Recap by JD Piche, RCRs Producer, and Pop Culture expert, follow him on Twitter at @misadventurer
Widely considered the one of the greatest Graphic Novels of all time, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen” was a 12 part story taking place in an alternate 1985, where Nixon was still president, the Cold War was at a boiling point and a god walked amongst men.
The original Watchmen followed a second generation of vigilantes and costumed crusaders with flashbacks and allusions to the adventures of the first group of domino masked heroes, the Minute Men who fought crime in a Post WWII New York. From the first publishing, filmmakers had attempted to bring the allegorical work to the big screen, until Zack Snyder pitched the unthinkable – Just Use the source material as storyboards and film it as intended. Which had some mixed reactions to the liberties Snyder took with focusing on violence, when subtlety is the book’s strongest point. And a cop out of the ending, which many say left a bad taste when talking about the movie. So close to victory.
HBO had asked many storytellers to attempt to continue telling stories in the Watchmen Universe, against the wishes of Alan Moore, whom has disavowed every piece of work published or filmed (aside from the Tabletop RPG, which he worked with on the original development) as his deal with DC Comics was he would create them an original, self contained Super Hero tale, but they would have to give him the rights back, if it ever fell out of vogue, unfortunately for him, it won award after award and has been constantly in print.
When HBO asked Damon Lindelof, fresh off of “The Leftovers” to tackle Watchmen, he declined several times, and only accepted as he was afraid of what could happen if it fell into the wrong hands. After reading Ta’Nehisi Coates’s book “The Case for Reparations” which detailed the 1921 massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lindelof felt that it was a story that needed a greater spotlight than amongst the literati, so he begins his addendum to the original Watchmen around a young boy surviving the destruction of the thriving black community who becomes the first superhero, the allusion to Superman’s origins, very much intended.
Lindelof and his writers took every theme, reference, joke, background graffiti and notion of the original book, as gospel and built the show around it, with such loving reverence, it may earn Moore’s stamp of approval, while the show addresses at length a topic that eluded Alan when he was penning the original. Race. The main character of the story, Angela Abar, played by Regina King, is a state-sanctioned superhero, by the name of Sister Night, operating in Tulsa, 100 years after the opening massacre. The show honors black history in its inciting incident being the massacre and bombing, and the trauma in the community, and the city, how even after a century of rebuilding, the scars remain.
The key takeaway is that we must confront the sins of the past for the hope of a brighter future.
Juneteenth is unofficially celebrated as the emancipation day of the remaining slaves after the Civil War, on June 19th, 1865.
