Chapter 329: An Explosive End I
Stuff was really ramping up, alright.
It was ramping up in many different ways.
Home video is accruing sales and rental figures across video stores around the nation.
Teaser trailers, music videos, and random radio requests from nerds were helping to gain traction for certain shows.
They were coming soon. Of course, coming sooner was a moving picture set to be theatrically released.
Of course, an unambiguously-named video game about Flappy Birds was continuously generating hubbub. A hubbub of the multi-directionaly-percieved kind.
Love it, hate it, loathe it, or can't stop playing it. There's no denying that people were buying it.
$30 for some tiny, cartride-esque, card-esque, key that you can easily misplace seems overkill... but what can they do.
It's the hip new thing and you don't want to miss out on it.
In any case, stuff was really ramping up.
But... the thing is... they were all just getting started. Some of them haven't technically started yet.
They might turn out for the worst, they might just turn out normal, or things might turn out great. Conclusions are just that foggy at these early stages.
It might still take a while and one can only wait... for now.
However, momentum was definitely building and it was only a matter of time before it implodes.
Imploding to its many potentials with varying proportions.
Unlike these aforementioned projects though, something was reaching its final stage already.
Unlike the others that were just building themselves up to their implosions, this one was truly coming to an end.
A somewhat explosive end!
Alexander made sure of it.
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Through natural temporal progression, it had already been a year or so since the overdramatized Creed-Moore drama.
Nothing much really came out of it.
Maybe some media slandering here and a rigged Kirby award there... but it ultimately amounted to nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing.
It spurred the release of a highly-acclaimed comic book. A comic book that shed some light on how flawed heroes can really be.
The Creed-Moore drama was undisputedly pointless but the comic book community was thankful for it.
It gave them Watchmen!
Many nerds and comic readers had always celebrated this fact.
What they didn't celebrate or even accept, however, was the fact that it was coming to an end.
It took a while for them to register that this was no joke. Nor an April Fool's prank.
Then again, it didn't help that it was around April 1st of 1986 that the news broke.
With all the second-guessing that happens around this weird day, grasping what's what took some time.
To think that Creed Entertainment with all their new projects, popping up out of nowhere, actually had an old project that was getting shelved.
It was the last issue of a comic book story. Making it shelved in both metaphorical and literal senses.
Shelved on shelves. How else is it going to be sold otherwise?
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Anyways, if it still wasn't clear... Watchmen coming to an end.
Alan Moore settled things within 12 issues and the plundering Alexander was sure to follow suit. For most of it, that is.
On Watchmen's 11th issue, Veidt or Ozymandias had revealed his master plan to his heroic peers that wanted to thwart it.
Adrian Veidt was no comic book villain.
Others would have already been foiled after the reveal.
How could he be beaten when his plan had already happened long before his reveal?
The issue cut off on that shocking and grim note. With a trope-breaking twist, Watchmen once again proved how outstanding it was against its comic-superhero-ing peers.
By the last stretches of April, that shock and grim felt even more poignant as the comic book industry greeted Watchmen #12.
Issue #12 or Chapter XII: A Stronger Loving World.
With the artistic Creed cover art depicting a clock at midnight with its face running with blood.
Signifying the final stroke of the story and the plentiful blood that was about to be shed.
Rorschach, Nite Owl, Manhattan, and Silk Spectre discover that Adrian Veidt is behind the attacks on the masks. Orchestrating the Comedian's mysterious death from the start
They meet Adrian at his South Pole base and argue about the morality of his actions.
Ozymandias has planned to bring peace and union to the world by giving humanity the greatest jumpscare they could ever have.
It's just that this jumpscare involves wiping out cities and the death of millions!
At the end of the original comic, Adrian Veidt — the evil-genius character who quits crime-fighting to run a big, crazy corporation and live in a slow globe — tries to avert a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union by faking an alien invasion, dropping a huge exploding squid on Manhattan and killing millions, which unites the world’s superpowers against huge exploding squids.
This was Moore's great clincher for his magnum opus.
Of course, as mentioned, Alexander would follow suit as a plunderer but only for most of it.
He had another alternative end in mind. It was something that would probably enrage comic bookers of old but this was a new Creed-dominated one, so who cares?
As for the comic-booker-enraging alternate that Alexander went with, well, it was from Snyder's version.
In the Watchmen movie, there is no squid; Veidt builds a machine that imitates the powers of Dr. Manhattan — the only Watchmen character with actual superpowers — which sets off a string of atom-bomb-like explosions in a bunch of cities and, presumably, unites the world against Dr. Manhattan.
Everyone would have to HYPOTHETICALLY work together to stop the threat that they can't overcome with just their own measly nationalistic pride and power.
Why not just go with framing Manhattan himself? This was much more straightforward than making a squid monster from some psychic's brain and pooling creative writers.
Instead of psychic squid, multiple Manhattan-laced nuclear explosions were the way he went with it.
What the heck was that squid thing supposed to be about, anyway?
In any case, Alexander actually likes Snyder’s ending better than Alan Moore’s. An unpopular opinion but it's his opinion and he's the one calling the shots now.
Since this new Watchmen was brought about to go against Moore, why not truly upend the man till the symbolic end?
Anyways, with a few tweaks to the story here and there, the payoff was still the same. More or less.
Ozymandias' absurdly warped mission actually worked and the world was shockingly mortified into accepting unity amongst themselves.
This was already close to world peace. An ideal utopia that nobody ever believed to be possible.
Ultimately, most of the masked heroes present during Ozymandias' patronizing speech reluctantly agreed to keep the peace.
Keeping the secret that it was Veidt's plot all along and Manhattan hadn't actually gone rogue on humanity.
So, just like in the comic, Manhattan will probably leave planet Earth, but he’ll do it with sound reason, sort of like how Batman retreated into hiding at the end of The Dark Knight.
In other words, like Batman, he’ll be perceived as the villain but he was actually the hero that the world deserved.
Rorschach, however, doesn't agree with keeping the secret. He walks out, seeking to share the truth. Dr. Manhattan could only obliterate Rorschach.
Veidt sagaciously declares victory, but Dr. Manhattan notes that nothing ever truly ends--then Manhattan leaves Earth.
Time passes, and Dan and Laurie are living incognito, but make amends with Sally.
The story ends with his journal being attended to by the New Frontiersman, suggesting that the truth shall escape.
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A conclusion open to interpretation and a thought-provoking send-off to the story that intrigued comic bookers for months on end.
As readers closed their issue of [A Stronger Loving World], questions, reminiscence, and deep reflection put them in a stupor.
Was this really the end?
Was Watchmen no more?
Why were they reluctant to part with it?
Young Snyder from afar seemed to have imagined his future.
Even Rasputin-esque Moore, who was clueless about the plundering of his work and retconned death of his squid monster, was commending the finale.
As brief and of unwillingness it may have been, Alexander Creed created a Moore-style story that even he, as Moore himself, could only try to match!
Watchmen is a brilliant work, complex and thoughtful, and one of the comics that he would most probably recommend to people who've never read comics before.
That was the greatness of Watchmen!
Alexander Creed's Watchmen!
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Of course, the Watchmen saga didn't end with just that.
Alexander alluded to implosions and explosions for a reason.
A somewhat explosive end was what he promised to send the work off and he will make sure of it.
He even changed the story to go with Zac Snyder's nuclear-infused alternative.
That wasn't just to go against Moore or to pave the way for the future Watchmen movie's better reception.
It just had something to do with how this version of Watchmen fittingly fit itself to end around April of 1986. Even if it didn't, Alexander made it so.
Something incredibly explosive happened at this specific time of the year, after all.
Call him heartless and opportunistic. Alexander didn't care.
He simply wanted to try imploding Watchmen's already-great significance to a whole another level. The nuclear level!