Alan Moore to DC, Go Fuck Yourselves.

[frigidmagi]

CBR

[quote]Alan Moore, whose tumultuous relationship with DC Comics is legendary, claims the publisher offered this week to return the rights to his most famous creation -- in exchange for a concession.

“They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels,â€

[Mayabird]

How would prequels work, anyway? The backstory is all covered. Anything before that would just be our history. And as for sequels...people stop being scared by the psychic doom squid/threat of Manhattan when nothing else happens, nukes fly, people die, and then we have your standard post apocalyptic story.

[The Minx]

Any sequel or prequel would almost certainly be very bad. They would have to ignore the logical consequences of all that happened in the story to make it work, which would undermine the original no end. I hope that they don't go for it. Some things are just meant not to have sequels or prequels.

The least bad idea would be to flesh out the origin stories more for each of the characters, or possibly do "adventures of Nite Owl 1" or something like that. In other words minor stories in the setting with established characters but without the world shaking implications. It might be doable, but it could very easily suck badly.

[frigidmagi]

How would prequels work, anyway? The backstory is all covered. Anything before that would just be our history. And as for sequels...people stop being scared by the psychic doom squid/threat of Manhattan when nothing else happens, nukes fly, people die, and then we have your standard post apocalyptic story.

Alright, I'll ask. Why? The USA doesn't have blue tinted god to call on anymore and the USSR knows that. On the flip side from what I read the USA still has enough nukes to turn the USSR to ash and chinders and the USSR knows that to.

Way I figure it, nuclear stand off returns until the USSR collapses like in OTL. Or, the friendship/alliance/whatever the fuck, holds the USA supports the USSR long enough for it to reform it's system into something sustainable. In which case the USSR starts looking more like Europe and the US. Or maybe like Japan, a place that is an open democracy but for some reason a single party has been in power for 50 years (it's true, from 1955 to 2009 a single party was in control of Japan, with no evidence of election tampering).

We know it's possible for the US and the USSR to share the planet without mass nuking so why should we assume it's inevitable when we remove Manhattan?

[Mayabird]

Because it's gritty and dark! Everything goes bad when it's gritty and dark!

It's just the way the story was written. Nuclear war was pretty much inevitable, Ozymandias thought he could stop it, but if he did anything he just put it off the inevitable a little bit.

Though if we use the Tales of the Black Freighter as a story parallel to Ozymandias, nothing was actually going to happen and all he did was kill a bunch of people pointlessly and damn his own soul. So I guess it could be a "nothing really happens" scenario, in which case there's no story so a sequel would still suck.