Word: watchmen
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...both Wenders films is the notion of angels as bestowers of grace on a secular landscape. Wenders' view is traditional and strangely powerful. He sees angels as invisible consolers, gentle kibitzers in the monologues that run endlessly through our mind. They are the eternal observers, God's night watchmen, holy voyeurs. Wenders would probably say they are moviegoers, eavesdropping for a few privileged hours on a world more perilous and beautiful than our own. In a lovely scene, Cassiel comforts an old chauffeur (Heinz Ruhmann, a German movie star since 1926) with memories of his childhood. The angel's knowledge...
There are no handsome princes or yearning princesses, no talking-animal sidekicks or lovable syncopated props in Akira. This is the stuff of nightmare, closer in theme and ambition to so-called graphic novels like Watchmen than anything that's ever been drawn for an American screen. In fact, ^ Akira was derived from director Katsuhiro Otomo's graphic novel series of the same name, and the movie, even at 124 minutes, has the densely packed sweep and go-for-it pep of a pop epic...
...nation's largest bookseller, they are being given prominent display. Says Margaret Ross, manager of Waldenbooks' magazine department: "We thought they could bring in people we wouldn't usually see -- from early 20s to early 30s, science-fiction and comic collectors, well educated." Writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen (Warner; 384 pages; $14.95) and Saga of the Swamp Thing (Warner; 161 pages; $10.95), puts the age range higher. From the nine- to * 13-year-old audience he began with in the early '80s, he says, he has shifted to 13 through 40. "People," he observes, "are beginning to take comics...
Graphic novels use, as the comics have for some time now, a whole battery of movie techniques. An artist like Miller or Dave Gibbons, who worked on Watchmen with Moore, can storyboard a zoom, a cross-fade, a jump cut or a lap dissolve with a deft immediacy that would beat many directors at their own game. Indeed, for anyone used to working the controls on a Laserdisc or VCR, freezing the frame or strobing the action, the expansive technique of graphic novels will seem comfortable and accessible...
...often, as Critic Mikal Gilmore points out, graphic novels still tend to be "overblown bad comics, using fancy paper to do bad stories." But a work like Watchmen -- by common assent the best of breed -- is a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi, political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats into a dysutopian mystery story. It is as engagingly knotty and self-referential as The Name of the Rose, but instead of monks doubting their faith, here are superheroes weighed down by their creed, caught in a world they never made...