Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Blu-ray Edition
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: March 3, 2009

It would be logical to write off the Watchmen Motion Comic as yet another way for Warner Bros. to cash in on the recent Watchmen movie tie-in craze. That’s understandable, but going on the assumption that anyone putting out a product is primarily looking to turn a profit, what is the benefit of this motion comic and is it worth your time? Let’s find out.

For those of you not familiar with motion comics, it’s an animated version of a comic book that includes a narrative and musical score. So with the Watchmen Motion Comic, you get the original artwork by Dave Gibbons that was in the printed book with nothing changed except its presentation. Panels of art are panned in and out of, and the pieces of each panel are animated, making it look like a crude form of cartoon. A narrator speaks the dialogue from the word balloons while a musical score plays along with it.

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.