History Comes In All Shapes And Sizes

Just moments ago, I finished poring over Watching the Watchmen, the oversized hardcover produced by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, in which he recounts all kinds of trivia and other points of interest from the production of that greatest of all comic book achievements. It's the sort of book that any die-hard fan of the work will just have to own, and I was certainly no exception. I don't think there will ever be any single definitive tome that will be able to sum up everything that went into Watchmen - it's much too multi-layered for that - but Watching the Watchmen provides another key component to one's understanding of that uber-picture.

What really caught my eye toward the end of the book, though, was a page upon which Gibbons reminisced about the original artwork for the comic series. While he laboured on the book in 1985 through 1987, it's unlikely that he truly appreciated the historic nature of what he was doing, and he as much as admits that here. It sounds like he and writer Alan Moore fully understood that they were breaking ground and taking the art form to a new level, but perhaps underestimated how it would be received, both in the immediate and long terms. Because of this, Dave parted with the original art pages for what he now describes as being about 1% of their current market price. (Doing the math: a page nowadays usually fetches somewhere around $10,000, meaning that he was selling them for perhaps as little as $100 apiece!) It seems almost criminal now, but at least the constant and considerable royalties from the book's impressive sales over the past 20+ years have presumably kept him (and Moore, and colourist John Higgins) from the life of the destitute. But still.. $100 per page means that he recouped about $30,000 - $40,000 for the entire set of pages for the 12-issue series, whereas today you could get that same figure from parting with just a small handful of them!

Still on the topic of original artwork, and of particular interest to me, was one section where Gibbons describes the three art corrections that he made for the relatively recent Absolute Watchmen edition (and which are now corrected in all subsequent printings, he notes). As I read over his descriptions, I was stunned to discover that one of the three pages that he mentions is the piece that I own! I'd long puzzled over one piece of dialogue on that page, as it was clearly missing a word in order to make sense (and had done so each time it had been published, as well). When I'd bought the Absolute edition, however, I hadn't noticed that that oversight had - finally! - been addressed, and yet here he points out that it had. Of course I immediately retrieved my original copy of that issue, as well as the Absolute collection (which I also own a copy of), and compared them to the page of original artwork in my possession. Sure enough: the missing word had been added, digitally, and now the dialogue gloriously made sense! Meaning, of course, that I own one of the three pages that Gibbons specifically references! And that's a pretty cool feeling, I must say.

With the Zack Snyder-directed Watchmen movie now just 33 days away, and Watching the Watchmen still fresh in my mind, it seems like the time may be ripe for yet another reading of the book that found a spot on Time Magazine's Top 100 novels of the past 85 years.