, though, that's one cream pie I'm glad we dodged. \n\nSupposedly, graphic novels are more cinemafriendly by definition, since their visual component is built in. But that's one reason earlier adaptations of Moore's work have seemed redundant at best. V for Vendetta probably came closest to staying faithful to his original, but with a literalminded clunkiness that didn't do his or our imagination any favors. Besides, the specific target of his fury\u2014Margaret Thatcher's iron rule\u2014was distant history, leaving viewers understandably mystified by the movie's point. \n\nOn top of that, even though Watchmen's fascination with America puts Moore up there with the Beatles as longdistance obsessives go, he's as British as kippered herring and publicschool sodomy. Any filmmaker who tries to pasteurize that side of him ends up with goo. One offender was the Hughes brothers' dim version of From Hell, Moore's astonishing 543page (including fortyodd of footnotes) riff on the Jack the Ripper murders. Still, From Hell wasn't an abomination on a par with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which had considerable charm on the page. On film, it might as well have been retitled Revenge of the Kitchen Sink.\n\nSo maybe Snyder will break the jinx. But won't Watchmen fans have lost something precious anyway? The truth is, we always do. I don't know of anyone who didn't enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean, but call me sentimental: It's kind of spoiled the original ride for me. Man, how I did love that ride.\n\nTom Carson  is a  GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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