Elephant In The Room: DC Comics’s Before Watchmen Panel, SDCC 2012
I expected things to be a little more contentious than they wound up being at DC Comics’s Before Watchmen panel yesterday.
After all, this is Comic-Con. It is packed to the gills with rabid fanboys and fangirls, many of whom were swirlied in junior high school (Hi, Paul Jameson! I make a comfortable living in the software industry now! How’s that A in woodshop treating you, fucker?) and now that they have strength in numbers, are itching for a fight. This convention has fundraisers for Jack Kirby, panels dedicated to pointing out the injustice of Bill Finger not getting enough credit for co-creating Batman, and a panel called The Most Dangerous Women in Comics. It is a place where a lone nut in a Batgirl suit can change the course of an entire comics company, and come back the next year bearing gifts for the creators and none for the thousand or so paying customers whose convention experience she fucked with last year in order to further a personal agenda. In short: this is Angry Fanboy Central, and if there was a place for them to show their colors, it was this panel.
But that didn’t happen. Sure, the panel started a little bit late, and the whole Quentin Tarantino announcement smack in the middle sucked up some question time, so maybe the slavering, angry, “You fucked Alan Moore!” guy just didn’t get his turn at the microphone. The people who did get a turn were generally really enthusiastic about the whole Before Watchmen project; one fan flat-out said that he was one of those “keyboard commandos” who ranted against the whole project, but wound up really getting sucked into it. Hell, the entire Alan Moore elephant in the room was only addressed once by anyone in the crowd… and it was a guy who was hoping that DC could get Moore to work on a Watchmen sequel.
How’d that turn out? Well, let’s watch!
So yeah, the crowd was pretty pacified over the whole subject. But then again, when you show a bunch of variant covers and interior art from some of the best in the business – Jim Steranko’s doing a variant cover for Rorschach, for Christ’s sake – you can calm down any room of comics enthusiasts.
Even the DC brass are excited about how the project is being perceived in the marketplace (although I would imagine they’d have to be; if it was tanking, this panel would probably have been quietly canceled and replaced with something like The Glass Ceiling For Women In Comics). DC Co-publisher Dan DiDio said, “I couldn’t be more happier… the periodics [sic] have exceeded our expectations… these guys are turning in the work of their lives.”
Each member of the panel gave some teasers to what’s coming up in their respective books, and showed off some art that’s on its way. Nite Owl Friter J. Michael Straczynski addressed the fast pace of his first issue by saying he felt he needed to address the character’s childhood, relationship with the original Nite Owl, and superhero partnership quickly so he could explore other things, “I wanted the first book to get him… working with Rorschach,” Straczynski said.
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