As you may have heard, Alan Moore, the writer of the 1986-1987 comic book series Watchmen, is so disenchanted with both Hollywood and DC Comics (the company that published the comic back when Moore was their official house genius) that he wants nothing to do with promoting Zack Snyder's movie version. It turns out that (as Michael Ordoña reports in the San Francisco Chronicle) Dave Gibbons, the other half of the comic's creative team, isn't so bashful. Gibbons says, "people say, 'Did you do any drawings for the Watchmen movie?' And I say, 'Thousands of them ... 20 years ago.' " Snyder has made a lot of noise about this being a faithful adaptation, and since movies and comics are both visual story-telling media, for Snyder that means duplicating the look of what was on the printed page, transferring it to the big screen, and setting it in motion. (That was basically his strategy with his movie version of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 300, too.) Gibbons, who calls the movie "far better than anyone could have reasonably imagined," says that "when you draw a comic book, you kind of have a movie in your head. You try to focus in and isolate one frame of what you're seeing. This is a bit like seeing that movie, but in the real world. You're going, 'That's that picture you drew; that's another picture you drew.' " Looking forward to watching it on DVD, he adds, "you can go back though and pause and look at the background because there's a lot of resonance in there. What Alan says about the graphic novel is, 'Everything in it means something. There's nothing put in there just to put it in.' And that's so with the movie as well. Even down to quite obscure background dressing, it all has some connection."

For his part, Snyder, who seems to have a healthy mutual-admiration thing going in with the cartoonist, says that Gibbons has "been a strong ally in bridging the gap" between the comic and the movie. Having Gibbons on hand as a consultant helped embolden Snyder in those decisions where he felt he had to deviate from the sacred text a bit. Gibbons says that "There's one scene in the film that isn't in the graphic novel that Zack wanted to see how I'd visualize. So I actually drew three new pages, which I got the original colorist, John Higgins, to color, so they looked absolutely authentic." Snyder and his production designer Alex McDowell also wanted to improve on the image of Dr. Manhattan's glass palace on the moon, so, the director says, "We hired this guy, he was like some atomic scientist, to design the original clockwork - it got modified from there, but it had this crazy scientific backing. There's a lot happening in that thing if you actually look at it. It's got this kind of corkscrew down the center - and in the director's cut you see it better, but when Manhattan and Laurie are walking up the stairs, there's no stairs in front of them. They come in under their feet, and as soon as they step off, they fold back into the machine." But for the most part, the chance to see Watchman come to life, looking much as Gibbons drew it, seems to have reduced the director to pure fanboy. One thing the production has given him has been the chance to have Gibbons at his ear, "from a creative standpoint, saying, 'Yeah. That's Watchmen. ' It's been really cool."

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