6 Reasons Watchmen Should Stay Out Of The DC Universe

1. It’s A Symptom Of A Larger Pop Culture Problem

Batman V Superman Henry Cavill
Warner Bros

Secret Wars, Convergence, Rebirth, and even video games like Lego Dimensions all cannibalize characters and stories from the past, jumble them up, and then present them as something new. Nostalgia is great and a lot of these things are very enjoyable, but they’re not fresh. No matter how much you love the new Star Wars movies or the many many Marvel movies, you can’t deny that they are completely unoriginal. How will we ever get the next Matrix when we’re busy seeing the seventh reboot of Spider-Man?

It’s all clearly an attempt to recapture something. That’s all anyone is trying to do anymore: recapture. The comics that generated the very profitable movies of today were doing the exact opposite: they were trying to push things forward. Pretty much all of the iconic elements of any superhero come from a period of unrestrained progress. Moore and Gibbons weren’t trying to recapture anything when they wrote Watchmen. They weren’t trying to make you feel like you felt thirty years ago; they were trying to make you feel things you’d never felt before. DC Comics, Pop Culture, and in fact most of the Western World need to stop living in the past.

watchmen dc
DC Comics

Pop culture currently seems fixated on asking “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Just because something can be conceived of and sound kind of cool does not mean it will work as a good story. The Matrix is just a slow motion spectacle without the philosophy and reality-questioning aspects. Of course DC is a business and of course adding Watchmen is a smart move when it comes to squeezing more profits from a thirty year old book, but just because something makes sense and is likely to be financially successful that doesn’t mean it’s good. A movie where James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, and the Doctor have an adventure would probably sell a lot of tickets, but it would still be glorified fan fiction.

Mining the past like this is as counterintuitive as mining coal. We need new sources of entertainment energy. Disney’s two biggest properties right now: Marvel and Star Wars originated in the sixties and seventies, respectively. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are all over seventy years old. Finding new elements of old characters is nothing new and countless creations have been reinterpreted over hundreds of years, but there is a resistance against anything new these days. If we want to move forward we have to stop looking backward and this is an excellent place to start.

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Trevor Gentry-Birnbaum spends most of his time sitting around and thinking about things that don't matter.