Charles Apple

All the comic book and sci-fi geeks out there — Credit yours truly with a double word score on that one — are eagerly awaiting the opening of The Watchmen on Friday.

For the uninitiated, The Watchmen is based on a 12-part comic book mini-series published in the late 1980s that was intended to show the dark underside of the concept of sneaking out at night, dressing up and beating the snot out of bad guys. Unlike those squeaky-clean “normal” guys like Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne, anyone who’d actually do stuff like that would probably be off their rocker, y’know?

Bob Voros appears to have beaten everyone to the punch with this nifty page in today’s Virginian-Pilot (click for a larger view):

The upper part of the page consists of a who’s who of primary characters. The middle section takes a look at the creators of the original comics as well as three other movies made from comics written by Alan Moore. The bottom section shows the covers to the 12 issues and explains the symbolism behind each chapter title.

Bob writes:

Brandon Stuck really helped out with the design. What I had originally was an attempt to look like a cover of one of the Watchmen books, then I tried a 9-panel grid layout like Dave Gibbons used for the interior artwork. Both looked like crap. Brandon had some time Saturday to take the Illustrator file and reworked it to basically what you see now.

And, of course, Bob writes and researches stuff like this himself.

Our only quibble: We wish Bob had used this illustration of the characters instead:

That is by cartoonist Evan Shaner. We found it via the L.A. Times‘ excellent Hero Complex blog by Geoff Boucher.

Watchmen — and, of course, the Star Trek flick that opens in May — are the two movies we’re looking forward to the most this season.

Is your paper doing something special for the Watchmen movie? Without NewsPageDesigner, it’s a lot harder to keep an eye out for stuff like this. Send us a PDF or a high-resolution JPG and tell us who did the heavy lifting. We’d love to see ‘em.

In the meantime, you’ll find Bob and me at Military Circle theaters at the Friday afternoon matineé. Last one there buys the popcorn.

Perhaps I’ll cheat and drive over there on Thursday night…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Comic books, News design, Virginian-Pilot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.