That's the preview to next summer's Watchmen movie, an adaptation of Alan Moore's earth-shaking graphic novel that brought pulp fiction, punk rock and novelistic storytelling to the superhero genre.
I've been foisting this book off on friends for more than a decade, but over the weekend, Batman outdid me a couple thousand times. Check it out at GalleyCat:
"The Watchmen trailer that was shown before The Dark Knight in movie theaters this weekend was promoting the forthcoming motion picture ... Nevertheless, as Bully observed over the weekend, the book promptly vaulted into Amazon's top ten, and as of Sunday afternoon it was the #3 seller on the site"
Book blogs have been debating what happened ever since. Can movies sell books? M.J. Rose, a Publishing Spot alum, saw it as a triumph for book advertising, a tool that most writers and publishers can't afford.
Besides urging you to read the graphic novel, I had one thing to add for all the storytellers in the audience. The Watchmen, unlike Batman, the Hulk or EVERY SINGLE SUPERHERO, EVER, was a self-contained story. The whole film fits inside a single graphic novel. It's much easier to fall in love with a story that can find on Amazon and buy in single swoop on Amazon.
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