Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Digital Download
Directed by Jake Strider Hughes
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Based on the original work by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Warner Home Entertainment
Release date: July 31, 2008 – February 23, 2009

We’ve been told for the last few years that digital comics are the wave of the future, and whether that involves just finding some way to make them easier to read on a computer screen, or some way to read them on a portable devise, I haven’t found a good platform for digital comics yet (which is not to say it’s not out there.) With the release of the Watchmen movie, DC comics and Warner Brothers have decided to cash in by turning Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking work into what they call a motion comic. What this means is that they’ve put minimal animation into Gibbons’ original art, minimal voice work to read the captions and dialog, and minimal music to set the mood. In the end, what they have come up with is something that fails to live up to the original work, and does not present the work as it should be.

The question to ask yourself before buying this is: Is the experience of watching this better, worse, or the same as reading the book? I’m not judging the original work right now, just how the work is presented on this disc. The sad thing to say here is that changing Watchmen into a motion comic does nothing to help the work; in fact it only harms it. One of the major things about Watchmen is the way that Dave Gibbons’ page layouts, and more specifically the nine panel grid, tells the story as much as the words and actual art do. Changing Watchmen the way they did here removes one of the main things that make the book so special. The supposed animation is simply not able to convey the page layout that Moore and Gibbons use, which is so important to the actual work.

But the bad “animation” isn’t even the real problem with this. No, the biggest problem is the one actor doing all the voices for all the characters. If the voice cast was larger and more varied, I would probably enjoy it more, but once you get an exchange between a male and female character, you will really notice the problem that this causes. The actor does a fairly good job with the male actors (he does a very good Rorschach), but when he does the female voices; man does it just bug me. Would it have been that hard to bring in a female actor to voice the female characters? It really makes the whole thing feel thrown together, and that bugs me more than anything.

In the end, the intentions are good, but this mostly feels like a cheap way for Warner/DC to cash in on the property, and while I could see myself watching more, they’d have to step up the voice acting to make it worth my while. If you really want to read the story, just read the friggin book. I can appreciate what the makers of this are trying to do. There are a lot of people trying to figure out the best way to produce comics for mobile devices and for reading on the computer, and this is just another way that could work, I just wish that this was a better example of what could be done. I’d say they could try turning other books into this kind of a motion comic, but they’d have to use a fairly wordy book like this one, because an action book would look ridiculous with the crappy animation they use. Save your money and just buy the original book, or if you already own it, buy a different book. You know there’s another comic you’ve been meaning to buy, so just blow your money on that.