Watchmen artist and co-creator Dave Gibbons has given his blessing to Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV series after reading the script for the pilot episode.
“I do know a little about it. I’ve had conversations with Damon, and I’ve read the screenplay for the pilot. I don’t think it’s my place to say too much about it, other than I found Damon’s approach to be really refreshing and exciting and unexpected,” Gibbons told Entertainment Weekly of the Watchmen TV show. “I don’t think it’s gonna be what people think it’s going to be. It certainly wasn’t what I imagined it to be. I think it’s extremely fresh. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on the screen. I’ve been resistant to the comic book prequels and sequels, but what Damon’s doing is not that at all, it’s very far away from that. While it’s very reverential and true to the source material (by which I mean the Watchmen graphic novel that Alan and I did), it’s not rereading the same ground, it’s not a reinterpretation of it. It approaches it in a completely unexpected way.”
Gibbons also went onto describe Lindelof’s approach as more experimental and less directly related to the original story then the likes of Doomsday Clock or DC’s Before Watchmen series – Instead comparing it to writer Grant Morrison and Frank Quiltel’s Watchmen inspired Multiversity Story “Pax American” which is certainly not a bad a bad selling point in itself.
“That’s what we tried to do with Watchmen itself. Other people have done it with some success, coming to the basic material with a fresh approach. I feel like the comic prequels and sequels don’t really do that,” Gibbons explained. “They’re done by very talented people, but they don’t expand the scope of it at all. Grant Morrison did a thing with Multiversity, where he came up with some very fresh approaches to comic stories, and in one of them they did something similar to Watchmen, but in a new way. I heartily applauded that. My feeling is that what Damon’s doing is like that, it’s not a rereading of something we already know, but it’s a fresh and unusual approach.”
Although HBO has given Watchmen the greenlight, no premiere date for the in-development series has yet been announced.
