Watchmen (2009) (with Drew Morton)

In an alternate 1985, Chris and Alex sit down to watch the recent comic book feature film Watchmen (Zach Snyder, 2009), a neo-noir/superhero blockbuster that adapts the popular DC Comics series for the big screen. They are joined in this Cold War-era tale of Soviet Union-United States relations by Dr Drew Morton, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University, Texarkana, and author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), as well as a number of articles and chapters on motion comics, media convergence and comic book adaptation. Topics up for discussion in Episode 54 include Watchmen’s pivotal place within Hollywood comic book feature films of the 2000s; formal issues in adaptation and the graphic decompression of time and space; digital technology and the spectacle of Baroque aesthetics (including director Zach Snyder’s balletic slow-motion visual style); the film’s depiction of psychologically repressed superheroes and noir-esque vigilantism; and how Watchmen presents a crucial case study for thinking about the movement of media products within a broader transmedia flow.