Of Wikis and Watchmen

I haven't finished Watchmen yet, but I'm getting there. The story is definitely starting to pick up and get interesting, so I'm looking forward to the ending. I hadn't read any of Alan Moore's work before, but after taking this class, I can see why he's considered so influential. I've seen the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta movies, and my roommate tells me that there's one coming out for Watchmen. The LXG movie was pretty bad, but V for Vendetta was pretty well received because it was directed by the Wachowski brothers. My roommate seems to think that they picked a bad director to handle the Watchmen movie. Oh well. I guess not every superhero movie can be Batman Begins.

Speaking of Batman, I think my group's Wiki on the Batman comic series is done. Wow, what a clever segue, huh? Anyway, doing this project taught me a few things about making a Wiki. First, the best source of information...is usually Wikipedia, ironically. It's kind of hard to go out looking for other credible sources on the internet when everything is already neatly collected in one place for you. Luckily, my roommate has several Batman comics that he let me borrow, so I had an ace up my sleeve. Nothing like primary sources, after all. It was kind of nice that everything for the project is done online, though. We still met as a group to set things up and plan what we wanted to do, but other than that we were basically able to work on our respective sections separately.

My section was the characters page. I guess you could say I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Most of the information wasn't too hard to fill out since I'm pretty familiar with the Batman universe. Or so I thought. Most of my knowledge comes from the movies and animated series. Turns out the comics are much different. And much weirder. They've got alternate universes, multiple origin stories for the same character, and all kinds of other crap. I basically did the best I could to focus on the canonically significant stuff. Even then, Batman has been around in comics from the '30s. The comics have racked up quite a cast of heroes and villains by now. There have also been many different writers and artists that have worked on Batman comics. It's interesting to see different creative minds re-imagine the Dark Knight. I think Batman also enjoys a better relationship between different mediums than do most comics. The Batman movies and T.V. shows have generally been pretty good, with the 1989 Tim Burton film and the recent Batman Begins helping to reignite public interest in the caped crusader.

I'll probably talk about the end of Watchmen in my next post, assuming it's not spoiled for me in class. Now that I've gotten my feet wet with Watchmen, I'm looking forward to V for Vendetta, especially since I've seen the movie. I'm anxious to see how the story and presentation differ between the comic and the film. Also, humor.

I'm going to start running out of worksafe stuff that is still funny to people who don't play way too many video games or read too many message boards, but I'll see what I can do.