In the early ’80s Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons decided to try something bold and different with comic book characters: they decided to treat them as literature. Based (very) loosely on the Charlton Comics characters Captain Atom, The Question and Blue Beetle, the “heroes” of Watchmen are a complex, broken and disturbed lot. The original 12 issue run was a Hugo Award winning, high-water mark for the comics industry and has been seen by many (until recently) as untouchable… and after the 2009 Zack Snyder movie, potentially un-filmable and un-watchable too.
HBO have wisely chosen not to simply re-hash the original story in this series, but to move the time-line onwards and to see what the world looks like 30+ years later.
Dion and Quinny can now state categorically that they are the people who watch the Watchmen.