The characters and the mood are excellent: The Comedian, Dr, Manhattan and Rohrschach especially. There is a good comic-book feel, and the use of music manages to capture a lot of essence of the original. The direction--in flashes--is grimly inspired. It fails, however, for three reasons. 1) The ending limps, especially the fight scenes between Ozymandias, Night Owl, and Rorhschach, as well as the overdone moralizing by Night Owl. The last really good moment is when Night Owl and Rohrschach get out of Archie and head for the Antarctic Karnak. 2) It's too long as a movie and too short for an HBO mini-series, which it really should have been. The length made me ... tired. But on the other hand the brevity left out a lot of what made the series so important: in the graphic novel, context was equally important as plot. The minor characters (like the psychiatrist or the pair at the newsstand) are critical to understanding the world of the Watchmen. Here they become almost inside ...

I'm doing this part before Marvel because, quite frankly, if I didn't a lot of people might never take a look at it. Charlton Comics was the poor relation of the Marvel-DC war (sort of the DuMont network of comix). They did a lot of the standard late-1950s stuff like monster stories, watered-down EC-type stories, hot rods, cowboys, and romance, but they also had some really interesting SF and superhero books, as well as some significant talent. Dick Giordano, who later came over to DC and paired with Neal Adams on a lot of classic Batman stories, as well as with Dick Dillin on Justice League, was first at Charlton. Jim Aparo, who took over the pencils on Brave & Bold from Adams, as well as doing Phantom Stranger, got his start at Charlton as well. Giordano edited, Steve Skeates wrote, and Aparo illustrated one of the better back-of-the-book series, Thane of Bagarth, which ran second fiddle to Sam Glanzman's rather crude Hercules. Aparo never got a cover for Thane ...

OK, for at least tonight I've had it with stimulus, pork, partisan politics. So I've been thinking that my formative years as a reader almost exactly overlay the so-called Silver Age of comic books (early 1960s-late 1970s), of which I once had a collection of several thousand (most of which went to pay for my undergraduate degree). And though the Silver Age was essentially defined by Marvel, with the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, X-Men, Hulk, etc. etc., there were some truly outstanding pieces of work published by DC--and even by the third world publishers like Gold Key and Charleton. So here's what I challenged myself to do: select in each category [DC, Marvel, and the pack] the five indispensable comics I'd want if I ever reconstructed even a part of my collection. Five... Even with a couple of runners up to cheat with, that's a tall order. Here's my first nominee --Brave and Bold #79--"Track of the Hook"--Dennis O'Neil script teamed with Neal ...

The remnants of my original 600+ comix collection of Silver-Age Marvels exist safely under glass, framed on the wall of the home office. I picked these to hang on to as representative of the joy of the early 1960s Marvels, when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and Dick Ayers were revolutionizing the comix industry. Lee and Kirby, obviously, are legitimate icons of the whole business. Ditko was something of a cult figure, an acquired taste, and a master of almost baroque mood (I tend to think about him, somehow, in the same category with Gil Kane, except that Kane never quite had Ditko's class). Heck and Ayers were second-stringers--journeymen artists who did most of the heavy lifting on the back-up heroes like Giant Man and Iron Man. (Ayers' true love and place to shine was obviously NIck Fury and the Howlin' Commandoes; Heck did a number of early Avengers--after Kirby left and prior to issue 40--that deserve more attention than they usually get.) Ayers and...

The editors are so scared now. The only thing left to be afraid of are lesbians....

The editors do not approve of any of the above content. But find it like a bad edit of married to the mob. Watching this now could save some [UNNAMED] politician's life.

This will date you: the Marvel No-Prize (and did you advance to the rank of Keeper of the Flame?). I actually got one of the treasured empty envelopes for having a letter published in Fantastic Four #90. If I'd had the foresight to hang onto it, who knows what it would be worth today? OK, for no-prize-at-all-except-bragging-rights, here's a question: What percentage of all the modern humans who have ever lived is believed to be alive today?