I hope so, because that’s what I’m doing at the moment. Just the rumor of the possibility of more Watchmen comics of any kind that David just mentioned below has got plenty of comics folks talking—I’m still sifting through my Google News hits of responses—and, of course, tweeting.

Writer Mark Waid was among those doing the latter:

—Wow, this seems like a bad day to announce that I’ve been tapped by DC to write DK3.

—Big news day for me and I’ve been cleared to announce it! Next summer, Paul Azaceta and I will be doing NEW FRONTIER 2: NEWER FRONTIER!

—I’m sorry. My bad. I meant to say NEW FRONTIER 2: FRONTIER HARDER.

Oh, that Mark Waid is a delight, and that’s before he even brings up Maus 2.

In all seriousness, if someone at DC is seriously considering moving forward with Watchmen projects, they sure picked a weird time to do so (Wouldn’t maybe sometime around the movie have been better? That whole “striking while the iron is hot” idea? Or maybe on an anniversary of the book’s publication?).

Remember, it’s still just rumors and chatter at this point, although a quote from Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes regarding “plans to mine more aggressively the deep catalogue of DC Comics characters” a quarterly earnings report sounds like possible support.

Personally, I sort of hope cool heads at DC and Warner listen to all the hand-wringing and joke-cracking like Waid’s and think better of Watchmen prequels, sequels, crossovers or stories from the squid’s point of view (Are there honestly any stories about those Charlton analogues that can’t be told using the actual Charlton characters DC also owns?). But, in all honesty, I am almost positive more Watchmen would make financial sense, and the publishing business is a business.

Even if they found creators who would take such a daunting challenge/rather tasteless assignment, even if it turned out terrible and every single person who read it hated it and/or only bought it to make fun of it on the Internet (like, say Ultimates 3 or Ultimatum, both of which sold gangbusters), it would certainly make a decent profit.

It shouldn’t be hard to crunch the numbers on Dark Knight Strikes Again, which most readers seemed to hate (I loved it, by the way) and see how much money that made, or to look at Blackest Night and see how much money the publisher can make by taking some old Alan Moore ideas and letting the right creator run wild with ‘em.

It might be better to wait until Alan Moore passes away to start aggressively exploiting his take on some DC-owned characters, but maybe the decision makers will feel better doing so while Moore’s still alive. After all, now all he’ll be able to do is make fun of them; once he’s dead, maybe he’ll be able to haunt them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 11:27 am and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.