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“Heroes” vs. “Watchmen”
I was wondering if anyone else noticed the plot of Monday night’s “Heroes” had a rather startling resemblance to the closing issues of the classic super-hero deconstruction “Watchmen” (DC Comics, 1987) by Alan Moore and David Gibbons.
Well, someone did.
I wonder if the Post will write the same story next week, seeing as how the preview for next week’s “Heroes” episode looked an awful lot like “Days of Future Past.”
Yanking tropes from comics for TV and movies is a rather fashionable thing at the moment and I wrote about this trend from the Statesman back in 2001, when “From Hell” was turned into a (rather problematic) movie. (We’ll repost the article if when we can track it down.)
Nobody has done it better than “Buffy,” which captured comic-book melodrama better than anything else on TV or film, “Spider-Man 3” or no “Spider-Man 3.” Hit shows such as “Alias” and “Lost” (and bombs such as “Firefly”) are impossible to imagine without comic-book roots, let alone obvious franchises such as “Smallville.”
But “Heroes” has really upped the ante, pulling everything from comic books, from good-looking young adults with strange powers to vast conspiracies to which all the players are connected to the weird third-person narration to the hand-lettered look of the title cards.
Like too many of today’s mainstream comic books, where what once could have been covered in two issues is stretched to four or five and everyone sits around and talks instead of punching stuff “Heroes” took its sweet time getting us to a climax, which is where the show is now.
All of the various plot threads are starting to pay off, and the last few episodes have featured the breakneck pacing and wide-screen feel of old-school comic book adventures. And as my colleague Omar pointed out, “Heroes” is very good at ending each episode on a solid cliffhanger, something “Lost” seems to have abandoned.
“Heroes” is one of the season’s few brand-new hits. It will be fascinating to see if the viewing public will stay along for the new, more comic-booky ride or if their suspension of disbelief regarding super-powers works better on the printed page.
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