Short Box: Watchmen

Watchmen TP / HC

Release: Jun 04, 2024

Cover: May 07, 2014

Creators

Writer	Alan Moore
Cover Artist	Dave Gibbons
Penciller	Dave Gibbons
Inker	Dave Gibbons
Colorist	John Higgins
Letterer	Dave Gibbons
Editor	Barbara Kesel, Barry Marx, Len Wein

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I should mention up front that this isn’t really about Watchmen.

Alan Moore once said that if Watchmen is about anything it’s not about the plot or the actual narrative, it’s about its own structure, which makes this post kind of fitting in that it’s not about the story contained in the book but about the book itself.

DC recently launched a series of “Compact Comics,” books whose dimensions are a bit larger than a mass market paperback but a bit smaller than a standard comic or trade paperback.

The Compact Comics reprint classic DC stories and are designed to be affordable – they cost about twice as much as a standard floppy comic but contain many comics’ worth of content – portable, and accessible, being sold wherever books are sold.

I’ve been meaning to check one out just so I could write about it here, but the problem is that either I already have – in a different format – or don’t particularly want what’s been released so far.

Ultimately, my curiosity got the better of me, and I opted for Watchmen for multiple reasons, not the least of which was that I found it on sale for $2 off, and I’ve already owned it in multiple formats at different points in my life, so what’s one more?

I was also interested in seeing how well something as dense as Watchmen in particular could be compressed down to this smaller format.

I have to say that even with my aging eyes the reduced size of the lettering is still perfectly readable overall, though I would note that there isn’t enough of an interior gutter to prevent the pages from disappearing into the fold, so reading/viewing anything towards the center is going to require really pulling the pages open.

I suspect most copies are going to end up having broken spines, which, for the sense of irony, makes me hope that Knightfall gets the Compact Comics treatment at some point…

As for the actual story contained within…it’s Watchmen. There really isn’t much that I can say or that needs to be said about it. It’s groundbreaking, revolutionary, “the Citizen Kane of comics,” beloved, misunderstood, or, depending on your perspective, a tired old overrated relic that ruined comics.

(And it’s also a perennial cash cow for DC and this is yet another way for them to keep it in print and ensure that the rights never revert back to Moore.)

In some ways the Compact Comics remind me of the much smaller digests of my youth which served a similar function and were the primary way I became familiar with older classic stories, and had similar – for the time – pricing, but they are of a much higher quality product than any digest I ever owned.

My understanding is that they’re selling pretty well, and they’re full of marketing for other non-compact comics from DC, so here’s hoping that with their positioning outside of specialty shops they can be a bit of a boon to the industry.

And ideally, anyone who gets hooked by these will move on to buying comics in a format that provides a bigger showcase for the creators’ work.

If you want to learn more about Compact Comics than my quick thoughts on them, including the full line up of available titles, check out DC’s announcement from last year.

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