1: Something might happen!! Say, “hypothetically” the Giants bus gets a flat tire (or six) and the Niners are all still in Hawaii in some drunken post-ProBowl stupor, they might suit up some Saints!
2: Eli isn’t Peyton. Yeah, I know, same point, but the schadenfreude in me loves this! Maybe now Peyton will cut Cooper some slack about on-field injuries… (And hey, there’s always the Oreo Double-Stuff Racing League!)
3: Nothing gets you out of any other obligation better than the Superbowl. (I know I agreed to move to North Dakota, honey, but it’s THE SUPERBOWL! You take the kids now, I’ll be there in a day or two with the flat-screen…)
4: Injuries! Madonna’s bone density might not be up to a full twenty minutes on stage! (And really, isn’t that why we watch sports?)
5: It’s the last NFL game for the next seven months. Insert frowny face here.

-M

Despite the talent on the books, I don’t see them offering anything relevant to the canon. The motivations, backstories, prejudices and shocking surprises are all contained within the original series, intricately laid out and neatly tied up despite the stock Sci-Fi ending. As I’ve stated elsewhere, this means we’ll end up with one of two things: an expanded rehash of what we already know, (full issue of Sally Jupiter’s rape… no thanks,), or irrelevant and incongruent things that fail to dovetail with the “truth” of the original, (Oh, I get it! Rorshach was a numbers whiz and won a math camp trophy and neighborhood kids beat him up for being a braniac! THAT’S why he wears a mask and fights crime! It all makes sense now! Smart kids were always getting the tar kicked out of them in 1941!). Of course, there is that whole Silhouette/lesbianism-in-the-1940′s element I might be interested in, but I… come close to ripping off Peter David…

While the original series was anything but “original”, it was a masterwork of story telling, fitting so much detail into those 12 little issues and weaving everything together so well that you almost didn’t mind the borrowed plots and “mile away” reveals. It was a taut little mixture of the vaguely familiar and the mysterious unknown and it worked like a charm. And that’s kind of the point of good writing anyway.

Had DC let Moore use the original Charlton Chumps, this wouldn’t be an issue. Just another in a long line of retellings and reboots. Similar effect had they done this twenty years ago. However, by sitting on Watchmen for a quarter century, DC has allowed it to move beyond the realm of product and into that of sacrosanct divinity, at least for those of us who were there in the beginning.

We had the fortune/misfortune of growing up in the years when the immutable laws of comic books were suddenly subject to change at a moments notice. It made some characters immediately relevant, others simply readable, and sometimes it just messed up our heads for no damn good reason at all (Crisis, anyone?). End result: hundreds of people stopped buying titles that had changed too much. Of course, that small ripple was somehow buried by the piles of dough rolling in from thousands of new readers… go figure.

The new mutants don’t care. They want more Watchmen stories, (though I have yet to meet anyone who’s voiced this particular opinion,) and DC is willing to provide them. I don’t want to sound snobbish, but they don’t get it. They will probably never understand what Watchmen meant to those of us who spent years reading the goofy shit Julie Schwartz churned out or the endless soap operas Stan Lee offered every month. Go nuts, kids… I won’t be there.

I, for one, blame the new logo. They have to pay for that million-dollar “design” somehow and nothing else they have seems to be leaping off the shelves like it once did. (By-the-by, am I the only one who thinks the new DC logo looks like a lid closing on a public toilet?) I just hope they “Image” the hell out of them with a veritable rainbow of variant covers, tipped in trading cards, pog offers and alternate endings. Hell, print some in Esperanto while you’re at it! At least they’re not messing with Camelot 3000!

Yet…

-M