Who is eating the Watchmen?

I've posted a few times in recent months about the comic and movie Watchmen. Those posts were the main course. Here, courtesy of the Baixa Gastronomia blog, is the dessert, a chocolate cake with yellow icing, a chocolate smile and a blood stain of strawberry sauce, in the manner of Watchmen's signature blood-streaked smiley face.

Click on the Baixa link for the recipe. It's in Catalan, but you'll figure it out. Blogger Mar Calpena provides a synopsis in English. (Hat tip to Briciole, for its continuing mix of crime fiction, food and Italian lessons.)

Now it's your turn. What foods suit your favorite crime writers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More Moore

I've been surprised from time to time by the popularity that crime fiction enjoys among graphic-novel readers. Based on nothing other than guesswork and prejudice, I once would have associated comics more with fantasy than with crime. But no longer.

First, cover copy on one of the Batman collections referred to the story's murder mystery. Then a staffer at my local comics shop, as slacker-like a slacker as any who ever called a customer "Dude," surprised me when he said he wished the Watchmen movie had played up the story's murder mystery more. And then there are writers like Duane Swierczynski, who write both novels and comics.

My latest eye-opener in this regard is Alan Moore's Top 10, which I discovered thanks to the comic-store dude cited above. The story has a typically fantastic Moore premise: A city called Neopolis is built after World War II to house a population that consists entirely of superheroes. Their population explodes. Unemployment and associated social problems proliferate. And a wild squad of cops with odd superpowers of their own is charged with keeping order in this messy world.

Moore, I have read, cited Hill Street Blues as an influence, which means that Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels were an influence, too. The books have extensive fantasy and science fiction trappings, but at their heart they're ensemble police stories. That an imaginative writer such as Moore finds this time-honored form fertile ground speaks well for the vitality of crime fiction.

The books are vehicles for Moore's humor and social commentary, and the fantastic setting makes a wonderful background for the stories. That setting? Think of the bar scene in Star Wars, with all those weird creatures drinking and socializing. That's a nice set piece, right? Imagine all those creatures with lives and problems of their own, inhabiting a New York-like city, trying to survive, committing crimes or trying to solve them. That's Top 10.

I expect I'll have more to say once I've read all of the books. For now, though, I'll share a snippet of dialogue from The Forty-Niners, a Top 10 prequel:

"`Uh, say, buddy, excuse me? This'll sound kinda nuts, I know, but ... are you a vampire?'

"`I'm a Hungarian-American with an inherited medical condition.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I am watching the Watchmen

A narrative strand in Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen traces the sociopathology of the character Rorschach to his traumatic childhood. In one scene, Rorschach (when he was still a young boy called Walter Kovacs), is accosted by two bullies. He grabs a cigarette from one and grinds it into the attacker's eye.

The movie version, which I saw this evening, alters the scene. In the film, Kovacs kicks his attacker in the nuts, then bites out a chunk of his face.

What do we learn from this? That in the moral world of 2009, a movie can depict nuclear annihilation, graphic dismemberment, boiling cooking grease flung in a man's face, a pregnant woman shot dead at point-blank range, a man burying a meat cleaver repeatedly in another man's skull, and a blue mutant in full frontal nudity — as long as it does not appear to condone smoking.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Harvey, Alan and Clive

I bought books by Harvey Pekar and Alan Moore at my neighborhood's exciting new addition last week. Imagine my surprise when I opened the Pekar book at a random page yesterday and found a storyline about Pekar's visit with Moore in England.

Unlike The Simpsons' version of Moore, Pekar's, drawn by Ed Piskor, makes Moore look even more like a wild man than he does in video clips. "Alan is a very good and very talented guy," Pekar writes. "You couldn't have a better friend." Pekar has Moore say that he lives in Northampton because "It centers me. It has a large working-class population that I feel comfortable with." and "It's been inhabited continuously for 8,000 years."

In other news related to my reading, I found this in an essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper: "The world is jealous of confidence and success: it loves to detect the occasional ignorance of the omniscient, the trivial errors of the infallible."

Of course, he was writing about Macaulay and not about Clive James, but still.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Watching "Watchmen" and other Alan Moore movies

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rival studios say they have resolved their battle over the release of Watchmen.

The release of the superhero flick had been in doubt for months as 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. sparred in federal court over who had proper rights to the film. The studios say it will be released as scheduled on March 6.

(Read more here.)

Here and here is some of what I thought about Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen. I understand that Moore has distanced himself from films based on his work. Having recently discovered Moore, I'll probably see Watchmen. But I hope it's not just an orgy of special effects, though the story offers ample opportunity for a moviemaker who has money to spend on this sort of thing.

OK, Moore fans: What do you think of movies made from his work? From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen come to mind. What have I missed?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Adaptations

Like many another movie adaptation, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen makes alterations to its source, in this case the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Some of the changes may have been well-intended extrapolations from the story. Among these were adding Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray to the cast of fictional Victorian adventurers.

At least one change, though, seems to have been a taming, not to say censoring, of the comic. Moore explained in an interview that Allan Quatermain's attachment to the narcotic drug taduki might have rendered him vulnerable to opium addiction had the taduki supply dried up. Thus the comic has a soon-to-be fellow league member finding a sick and withered Quatermain half-dead in a Cairo opium den. In the movie, Sean Connery's robust Quatermain makes a rather more dashing entrance. Whether this change is due to Connery's role as an executive producer is a matter for speculation.

In another notable change, the movie has a male British functionary act as agent in recruiting members for the league. Moore had given that key task to a female character, the league's first member, Mina Murray. Moore's Murray is more prickly and more fully rounded a character than her screen counterpart. The comic also has an especially evil character refer to Murray as a "smelly lesbian," an edgy reference absent from the movie.

What's your take on these changes? What other notable book-to-movie changes can you think of? Feel free to speculate about the thinking behind those changes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Alan Moore makes the familiar strange

Remember that line about making the familiar strange? There's a witty example in Watchmen in which Jon Osterman has returned from the accident that dematerialized him and become Dr. Manhattan, able to dematerialize himself and others.

The trope of a man gaining super powers from an accident and becoming a costumed crime fighter will be familiar to anyone who has read a Marvel comic. In author Alan Moore's world, however, the transition is not direct. It takes image consultants, government handlers, cooperative media and a willing public to create Dr. Manhattan, a notion that amuses Osterman/Manhattan's wife to no end.

"I mean," she says, smiling widely, "you wear an old double-breasted suit for that photo session, and next thing, everybody's talking about its fashion significance! Can you imagine?"

Can you imagine? Next thing, people will be taking seriously what U.S. presidents, presidents-elect and their wives wear.

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P.S. Alan Moore is British, so I'm not becoming cool or changing my focus or succumbing to hype for the upcoming Watchmen movie. Moore fits right in here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Enter ... the Visitor

I'm feeling like a benevolent superhero these days, one whose power consists in his ability to take on the interests of anyone he visits.

Thus a recent stay with a comics-loving friend introduced me to some fine crime-fiction titles: Scalped, The Punisher and, just yesterday, that stunning, multi-layered, symphonic, operatic piece of storytelling known as Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons.

The comic maven's partner (and my co-host) loves Ian Rankin's writing and is fascinated by music in crime fiction, a frequent and well-commented-upon topic of discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders, so our talk naturally turned to those subjects. This led to some thoughts and questions that I'll pass on to you:

Music has been a part of crime fiction at least since Sherlock Holmes started scratching at his violin and of crime movies at least since the 1950s (think moody saxophones and lonely skylines). I have an idea, though, that it was baby-boomer authors who really popularized music references in crime fiction, often to rock and roll, in a big way. Why is this the case? And was Ian Rankin any kind of an innovator in his use of music in general and rock and roll in particular, or might it just seem that way because his Rebus novels are so popular?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008