And actually, I think I do have just about everything Morrison’s written– for American publishers, anyway. He’s the only comic book writer I really follow these days (in fact, at his best, I think he’s better than Alan Moore– an opinion that strikes most of my comic-reading friends as blasphemy).

But yes, you’re right, Cap/Wolf was way better than Watchmen. I frankly feel embarrassed to have omitted it. Still, the far superior tale has to be X-Force. Because mutants+big guns+Rob Liefeld=AWESOME

I haven’t seen the movie yet– less than two hours to go, though!– so I can’t comment on the film itself, but I thought A.O. Scott wildly missed the mark in his appraisal of the original book in his discussion of the film. His conclusion that the book’s “shallow nihilism… [and ] intellectual pretensions” argue that “the only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing” is actually the exact opposite of the book’s ethos. You have to ignore huge parts of the story to walk away with that– it’s like concluding that the point of Oedipus Rex is “if you wanna bang your mom, make sure you kill the blind seer when you kill your dad.”

The point of Watchmen (the book), I think, is that even well-intentioned violence (like the type celebrated in superhero comics since 1938) is ultimately destructive of both the culture and the individual. Once you start using force to solve problems, you become that guy on his raft made of dead people, eating raw seagulls, blind to your own barbarism.

And Anthony Lane, I’ve concluded, simply hates movies. I like the other New Yorker reviewer quite a bit, but Lane always seems too impressed with his own “cleverness” as he make snide and, frankly, stupid insults at the movie’s expense. I still remember his review of Superman Returns– a movie that had plenty of legitimate flaws to point out– which was pretty limited to “Oh, I’m so sure. This is so stupid. Like people can really fly.” You kinda wanna grab the guy by the shoulders and tell him, “They’re not claiming it’s a documentary, you halfwit!”

And Jono: Batman is about a guy in a cape. And, much as I love Watchmen (the book), calling it “the best work of fiction in the English language” might be just a bit of a stretch. I mean, what about that Captain America storyline from the 90s where Cap was turned into a werewolf…?