Comic Cats #12: Watchcat

Who watches the Watchcat? Probably the other cats, at least until they get bored and go take a nap in the sun somewhere. Watchmen, besides being incredibly important to the history of comic books (it's an excellent example of the darker, grittier graphic novels being put out in the 1980s), was the comic that NO ONE thought they could turn into a movie... until they up and turned it into a movie. Part of the problem in translating the work was Alan Moore's innovation and experimentation with form. Watchmen wasn't JUST a comic. It also contained excerpts from novels written by the characters, a comic book within a comic book to show what adventure stories might be like if you lived in a world that already had superheroes, police reports when one of the characters gets in trouble, magazine articles... it was a fully realized world, and Moore included the clippings to prove it. All of these extras wouldn't translate into any other medium, but the movie did an excellent job of capturing the main story and the world it inhabited nonetheless.