Upon hearing that DC Comics is releasing prequels to Watchmen, members of Twitter were predictably catty. DC's move certainly isn't without controversy. Alan Moore was a little less than pleased with the news. Neil Gaiman wrote on his website, "Mostly, I’m just glad that they didn’t do it 25 years ago. We’ve had 25 Watchmen-Prequel free years." And then there was Twitter. The place you go when you want a sassy one-liner, snarky complaint, or references to the sexually-explicit versions of classic children's books characters in Moore's Lost Girls.
Our 30 favorite reactions to "Before Watchmen" are collected here. Thanks to ComicsAlliance for tipping us off to about a third of these (and you can see some different ones on their list).
(Context.)
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I think JMS had the best response:
“Leaving aside the fact that the Watchmen characters were variations on pre-existing characters created for the Charleton Comics universe, it should be pointed out that Alan has spent most of the last decade writing very good stories about characters created by other writers, including Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz), Wendy (from Peter Pan), as well as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde, and Professor Moriarty (used in the successful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I think one loses a little of the moral high ground to say, ‘I can write characters created by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frank Baum, but it’s wrong for anyone else to write my characters.’”
Well, those characters are all 100 years old and have already been driven into the ground via public domain. I think Moore would have preferred to be dead when the cherry was inevitably broken.
I won’t buy these. I like Darwyn Cooke, but none of the other creators strike me as all-stars. I don’t like the idea, and to compare the use of public domain characters with those who Moore himself breathed life into, that’s just stupid.
Now, I suppose if someone else had created the characters used in Watchmen to begin with?