false 3135895 1848560419 9781848560413 143 32 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255595090m/3135895.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3135895.Watching_the_Watchmen 13285 Dave Gibbons 32903 4754 4 0 false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Jan 08 15:19:35 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 16 12:07:34 -0800 2009
I've always appreciated Watchmen as a dense and complicated work, but this behind-the-scenes look helped me understand the exact mathematical precision it took to construct it. Sure, it all started with an insanely detailed script from Moore. (91 pages for issue #1!) But it was Gibbons who brought it all together, and this archive shows you how seriously he took it. There are detailed maps and schematics of locations like Moloch's apartment, the Owlship and the street corner so he'd always have the spacing correct between the newsstand and the Gunga Diner. He dripped real ink into Rorschach patterns over and over to make sure his looked authentic. He even had an entire graph just to chart the rotation of a falling perfume bottle in relation to the fixed stars in the background.

Gibbons must have kept every scrap of paper from those years, and this book is like rifling through his old desk drawers. Not everything is particularly illuminating, but every bit of it is interesting.]]>