I have a question for fans of the Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the movie)...

I have been hearing about The Watchmen movie for over a year now, and what I’ve seen and read of it makes me very much want to see it. But in almost every single story/review/anecdote I read about it, they always have to point out that this movie took forever to get made, no one was willing to tackle it, because…and here’s the part I’m curious about…“there are things the graphic novel did that just can’t be done on the big screen.” Seems there is this presumption that there are “things” that could NEVER translate from the written/drawn page to the big screen. But what I haven’t seen so far (and this isn’t the first graphic novel about which this has been said by the way), are any specifics…zero, nada, zip.

I guess my question is, can someone be more specific. It just seems to someone who just plain isn’t “into” graphic novels (though I tend to love the movies based on them), I’ve sometimes read the source material and if anything it just seems like an outline to me…usually if anything the movies seem to enhance and/or embellish on the story. I look at the graphic novels and they have very few words and much of the story is told through visuals, but that’s EXACTLY what movies do. I can understand purism where you have respect and reverence for the original, as it is the artist’s intent and so on. But to say that film has limitations that paper and ink don’t seems so…counter-intuitive to me at least as it relates to graphic novels.

What I mean is, yes, a regular novel, if you were to try to film every detail you can squeeze into say a 400 page novel, you’d need to make a 13 hour movie to do it justice. But graphic novels as I understand them (and maybe it’s the fact that I don’t wholly understand them which is the problem) really can tell a robust story which is far more rich than just the few words in it (if you just looked at the number of words in a graphic novel, it would be SIGNIFICANTLY fewer than a screenplay, whereas there are probably 5 to 6 times as many words in a regular novel than in a screenplay). The graphic novel substitutes pictures for words, so it seems to me that in most cases you really can fit the entire content of a graphic novel into a film, because you combine the words with pictures (moving instead of still), and if anything what you do (if you do it right) is to bring the pictures to life.

So, what is it about the qualitative aspects of the graphic novel, the structure of the storytelling or whatever that really can’t be duplicated (and indeed in most cases improved upon) by translating it to the big screen? I can see how one could have a preference for the printed work, I can see the appeal of one form of storytelling over another, but to say that there are things you CAN do with drawings and words that you CAN’T do on film? It sound like hollow fanboy rhetoric. But yet, EVERYONE says it.

So is it just a big lie that everyone repeats to be “hip”? Or do you think there’s something to it. And if so, please articulate it and give some examples of what can’t be done and why. Convince me this isn’t unadulterated BS.