Are you sure? They look so different.

Yeah, this decision seems ripe with desperation. Massive reboot, then followed by this, I'm concerned the suits at the parent company are pushing very hard..

Which begs the question, what's next. Are there any sacred cows left, do they have anything left to exploit on the same level? Will they attempt to use Neil Gaiman's Sandman characters somehow?

There may not be a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, but someone did s sequel to Moby Dick...

Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund,


Exactly, no one here cares if sequels by other authors suck or not, they don't effect the original works...

Dracula: The Un-Dead, is an OFFICIAL sequel by Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt

The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes by Caleb Carr, and The House of Silk and several others by Anthony Horowitz, are all OFFICIAL sequels.

Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver isn't the first OFFICIAL sequel to Ian Fleming's Bond.

There have been way too many official sequels to Dune after Frank Herbert's Death.

Given that WATCHMEN was basically an "Elseworlds" story of the Charlton characters, I still fail to see what the big deal is. Moore simply changed the names of the characters and told his story, telling it quite well with the collaboration of Dave Gibbons. DC told him they would give it to him only if they could no longer make money off it, and since he told the story so well they continue to make money off of it. I think the "Northampton pothead" -- to use someone else's term -- is just jealous because no one is interested in his actual original creations, just his versions of others' characters. And it shouldn't be hard to come up with ideas for decent stories on "Earth-W"; I did as soon as it came out.

We understand that you fail to see it.

Enjoy WATCHMEN 2.

The folks at DC are running through their bucket list.



I actually wonder if they're going to follow this with a bunch of new "creator owned" books or OGNs to deflect the criticism.

When they announced that Neil Gaiman's character Death was going to visit Lex Luthor in an issue of Superman, that seemed desperate. The writer got Gaiman's permission but to me, Sandman characters in Action Comics don't fit very well.

These are my reasons:

1) It's too late. Watchmen 2 in the 90s would have been a good time to put this out. That was the time that the grim n gritty era peaked, and some of the concepts from Watchmen would still seem fresh.

2)It's really just another mega event. 34 issues, weekly is too much.

3)I see it more as an act of desperation by DC, like their rushed DCnU line.

Neil Gaiman doesn't seem to care if his Sandman characters turn up in JLA or ACTION COMICS, so it's not the same to me as WATCHMEN 2. But, like you, I think it's an odd fit. And it sort of smells like desperation.

I'd like to see an informal rule established whereby you could use a Gaiman or Alan Moore character in this week's GREEN LANTERN or whatever -- IF you've created some of your own characters that carry roughly the same respect with fans and you're freely loaning those characters around.

You want to pull the Rorschach action figure out of the toy box and play with him? OK, JMS or Darwyn Cooke, tell us all the famous comics characters you've created and that you're willing to put into the toy box for others to play with.

Grant Morrison, you want to fuck around some more with Jack Kirby's Fourth World? Go ahead, as soon as you create for us a dozen of your own entirely new characters that stand on a level with Darkseid & Co.

Geoff Johns, you want to wallow in the fan-fic nostalgia of 1980s comics by Alan Moore, Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman? You can recycle their tales and characters all you like -- as soon as you give us 20 entirely new characters of your own.

Gaiman has invented stuff. Moore has invented stuff. Kirby invented stuff. What has anyone on the DC masthead invented?