BOBC |
Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Murphy2017 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Watchmen", Adaptation, Gibbons. Dave, Moore. Alan, United Kingdom, USA, Utopia Creators: Murphy Collection: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts |
Views: 1/714
|
Attachments | URLs https://www.jstor.org/stable/26390194 |
Abstract |
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen helped define a watershed period for the American comic book industry; however, although pre-production on various Watchmen film scripts began shortly after Watchmen’s success, a full-fledged adaptation didn’t hit theatres until Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was released in 2009. This paper addresses the very different handling of utopianism in both versions of Watchmen, arguing that exploring utopianism in Moore’s Watchmen provides much more to say about the traction of utopian social dreaming in our contemporary age than the deconstructionism that defines Snyder’s film. In the end, while Snyder’s Watchmen is visually arresting and effectively translates some of Moore’s content into a cinematic medium, Moore’s Watchmen uses the self-reflexivity of its superheroes to engage in a larger project on utopian inquiry and theorization in the realm of popular culture, an inquiry that remains important in today’s broader cultural and socio-economic climates.
|