‘Watchmen’ co-creator Dave Gibbons is all for HBO’s adaptation: “It absolutely blew me away”

Dave Gibbons is the artist behind Watchmen, one of the most influential comic books in history. At the moment, Lost creator Damon Lindelof is readying a TV adaptation — of sorts — for HBO, although details have been fuzzy.

Speaking to SyFyWire at this year’s New York Comic Con, Gibbons cleared some things up, saying that the new show is set some 30 years after the events of the original comic, when the superhero/villain Ozymandias forced a peace between warring nations by tricking the world into thinking it had been attacked by space aliens, like you do. “It absolutely blew me away,” Gibbons said of the pilot script. “It came in at a very unexpected angle, felt very fresh, felt Watchmen, but [that it had] moved on. I’m really, really thrilled about it.”

Speaking to Deadline, Gibbons firmed things up further. “It does pursue the idea of an alternative reality,” he said. “And that’s essentially what Watchmen was [in its original comics form], an alternate-reality story.”

"I think what’s happening with the TV version is it presents yet another variation. And while I’ve only read the screenplay — and I can’t speak to the tone or the way the things been shot — I’d say the reality it inhabits is one that feels quite authentic. It’s not here, it’s not now, it’s something slightly sideways."

The original version of Watchmen presented us with a version of the 1980s where superheroes were real and Richard Nixon was in his fourth term as president, but people were still dealing with things they dealt with in our actual history, like anxiety over the Cold War. Will Lindelof’s show give us a sideways take on our time?

Whatever HBO’s Watchmen ends up being, Gibbons feels this is a perfect time to revisit the story. “Rather than [superheroes] being sort of a weird, geeky outlier, it is the epicenter of popular culture,” he said. “Given the kind of subject matter which appears on streaming TV series, they’ve been softened up for all sorts of weirdness. I think this is a really great time to be coming out with it.”

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Since its initial publication, DC has made several spinoffs and prequels to Watchmen. Gibbons reiterated that Lindelof is doing something a little different, with an all-new story and all-new characters. “I think with the graphic novel, [Watchmen writer] Alan [Moore] and I had said everything we had to say about those characters at that particular time,” he said.  “I’ve never been a supporter of prequels [or] sequels, even though there have been some really wonderful creators working on them. I’d rather see fresh approaches. Things that re-tread that ground tend to dilute it, rather than expand it. The HBO series doesn’t attempt to do any of these things. It felt new to me, it felt exciting. It felt today.”

One thing we know for sure about the series is its cast. Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons is front and center, but other cast members include Regina King (The Leftovers), Don Johnson (Miami Vice, Eastbound and Down), Tim Blake Nelson (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Louis Gossett Jr. (An Officer and a Gentleman), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (The Greatest Showman), Andrew Howard (The Outpost) Frances Fisher (Titanic) and Tom Mison (Sleepy Hollow).

Watchmen will debut on HBO at some point in 2019.

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