REVIEW: Before Watchmen: Comedian/Rorschach

PLOT: Eisner Award-winning writer Brian Azzarello brings his gritty, nuanced storytelling to these two recognizable characters. In RORSCHACH, Azzarello again teams with superstar artist Lee Bermejo to illustrate how one of most dangerous vigilantes the comic world has ever seen became even darker. COMEDIAN, featuring art by J.G. Jones, plants the famed war hero within the context of American history, as we find out how the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination revolve around him.

REVIEW: So far, the Before Watchmen series has been hit or miss for me. The volume that stuck out the most to me, was the one that was the most poorly reviewed of all four. I liked this volume too however, and I'm not sure how it stacks up against the Ozymandias volume but it's pretty close. The Comedian and Rorschach are probably the two most likable characters from the Watchmen world, but that doesn't make them the most easily likable. The Comedian is pretty much a character you're supposed to hate, and even in this book they do a pretty good job of doing that. They tie him in to a lot of actual American history and while it provides for a somewhat entertaining read, it wasn't really anything I couldn't have figured out for myself about the character. The ongoing problem with these books is that they're telling back stories to characters that didn't really need back stories, but merely just other stories with them in it. It doesn't really give you anything extra that you absolutely needed in the first place, but does just enough to entertain you to keep reading it. Rorschach's half of the volume was a little more entertaining but comes to no clear end and pits him against a strangely faced enemy. I agree with some other readers that Rorschach is guilty of some lines in this volume that just don't fit his character, but other than that his is pretty entertaining. The art in this book is phenomenal, much like the other volumes in the series and that's probably all that really kept these comics going as shortly as they did. They're beautiful to look at, and it's a trade off in terms of the pretty lackluster and unnecessary stories that the art is told with.

WRITING : ( 6 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 10 / 10 )

STORY : ( 4 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 9 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 7 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 7 / 10 )

REVIEW: Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre

PLOT: As the predecessor to the Watchmen, the Minutemen were assembled to fight against a world that have more and more rapidly begun to spin out of control. Can these heroes from completely different backgrounds and with completely different attitudes on crime come together? Or will they fall apart before they begin? SILK SPECTRE takes an introspective look at the WATCHMEN feature player's struggles with her overbearing superhero mother and her scattered path toward taking the mantle of the Silk Spectre.

REVIEW: Before Watchmen has either gotten more dull as I've read through the collected volumes, or I read them in the perfect order of quality that I'm now getting to the crappy volumes. I wasn't so much a fan of this volume that chronicles the story of the Minutemen told mostly through the eyes of Nite Owl. I liked the side plot, that seemed like it should have been the main plot, of Hooded Justice and the missing children but it didn't really progress as quickly and as predominately as it should have. Everyone practically knows the small story of the Minutemen as present in the original Watchmen graphic novel and even the movie. The Silk Spectre half was also decent, but again it was just a lot of background to something that already been explained well enough for me the first go around. I'm finding that a lot of these Before Watchmen arcs center on characters that were already pretty well fleshed out and didn't need much more explaining, as I've gotten to more familiar characters and they've gotten less entertaining. Plus what is with writing so much on each and every page, I find a lot of the thought bubbles and informational boxes are pretty unnecessary and I wish there was a lot less to read because it's all pretty boring. This volume and the last one I read suffer from what I like to call, over-writing, because there's too much written on the page that the reader doesn't need to know at all because most of us reading these, read the original Watchmen graphic novel. I know these comics could have been a lot better if they wouldn't have tried to be so entirely faithful to being exact and precise prequels to Watchmen. Here's hoping that the one I have left will be better than the rest of them, because Comedian and Rorschach were the two best characters and that's the volume I haven't read. Plus if Azzarello is involved, odds are that I'm going to enjoy myself right?

WRITING : ( 6 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 6 / 10 )
STORY : ( 4 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 7 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 3 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 5 / 10 )

REVIEW: Before Watchmen: Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan

PLOT: Discover what happened before WATCHMEN as writer J. Michael Straczynski is joined by Andy Kubert and the legendary Joe Kubert to take flight with the gadget-savvy vigilante known as Nite Owl! And then in BEFORE WATCHMEN: DR. MANHATTAN, JMS teams with fan-favorite artist Adam Hughes on the all-powerful super-man Dr. Manhattan. For Dr. Manhattan, past, present, and future are one and the same. But as he observes the events of his life, do they remain the same? Or are they changed? The very fact of his existence may have altered the nature of what will or will not be...

REVIEW: Now that I've read two volumes of the Before Watchmen series, I've been able to get a pretty good glimpse of what they were trying to do. When I read Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair first, I thought that it seemed kind of fruitless to rehash the beginnings of a character that didn't get too much more depth that he didn't get from the original Watchmen or the movie adaptation. Now I see that they are pretty much taking the time leading up to the events of Watchmen to plot all of our favorite characters, and tying it all together between the volumes. After finishing Before Watchmen: Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan, I'd really like to see a giant Watchmen sized compendium that puts all the volumes together as one big story to read together. I think it would benefit from being in a compilation like that.

Now this volume was a lot better than the first I'd read, mainly because Dr. Manhattan intrigues me a lot and his story crossing into the path of Ozymandias still puzzles me to this day. There's so much that can be discussed with the quantum intelligence of Dr. Manhattan, and it serves to show the complexities of the Watchmen storyline. The Nite Owl part was pretty good too, and as I saw him as one of the more underused characters in the book and movie, he gets fleshed out here to a more recognizable but extremely weak character when it comes to women, and shows where that came from. It really helps to explain him as a character in the events following Before Watchmen. The story of Moloch was also really great and I enjoyed the two issue line in with Ozymandias and it's tie in to the original. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Watchmen and readers of more intricately plotted stories. I can't imagine you'd have to have read Watchmen prior to this to enjoy it, but it probably adds that extra layer of plot that makes it so intriguing to me. Also I have to add that the alternate cover for Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #4 is absolutely amazing and I want a large poster print of it, like right now. Early Christmas present anyone?

WRITING : ( 8 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 7 / 10 )

STORY : ( 7 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 10 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 8 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 8 / 10 )

REVIEW: Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair

PLOT: Discover what happened before WATCHMEN. The team of legendary writer Len Wein and acclaimed artist Jae Lee--in his first DC Comics' work in nearly a decade--delve into the mind of the smartest man in the world: Ozymandias. How does one go from the son of immigrant parents to becoming the world's smartest man? Adrian Veidt begins his journey, both spiritual and physical, that will one day make him one of the most pivotal players in the world-changing events of WATCHMEN.

REVIEW: I for one, was extremely excited for the Before Watchmen comics as Watchmen is one of my favorite books of all-time, and probably the best graphic novel of all-time in my mind. A lot of people complained about these being made however, because why do we need more other than to capitalize on the success of the movie and the resurgence of interest in the original comic. I will admit that without the movie I never would have read the comic, as it is pretty extensive, but it was well worth the amount of time that it took to read. The first volume I got to read was Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair. Obviously we all know Ozymandias as the villain of the Watchmen, despite being what you could consider a good man at heart. The story really goes from birth to the events of Watchmen, and explains how he got to be the way he was. However, there wasn't a ton of new information that you couldn't deduce from the original or that actually wasn't in the original. The art was great, and I have to admit I was still intrigued when reading the book, but it just didn't present anything new. This point leads me to think that the critics may have been right, and now I start to wonder if there really is a purpose other than money to this series.

Ozymandias is the bulk of the book, but then there's the stories of Crimson Corsair and Dollar Bill. The Crimson Corsair were short 2 page issues bundled together into a tale of a man who dies at sea, and journeys through the depths of hellish waters to retreive the three items that will reclaim his soul. It's a beautiful work of art, but again the story wasn't something I found entirely necessary and it doesn't really connect in any way to the original. It was a back up story in the issues of Before Watchmen, and I can certainly understand why because it's exactly that. After that there's a story of about the same thing about a character Dollar Bill. This guy, they tie into the story of Watchmen delicately enough to make it plausible even though I'm pretty positive he wasn't present in the book or movie. I really liked this story because it had an old school look to it and it read like an older comic. On top of that, it had a really good storyline and it was ultimately the ending that packed the punch for it. Other than that, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend reading Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair unless you absolutely have to or you're a die-hard Watchmen fan.

WRITING : ( 7 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 9 / 10 )

STORY : ( 5 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 9 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 6 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 6 / 10 )