The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate Spoiler Special podcast on The Watchmen.

Joining me is Dan Cois, a newly expatriated to D.C., contributor to New York Magazine.

Hi, Dan.

Hey, Dana.

And, okay, we've got lots to say about this movie and book and the whole watchman phenomenon.

So let's get going.

But first of all, we should warn, just in case anyone's forgotten that a spoiler special is a spoiler special, be warned.

We will be giving away major plot points from a very twisty plot.

So if you're planning to see the movie, have not read the book, and don't want to know what happens, then tune out now and tune in again after you've seen it.

But be sure to tune in again after you've seen it.

Oh, definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah, download us now and listen on the way home from the movie.

So, Dan, I'm going to let you, because you're the graphic novel guy and know a little bit more about the history of this novel than I do, although I read it.

I just finished it this morning, actually.

It's quite something. But can you talk a little bit about the project of Watchmen, how long it's been in the works, what kind of a place this story holds in the history of graphic novels? It was originally an eight book, an eight comic series

written by Alan Moore, and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It came out in 1985 and is widely considered

a pretty seminal work in comics history

for the way that it darkened superheroes in a way that they never had been before.

It took the sort of traditional superhero tropes and put them into a real-world, real-life setting

and made those stories dark and brutal in a way that comics had not done before.

...