Article:
Why DC should leave Watchmen alone

Rich Johnston reported a rumor a couple weeks back that DC wants to do a Watchmen sequel. Not exactly shocking if you’re a casual observer. It almost seems like a question of “why didn’t they do it sooner?” Watchmen accounts for most of DC’s GN sales in the book market (if you believe bookscan) even with the disappointing profiting from the movie, it still makes a giant profit. On a 20 year old story. It seems only natural DC should be exploiting the property more.

Except it’s an absolutely stupid idea.

Let’s go back for a bit and understand how Watchmen was created. DC had purchased the character library of the defunct Charlton Comics (DC has had that penchant like WWE to own as much intellectual property of defunct companies as possible. At least in the department of defunct super heroes). DC was obviously eager to make some money off of that and begin to exploit the property they bought, they needed though to re-introduce the characters to an audience that probably would be unfamiliar to them, so they turned to Alan Moore. Moore at that point (and really still today) was the absolute hottest thing in comics and was someone drawing critical attention and great sales to DC, he had revitalized Swamp Thing and done quite a few odds and ends DC stories (His “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?” among the most notable) so it seemed a lock he could do this job.

Well he certainly gave them a story…but problem was DC couldn’t use it.

What he gave them was basically what would become Watchmen and DC totally rejected it feeling it was too “terminal” and would leave them unable to exploit the Charlton characters after the fact, so rather then leave the story in a drawer they just had him change some names and things around and they published it as Watchmen. Stop and think about that for a second: Watchmen was a story that DC was willing to publish, in an altered form from original intent because DC originally wanted a franchise launcher and they viewed Watchmen as a non-starter for franchising.

Absolutely correct, how astute of DC.  But that was under different management. While it’s true Moore contemplated a prequel (Minutemen) it never happened due to issues with DC, and Paul Levitz, who was an executive at the time and would ultimately rise to the Publisher’s chair, maintained for years the story was the story and that’s that. Seems Levitz understood there was nothing left to do there. It would be like continuing Gaiman’s Sandman (which DC has of course flirted with doing through a number of spin-off projects that drew increasingly diminishing returns until we are where we are now where there is nothing new coming out of that corner of the publishers catalogue), what’s the point? The story was told. But the problem is that a company like DC, especially under it’s current reorganized structure is not being viewed as a publisher it seems, it’s being viewed as an IP mill. The purpose of DC is not to tell satisfying stories and sell good comics, it’s there to create properties that can then be exploited by the parent company (and themselves of course) across other media to rake in the real money. It’s always been a fact of comics publishing going back to the start of the super hero so it’s not terribly surprising the current bosses want to do it now.