BEFORE WATCHMEN: Comments From the Writers (Plus Alan Moore)

ALAN MOORE
"I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago...I don’t want money,” he said. “What I want is for this not to happen. As far as I know, there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to ‘Moby-Dick.’"

BRIAN AZZARELLO ON RORSCHACH
"He's the face. The guy who covers his face is the face of the franchise. You're going to get the Rorschach that you know and want. It's a very visceral story we're going to be telling."

DARWYN COOKE (MINUTEMEN WRITER) ON BEFORE WATCHMEN & SILK SPECTRE
“The nature of the undertaking is going to polarize a lot of the readership. I think a lot of people will be excited about this and there are a lot of people that will be dead against it."

“One of the first things I did was go back through the original book and look at all the female characters and their position in the story and the arcs they had. What I realized is that as much as I really like Laurie, she’s really only just Dr. Manhattan’s girlfriend and then Nite Owl‘s girlfriend. We never get to see her being self-sufficient and dealing with herself and dealing with her own problems. She’s there for a man. I came up with the idea of looking at the brief period of time when she becomes an adult.”

LEN WEIN (OZYMANDIAS)ON BEFORE WATCHMEN
"To me, a reboot is what DC is essentially doing with the New 52, which is changing costumes, origins, relationships, essentially looking at old characters through new eyes. What we’re doing is filling in a lot of the blank spaces in a story that has already, to some degree, been told. There were still a lot of gaps in the histories of Watchmen‘s characters, and events only mentioned in passing or touched on briefly in the original story. We’re filling in those gaps in the most creative and inventive ways we can.”

JMS ON DR. MANHATTAN
"I was very careful to stay within the parameters of what Alan created for Dr. Manhattan. But at the same time, you need the elbow room to create a story worth telling, which means something new has to be created. In this case, it came through looking at what Alan had done and asking the next logical question within that framework. As one example: it's always bothered me that someone as brilliant and precise about time as Jon could just blithely walk into the intrinsic field test chamber as the time-lock closed. He'd know better than that. But since it did happen, you now have to say, "Okay, that being the case, how did it happen? Is there something we don't know? Or more to the point, was there something he didn't know?" Asking that question, and a number of others, began to have a profound effect on both the story and Dr. Manhattan himself. The result, for lack of a less dopey term, is a reexamination of the facts in the case on a quantum level that will branch out to have very large consequences."