Watchmen Co-Creator Says HBO Pilot Is True to Comic Yet 'Fresh'

CBR

By Sam Stone

Published Sep 8, 2018

Dave Gibbons provides some insight on HBO's upcoming Watchmen series and how it's not a complete retread of the comic book.

Watchmen co-creator and artist Dave Gibbons has read showrunner Damon Lindelof's script for the pilot of HBO's upcoming adaptation and is excited about the unexpected direction the television series is taking.

Gibbons, who co-created the groundbreaking comic series in 1986 with writer Alan Moore, has met with Lindelof to discuss the latter's plans for the series which officially received a series order from HBO last month. While the artist did not divulge any details, he praised the series' reverence to the source material while taking a fresh direction from the story.

"It's extremely fresh. I'm really looking forward to seeing it on the screen. I've been resistant to the comic book prequels and sequels, but what Damon's doing is not that at all, it's very far away from that," explained Gibbons in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "While it’s very reverential and true to the source material (by which I mean the Watchmen graphic novel that Alan and I did), it’s not retreading the same ground, it’s not a reinterpretation of it."

This confirms earlier statements from Lindelof who claimed in May that the series would not be an adaptation but rather a remix of the source material while respecting the canon of the original series.

"Grant Morrison did a thing with Multiversity, where he came up with some very fresh approaches to comic stories, and in one of them (Pax Americana, with Frank Quitely) they did something similar to Watchmen, but in a new way," cited Gibbons as a creative comparison to the HBO series. "I heartily applauded that. My feeling is that what Damon’s doing is like that, it’s not a retreading of something we already know, but it’s a fresh and unusual approach."

Based on the seminal comic book series of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen is developed for television by Damon Lindelof. It stars Jeremy Irons, Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Mison, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith, and Adelynn Spoon. The series is expected to premiere on HBO sometime in 2019.