It’s kind of a blessing the Watchmen movie didn’t catch on
more with people unfamiliar with the dense Alan Moore comic it’s based
on. Think how much confusion the tie-in Watchmen: Tales of the Black
Freighter/Under the Hood could have inspired—how many poor souls
would’ve been driven to lament “Why the hell am I watching this crazy
guy and his carcass boat?!” (To be fair, a featurette explains how the
animated carcass-boat/pirate story Tales of the Black Freighter relates to Watchmen.) It’s clear TOTBF and its companion,
Under the Hood, a flat-out delightful faux-documentary about the
original Nite Owl and his contemporaries, weren’t made for the general
public. But fans of the Moore original, for which these tie-ins
are geared towards, will surely notice how much resonance
TOTBF loses when it’s presented as a standalone story. In the
graphic novel, scenes from the Black Freighter comic that a boy
reads at a newsstand are skillfully interwoven with (and juxtaposed
against) Watchmen‘s “main” action. Word is that director Zack
Snyder’s planning to re-integrate the Freighter animation into
Watchmen when it hits DVD, but there’s no way he’ll be able to
do so with even a fraction of Moore’s clever elegance.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.
