Re: Get ready for Watchmen 2!
It's funny how rarely you see this argument with other forms of art. No one seemed to scream corruption of the arts when Mona Lisa Smiles, despite how little it was related to the famous painting. I just think there is just so long with the geek culture - I mean, stupid controversies like every continuity debates for the Marvel and DC, Star Wars and Star Trek. Does it really matter if Han shot first? It's such a minor, insignificant, detail, but there is such a rage over it.
It's sickening, really.
Now, there is some comparisons to some other art forms. You could definitely argue EA's Dante's Inferno is a mockery of the original poem, but these examples are so few and far between. Why is it that Geeks always seem to cry "corruption of the arts!" but the admirers of much more legitimate mediums almost never do? I'm just baffled.
These things come up from time to time in literature. Bram Stoker's grand-nephew or some relative in that vein released a sequel to
Dracula that was pretty atrocious. JD Salinger was all up in arms about some dude writing a sequel to
Catcher in the Rye. I think there's a few reasons for this. The first is, comics are a younger and less secure medium. It's a form still gaining artistic legitimacy, at least in the eyes of the public. So when a property like
Watchmen gains a level of credibility with the general public, fans don't want to lose that. There's the sense that either people will read the sequels first and assume the original product is purile if the sequel is a failure or that outsiders will just turn up their noses and say "Look at these silly children making a sequel". I think the integrity of the property is an issue. While the story itself will retain its integrity, trying to franchise it could bloat and distill the general perception. A book like, say,
Dracula has been around long enough and gathered enough prestige that practically anyone who sees a sequel to it will just point and laugh and it won't hurt the credibility of the original. That might not be the case with something like
Watchmen where people will see a slew of books and action figures and movies and just think "Oh. Another silly comic book superhero".
Another issue is that this thing is just less likely to happen in novelist prose, where the characters and story are owned by the writer. By the time the characters enter public domain, the book has either acquired a legacy or been forgotten. I think literary snobs would throw a fit if Dean Koontz tried to write
Lolita 2: The Molestering or Dan Brown took a crack at
The More Satanic Verses.
But when it really comes down to it, I don't think it's an issue of expanded continuity hurting the integrity of the original franchise. It's just a frustration that lies in "Why would they do that? How conceptually bankrupt are these people really?" And that's something that comes up in film and TV all the time. Whether it's Jaws terrorizing Seaworld or Saw 19 or 24 in an eighth season after any suspension of disbelief is gone or more generically just a glut of vampire/western/sci-fi/whatever-the-current-trend-happens-to-be movies. I think, at the heart of it, it's less a worry that the new books will somehow make the original weaker so much as it is a frustration that whatever corporation is feeding us our media is just trying to milk us for dollars instead of creating something genuine and fresh.
