Watchmen

• 1. A Smile Spattered With Blood

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  Watchmen begins and ends with a smiley face, spattered with blood on its first page and with hamburger sauce on its last. That small circle sits at the center of a twelve-issue comic book series by three British creators: writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. DC Comics released it monthly across 1986 and 1987, then gathered it into a single volume in 1987. Its heroes wear masks, yet the story keeps stopping for a pirate comic that a young man reads at a New York newsstand. Along the way, the series raises some puzzles. Why did a story about masked heroes need brand-new characters? How did a team that kept running behind schedule get it finished? And why did the man who wrote it come to want nothing more to do with its publisher?

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• 2. Borrowed Heroes

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  In 1983, DC Comics acquired a line of characters from Charlton Comics. Writer Alan Moore began to contemplate a story built on an unused set of superheroes that he could revamp. He had done something similar with his Miracleman series in the early 1980s. He also reasoned that the Mighty Crusaders of MLJ Comics might be available. For them he devised a murder mystery that opens when the body of the Shield is found in a harbor. Moore felt it did not matter which heroes he used, provided readers recognized them. That recognition would deliver "the shock and surprise value when you saw what the reality of these characters was".

  Moore turned the premise into an unsolicited proposal for the Charlton heroes, titled Who Killed the Peacemaker, and sent it to DC managing editor Dick Giordano. Giordano liked the pitch but not the casting. DC planned to fold the Charlton characters into its main superhero universe through its upcoming event Crisis on Infinite Earths. Moore described the problem plainly: "DC realized their expensive characters would end up either dead or dysfunctional." Giordano therefore persuaded him to carry on with new characters who merely resembled the Charlton heroes. Moore first doubted that invented characters could stir readers. He changed his mind after deciding that well-written stand-ins could still recall "a kind of generic super-hero resonance or familiarity to the reader".

  Dave Gibbons, who had collaborated with Moore before, heard on the grapevine that a new miniseries was in preparation. By his own account he phoned Moore to say he wanted in, and Moore sent him the outline. Gibbons told Giordano he wanted to draw it, and Moore approved. Gibbons also brought in colorist John Higgins, whose style he found unusual. Higgins lived near him, so the two could talk through the art in person rather than "just sending it across the ocean". Len Wein came aboard as editor, with Giordano overseeing the project. Both men stayed out of the way, and Giordano later asked, "Who copy-edits Alan Moore, for God's sake?"

  A single day at Gibbons's house produced the foundations. Moore and Gibbons invented characters, sketched the setting and traded influences. A Mad parody of Superman called "Superduperman" was a particular influence, and they wanted to turn it toward drama rather than comedy. Moore's goal was "a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density". Moore supplied names and descriptions and left the look of each character to Gibbons. Gibbons sketched at odd moments over two or three weeks and favored designs that were easy to draw. His favorite was Rorschach, because "you just have to draw a hat".

  Moore started writing early, hoping to avoid the delays that had hit the DC limited series Camelot 3000. While scripting the first issue, he made a discovery: "I only had enough plot for six issues. We were contracted for 12!" His answer was to alternate issues that advanced the main plot with issues devoted to the origins of the characters.

  The scripts themselves were enormous. Gibbons recalled that the script for issue one ran, he thought, to 101 single-spaced pages, with no gaps between panel descriptions or even between pages. He numbered every page in case he dropped them, since putting them back in order would take two days. He marked lettering and shot descriptions with a highlighter pen. Moore often ended a panel description with the note "If that doesn't work for you, do what works best". Gibbons still followed the instructions closely. He suggested only one change, a compression of Ozymandias' narration while he stops a sneak attack by Rorschach, because the dialogue was too long for the action. Moore agreed and rewrote the scene. Gibbons also tucked background details into the art that Moore admitted he did not notice until later. For research questions and quotations, Moore sometimes contacted the comics writer Neil Gaiman.

  Deadlines slipped anyway. The series went into production with three issues finished, where Wein believed six were necessary. In November 1986, with issue five on sale, Moore admitted he was still writing issue nine. Gibbons blamed the piecemeal way the scripts arrived. From about the fourth issue he worked a few pages at a time, then called Moore to say, "Feed me!" When deadlines bit, Moore hired a taxi driver to carry scripts 50 miles to Gibbons. On later issues, Gibbons even had his wife and son draw panel grids on the pages to save time.

  Near the end of the project, Moore noticed that his story resembled "The Architects of Fear", an episode of the television series The Outer Limits. He and Wein argued over changing the ending. When Moore refused to give in, Wein quit the book. Wein later said he had urged Moore to "do something different, not something that's already been done!" Moore's answer was to name the Outer Limits episode inside the final issue.

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• 3. An Alternate 1985

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  Watchmen parts ways with our world in 1938. From that point, the presence of superheroes bends events in the United States. In keeping with the series' realism, only one of its costumed figures, Doctor Manhattan, has any real superhuman ability. America wins the Vietnam War in 1971, and Vietnam becomes the 51st state. Richard Nixon is still president in October 1985, after term limits are repealed. The Watergate scandal never breaks, because the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are implied to have been assassinated. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan comes about six years later than it did in real life.

  Manhattan gives the United States a strategic edge over the Soviet Union, and Cold War tensions climb. By 1977, police and public have turned against costumed heroes, and the Keene Act outlaws them. Most retire. Manhattan and a hero called The Comedian keep working as government-sanctioned agents, while Rorschach carries on outside the law. By 1985, the country is edging toward World War III with the Soviets.

  On the 12th of October 1985, New York City detectives investigate the murder of a man named Edward Blake and find no leads. Rorschach investigates on his own. He discovers a costume and a smiley-face pin badge and deduces that Blake was The Comedian. Suspecting a plot against costumed adventurers, Rorschach warns four retired comrades. They are the inventor Daniel Dreiberg, the second Nite Owl; Jon Osterman, known as Doctor Manhattan; Manhattan's lover Laurie Juspeczyk, the second Silk Spectre; and the businessman Adrian Veidt, once the hero Ozymandias.

  At Blake's funeral, Dreiberg tosses the pin badge into the coffin. Soon after, Manhattan is accused on national television of causing cancer in friends and former colleagues. The government takes the charge seriously, and Manhattan exiles himself to Mars. Because America depends on him as a military asset, his departure throws humanity into political turmoil. The Soviets invade Afghanistan to exploit the perceived weakness. Veidt narrowly survives an assassination attempt. Rorschach is framed for the murder of a former supervillain named Moloch, captured by police and unmasked as Walter Kovacs.

  Juspeczyk, meanwhile, has been neglected by the emotionally detached Manhattan and is no longer kept on retainer by the government. She moves in with Dreiberg. The two begin a romance, put their costumes on again and break Rorschach out of prison. Manhattan, looking back over his own history, leaves the question of his involvement with humanity in Juspeczyk's hands and teleports her to Mars. During the argument, she learns that Blake, who once attempted to rape her mother, was her biological father. He fathered her in a later, consensual relationship. The discovery reignites Manhattan's interest in humanity.

  On Earth, Dreiberg and Rorschach find evidence that points to Veidt. Rorschach writes his suspicions and the full details of his investigation in his journal and mails it to New Frontiersman, a local right-wing newspaper. The pair then travel to Antarctica to confront Veidt at his private retreat. Veidt explains that he plans to save humanity from nuclear war with a faked alien invasion. It will kill half of New York's population and force the superpowers to unite against a common enemy. He admits that he murdered Blake, who had discovered the plan. He made Manhattan's past associates contract cancer to drive him from Earth, staged the attempt on his own life and framed Rorschach. Veidt adds that the plan is already underway.

  When Manhattan and Juspeczyk return, they find mass destruction in New York. A gigantic squid-like creature, made in Veidt's laboratories, lies dead in the middle of the city. Tachyons from Antarctica limit Manhattan's prescient abilities, so the pair teleport there. Veidt shows them news broadcasts confirming that the new threat has driven the superpowers to cooperate. Almost everyone present agrees that hiding the truth serves world peace. Rorschach refuses to compromise and leaves, determined to expose Veidt. Manhattan confronts him and argues that the truth can now only hurt. Rorschach declares that Manhattan will have to kill him, and Manhattan does. Veidt then asks whether he did the right thing in the end. Manhattan answers cryptically that "nothing ever ends" and leaves Earth. Dreiberg and Juspeczyk go into hiding under new identities.

  Back in New York, the editor of New Frontiersman asks his assistant to find filler in the crank file. That file is a pile of rejected submissions, many of them never reviewed. The series ends with the young man reaching toward the pile, with Rorschach's journal near the top.

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• 4. Faces Behind Masks

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  Alan Moore set out to offer four or five "radically opposing ways" of seeing the world and left readers to decide which one seemed most morally comprehensible. He had no wish to cram "regurgitated morals" down anyone's throat. Of his cast he said, "What we wanted to do was show all of these people, warts and all." He added that even the worst of them had something going for them, and even the best had flaws.

  Rorschach wears a white mask holding a symmetrical ink blot pattern that is always shifting. Moore wanted a quintessential Steve Ditko character, with a funny name, a surname beginning with K and an oddly designed mask. He based Rorschach on Ditko's creation Mr. A, with Ditko's Charlton character The Question as another template. The comics historian Bradford W. Wright described a worldview of black-and-white values that never mix into gray, like the ink blot tests of his namesake. Because Rorschach sees existence as random, Wright wrote, he is free to "scrawl his own design" on a "morally blank world". Moore said he did not foresee Rorschach's death until the fourth issue, when he realized that the refusal to compromise would keep him from surviving.

  Adrian Veidt draws inspiration from Alexander the Great and is believed to be the smartest man on the planet. Moore based Ozymandias on Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, and liked the idea of a character who used "the full 100% of his brain". Richard Reynolds noted that by taking the initiative to help the world, Veidt shows a trait usually given to villains. In a sense, Reynolds argued, he is the villain of the series. Gibbons counted among Veidt's worst sins his habit of looking down on, and scorning, the rest of humanity.

  Daniel Dreiberg's owl-themed gadgets trace back to the Ted Kord version of the Blue Beetle. Just as Kord had a predecessor, Moore added an earlier crime fighter named Hollis Mason, who had used the Nite Owl name before. Gibbons supplied Mason's name and costume design, which he had created when he was twelve years old. Reynolds observed that Nite Owl's methods resemble those of Batman more than those of his Charlton roots. The critic Klock said his civilian form "visually suggests an impotent, middle-aged Clark Kent."

  Edward Blake is murdered shortly before the first chapter begins, so he appears only in flashbacks and through the memories of others. Moore built The Comedian from the Charlton character Peacemaker, with elements of the Marvel spy Nick Fury added. He and Gibbons saw him as "a kind of Gordon Liddy character, only a much bigger, tougher guy". Reynolds called him "ruthless, cynical, and nihilistic, and yet capable of deeper insights than the others into the role of the costumed hero."

  Jon Osterman gained power over matter in 1959, when he was caught in an "Intrinsic Field Subtractor". Doctor Manhattan was based on Charlton's Captain Atom, who in Moore's original proposal lived under the shadow of nuclear threat. Captain Atom was the only hero with real superpowers in Giordano's Action Hero line, just as Manhattan is the only one in Watchmen. Moore found he could do more with a "kind of a quantum super-hero", so he explored nuclear and quantum physics. He reasoned that a being in a quantum universe would not perceive time in a straight line. To avoid an emotionless figure like Spock, he let Manhattan keep "human habits" and then grow away from them. Gibbons reused the blue skin of his earlier creation Rogue Trooper, because it suggested atomic energy while still reading as skin. Moore was unsure whether DC would permit full nudity, and Gibbons chose his full frontal shots with care. He made the anatomy "understated", like a classical sculpture.

  Laurie Juspeczyk is the daughter of Sally Jupiter, the first Silk Spectre, and of The Comedian. Her relationship with her mother is strained. Of Polish heritage, she had been Manhattan's lover for years. She was first meant to be the Charlton heroine Nightshade, but Moore had little interest in that character. When the Charlton plan fell through, he drew more from heroines such as Black Canary and Phantom Lady. A University of Dayton student paper called her impulsive, rarely using logic to think through situations. The same paper noted that she stands by the belief that each human life matters, unlike most other characters in the story.

  Gibbons drew all of these figures with a hard, stiff pen, a choice he made on purpose.

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• 5. Built to Be Reread

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  In a 1986 interview, Moore said he wanted to explore "the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating". He stressed how comics differ from film. The series was designed to be read "four or five times", with some links and allusions becoming clear only on later passes. Gibbons said Watchmen grew "much more about the telling than the tale itself". He called the plot a macguffin of no great consequence and described the book as "a comic about comics". In his view, Moore cared more about the social implications of superheroes, while he took on the technical ones.

  Gibbons wanted each page to be recognizable as part of this series and "not some other comic book". He drew with "a hard, stiff pen that didn't have much modulation in terms of thick and thin". He hoped that would set the book apart from "the usual lush, fluid kind of comic book line". In a 2009 interview, Moore recalled leaning on Gibbons' past as a surveyor, which allowed "incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing". The alternate world let Gibbons add electric cars, slightly different buildings and spark hydrants in place of fire hydrants. Moore said this gave American readers a chance to see their own culture as an outsider would. Gibbons found the freedom welcome, since he did not have to rely mainly on reference books.

  John Higgins used a "moodier" template that favored secondary colors. Moore admitted he had always loved Higgins' coloring but associated him with airbrushing, which Moore disliked. Higgins decided to color Watchmen in European-style flat color. He paid close attention to lighting and subtle shifts. In issue six, he began with "warm and cheerful" colors and made them gradually darker through the issue, to give the story a bleak feeling.

  Instead of panels of varied sizes, the creators divided every page into nine panels. Gibbons favored the grid for its "authority". According to Gibbons, it gave Moore control over the storytelling he had not had before, since the pacing and visual impact were now something he could predict and use for dramatic effect. In 1987, Bhob Stewart of The Comics Journal told Gibbons that the layouts recalled those of EC Comics. Gibbons agreed the echo was deliberate, though his inspiration was Harvey Kurtzman, and he altered it enough to look unique. He also cited Steve Ditko's work on early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, and on Doctor Strange, where even psychedelic scenes kept a fairly straight page layout.

  The cover of each issue serves as the first panel of its story. Each cover is a close-up on a single detail, with no human elements. Gibbons said the cover "is in the real world and looks quite real, but it's starting to turn into a comic book, a portal to another dimension." The creators also experimented with layouts. Issue five, titled "Fearful Symmetry", was drawn so the first page mirrors the last. The pages in between mirror each other inward, and the center-spread is broadly symmetrical.

  Every issue except the twelfth ends with prose pieces written by Moore. They include fictional book chapters, letters, reports and articles by characters from the story. These exist because DC struggled to sell ad space, which left eight or nine spare pages per issue. DC planned house ads and a longer letters column, but Len Wein felt that would be unfair to anyone who wrote in during the last four issues. He used the pages to fill in the backstory. Moore said the book looked nice without a letters page and, being "less like a comic book", it stayed that way.

  One of those backstory pieces, at the end of issue five, covers the history of a fictional pirate comic.

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• 6. Pirates and Synchronicity

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  A young man named Bernie spends much of his time at a New York newsstand, and he is reading Tales of the Black Freighter. Scenes from this fictional comic appear in issues three, five, eight, ten and eleven. Moore and Gibbons reasoned that people who live alongside real superheroes "probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics." Gibbons suggested pirates, and Moore agreed partly because he is "a big Bertolt Brecht fan". The Black Freighter alludes to the song "Seeräuberjenny" ("Pirate Jenny") from Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Moore theorized that superheroes, as objects of fear, loathing and scorn, would quickly fall out of favor. Horror, science fiction and especially piracy would rise instead, with EC riding the crest of the wave. He felt the dark, rich imagery of pirate stories made a perfect counterpoint to the contemporary world of Watchmen.

  The supplemental article on the fictional comic's history credits the real artist Joe Orlando as a major contributor. Moore chose Orlando because, in that world, he imagined DC editor Julius Schwartz might have lured the artist over to draw a pirate comic. Orlando contributed a drawing designed like a page from the fake title.

  The story inside the story is called "Marooned". A young mariner, called the Sea Captain, survives the destruction of his ship and journeys to warn his hometown that The Black Freighter is coming. He sails home on a raft made of his dead shipmates' bodies and slowly descends into insanity. Believing the town already occupied by the pirate crew, he reaches his house and kills everyone he finds there. He then discovers that the person he mistook for a pirate was his wife. Back at the seashore, he realizes the ship has come to claim him rather than the town. He swims out and climbs aboard.

  Richard Reynolds wrote that the mariner is "forced by the urgency of his mission to shed one inhibition after another." Like Adrian Veidt, he hopes to stave off disaster by using the bodies of former comrades. Moore said the tale ends up describing "the story of Adrian Veidt". He added that it can also counterpoint other parts of the story, such as Rorschach's capture and Manhattan's exile on Mars.

  Moore named William S. Burroughs as one of his main influences. He admired Burroughs' use of "repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning" in the comic strip "The Unspeakable Mr. Hart", which ran in the British underground magazine Cyclops. Not every link was planned. Moore remarked that "there's stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read".

  Gibbons created the smiley face badge as part of The Comedian's costume in order to "lighten" the design. He later added a splash of blood to the badge to imply the murder. The creators came to regard it as "a symbol for the whole series", and Gibbons noted its resemblance to the Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight. Moore drew on behaviorist psychological tests, which had presented the face as "a symbol of complete innocence". Thierry Groensteen, in The System of Comics, read the smiley as one form of a circle shape that recurs throughout the story. Some appearances were accidental. Moore pointed out that the little plugs on the spark hydrants show a smiley face when turned upside down. Gibbons found a photograph of the Galle crater on Mars in a book about the planet's craters and boulders. It resembles a happy face, so they worked it into an issue.

  Gibbons also saw an unintended theme in the contrast between the mundane and the romantic. He pointed to two scenes between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, one on his couch and one high in the sky on his airship. Moore said, "We found a lot of these things started to generate themselves as if by magic." His example was the moment they decided to name a lock company the Gordian Knot Lock Company.

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• 7. Power and Praise

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  The title comes from a question posed by the Roman satirist Juvenal: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Roughly, who will watch the watchmen themselves? Moore did not know the phrase's classical origin until Harlan Ellison told him. In 1987, he said it fit because the heroes watch out for everyone else while no one watches them.

  The starting premise was to ask what superheroes would be like "in a credible, real world". As the story grew more complex, Moore said it became about "power and about the idea of the superman manifest within society." In the introduction to the Graphitti hardcover, he wrote that while working on the series he purged his nostalgia for superheroes and found an interest in real human beings. Bradford Wright called Watchmen "Moore's obituary for the concept of heroes in general and superheroes in particular." Wright read the characters as a warning to those who trust in leaders such as "the Reagans, Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world". Moore said in 1986 that the series was "not about anti-Americanism, but anti-Reaganism". Before the premiere, Gibbons stated, "There's no overt political message at all." Moore chose an alternate reality partly because he feared readers would "switch off" if he attacked a leader they admired. He also said he was consciously trying to make people feel uneasy.

  The essayist Iain Thomson, in "Deconstructing the Hero", cited Watchmen as the point where the comic book medium "came of age". He argued that almost all the heroes share a nihilistic outlook and that the story asks whether we would be better off without heroes. Richard Reynolds noted that with no supervillains, the heroes must face "more intangible social and moral concerns". He concluded that the series' ironic self-awareness marks it as "either the last key superhero text, or the first in a new maturity of the genre". Geoff Klock preferred to call Watchmen a "revisionary superhero narrative". Pairing it with Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, he saw the start of the superhero's transition from fantasy to literature.

  Moore voiced dismay that "the gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen" had become a genre. In 2003, he complained that many grim, violent stories used his series to validate themselves. Gibbons answered that readers took away a grim and gritty idea, but he saw the series as "a wonderful celebration of superheroes as much as anything else".

  Before any of that, the creators had to win over their peers. When the first issue arrived at DC, the writer and artist Howard Chaykin told Gibbons that his work on the book was "freaking A". In 1986, Moore said DC had "backed us all the way", even on the most graphic excesses. Time magazine called the series "a superlative feat of imagination". In 1988, Watchmen won a Hugo Award in the Other Forms category. According to Gibbons, Moore placed his award upside down in his garden and used it as a bird table. The series also took the 1988 Locus Award for Best Non-fiction, since that award had no category for illustrated works. Time later placed it on its list of the 100 best novels in English published since 1923. Reviewing it in retrospect, the BBC's Nicholas Barber called it "the moment comic books grew up". Moore rejected that idea. In his view, a few titles had been more adult, but most were unchanged, and comics were simply "meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way".

  The series was a commercial success, and its sales helped DC briefly overtake Marvel in the comic book direct market. For promotion, DC sold ten thousand sets of four badges, including a replica of the blood-stained smiley badge. Mayfair Games released a Watchmen module for its DC Heroes role-playing game before the series ended. It was endorsed by Moore, who gave story assistance, and it covers events of 1966. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were also marketed as "graphic novels", a term that tied such books to novels rather than comics. Bookstores and public libraries began giving them special shelves, and publishers commissioned new series with reprinted collections in mind.

  The 1987 DC trade paperback had reached at least 24 printings by March 2017, and Warner Books issued another that year. In February 1988, a slipcased hardcover from Graphitti Design added 48 pages of bonus material, including the original proposal and concept art. In 2005, DC released Absolute Watchmen under Gibbons' supervision, with restored and recolored art by Higgins. That December, issue #1 returned at its original 1986 price of $1.50 in the Millennium Edition line.

  Not everyone involved shared in the windfall in the way fans might expect: Moore and Gibbons received eight percent of the series' earnings.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  At the 1985 San Diego Comic-Con, Moore described the contract's reversion clause. DC would own the work for as long as it published it, and then rights would revert to him and Gibbons "so we can make all the money from the Slurpee cups". In 1986, he said his understanding was that the characters would be theirs once DC went a year without using them. Both men said DC paid them "a substantial amount of money" to retain the rights. Moore later felt the clauses were meaningless, since DC never intended to let the books go out of print. He left DC in 1989 over the contract language for Watchmen and for V for Vendetta, drawn by David Lloyd. He told The New York Times in 2006, "You have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again."

  In 2000, Moore publicly distanced himself from a planned 15th anniversary hardcover and a line of action figures from DC Direct. He felt DC was treating him unfairly over his America's Best Comics imprint, which had been launched under WildStorm. He said the anniversary marked only when DC "managed to take the Watchmen property" from him and Gibbons. DC Direct then canceled the figures, even though prototypes had been shown at that year's San Diego Comic-Con. In 2010, Moore told Wired that DC had offered him the rights back if he agreed to prequel and sequel projects. His answer was that he no longer wanted Watchmen back, certainly not on those terms.

  Prospects of follow-ups had come up much earlier. In 1985, Moore said that if the series did well, he and Gibbons might create a 12-issue prequel called Minutemen about the 1940s hero group. DC also floated Rorschach's Journal, The Comedian's Vietnam War Diary and a Nite Owl and Rorschach team. Neither creator thought those stories would go anywhere, and Moore was adamant that no other writers should take over. Gibbons liked the Minutemen idea because it would pay homage to the simplicity of Golden Age comics, with a conclusion already known. Two prequel modules for the DC Heroes role-playing game appeared in 1987: Watchmen: Who Watches the Watchmen? and Watchmen: Taking Out the Trash. Moore was credited on Taking Out the Trash with special design and concepts, and he co-wrote an essay with the game author Ray Winninger. It remains the only spin-off with his direct involvement.

  In February 2012, DC announced prequels under the banner Before Watchmen. Writers included J. Michael Straczynski, Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and Len Wein, and artists included Lee Bermejo, J. G. Jones, Adam Hughes, Andy Kubert, Joe Kubert and Amanda Conner. The line grew to nine miniseries. Moore took no part. Gibbons supplied a statement saying the original series was the complete story he and Moore wanted to tell. He added that he understood DC's reasons and wished the new work success.

  The sequel Doomsday Clock grew out of the 2016 one-shot DC Universe: Rebirth Special and the 2017 crossover The Button, both of which featured Doctor Manhattan. Set in November 1992, seven years after the original, it follows Ozymandias as he searches for Manhattan with Reginald Long, the successor to Walter Kovacs as Rorschach. It was revealed on the 14th of May 2017, with a teaser image that put the Superman logo at twelve o'clock on the Watchmen clock. The first of twelve issues appeared on the 22nd of November 2017, and the run lasted until 2019. Writer Geoff Johns saw a dichotomy between Superman, an alien who embodies and cares for humanity, and Manhattan, a human who detached himself from it. More than six months of debate followed over whether to merge the Watchmen universe with the DC Universe through alternate realities. Johns called it his "most personal and most epic, utterly mind-bending project". A standalone sequel, Rorschach by Tom King, was published between October 2020 and September 2021.

  HBO brought on Damon Lindelof to develop a television continuation, which premiered on the 20th of October 2019. Lindelof, a fan of the limited series, made it a "remix", a sequel with a new cast and story rather than a full reboot. Its cast included Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jeremy Irons. It is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2019, which is 34 years after the comic ends, and Gibbons took part. In that world, President Robert Redford has provided reparations to people affected by racial violence. White supremacist groups, following the writings of Rorschach, attack the police who enforce those policies, and laws require officers to wear masks. Doctor Manhattan, Adrian Veidt and Laurie Blake, the former Silk Spectre, are central to the plot.

  Film attempts began in 1986, when producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver acquired the rights for 20th Century Fox. Moore declined to write a screenplay, so Sam Hamm rewrote the complicated ending into a time paradox and an assassination. Fox put the project into turnaround in 1991, and it moved to Warner Bros. with Terry Gilliam attached to direct. Gilliam and Silver could raise only $25 million, a quarter of the necessary budget. Gilliam left because reducing the story to a two-hour film "seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about". He later declined a return, believing a five-hour miniseries would suit it better. In October 2001, Gordon and Lloyd Levin set it up at Universal with David Hayter to write and direct. In July 2004, Paramount announced the film with Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass replaced him before Paramount also placed it in turnaround.

  In October 2005, Warner Bros. approached Zack Snyder, impressed by his work on 300. Screenwriter Alex Tse restored the Cold War setting. Snyder used the comic's panel grid as a storyboard and shot on live-action sets rather than green screens. He extended the fight scenes and made Ozymandias' armor a parody of the rubber muscle suits in the 1997 film Batman & Robin. After the trailer premiered in July 2008, DC president Paul Levitz said the company had to print more than 900,000 copies of the collected edition. Total annual printing was expected to pass one million. Fox sued to block the release, and the studios settled with Warner giving Fox 8.5 percent of the film's worldwide gross. The film opened in March 2009 to mixed reviews and grossed $185 million worldwide.

  Tales of the Black Freighter became a direct-to-video animated feature released on the 24th of March 2009. It was cut from the screenplay because it would have added $20 million to the budget. Gerard Butler, who starred in 300, voiced the Captain, and Jared Harris voiced his dead friend Ridley. Snyder considered including it, but the film already neared three hours. In November 2009, a four-disc Ultimate Cut edited the animated feature back into the main picture. Len Wein wrote a video game prequel, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh. Gibbons advised on the film, but Moore has refused to attach his name to any film adaptation of his work and has said he has no interest in seeing Snyder's version.

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