WATCHMEN - Dave Gibbons

He is best known in the US for collaborating with Alan Moore on the 12-issue limited series Watchmen, now one of the best-selling graphic novels of all time, and the only one to feature on Time's "Top 100 Novels" list. Gibbon's artwork in Watchmen is notable both for its stark utilisation of the formulaic comicbook nine-panel grid layout, as well as for its intense narrative and symbolic density (with some symbolic background elements suggested by Moore, others by Gibbons).

Initially pitched by Moore to utilize the Charlton Comics characters which had been purchased by DC Comics, Watchmen was re-tooled to feature new - analog - characters when it became clear that the story would have significant and lasting ramifications on its main players. Gibbons believes that his own involvement likely came about after the idea was already in its early initial stages. He recalls that he had:
... known Alan for a while and we had tried to get things off the ground with DC and hadn't really succeeded. Then Alan finally broke into DC with Swamp Thing and I guess I must have heard on the grapevine that he was doing a treatment for a new miniseries. I rang Alan up, saying Id like to be involved with what he was doing. He said Oh, yeah great and sent me the outline for it. Then I was at a convention in the US and asked Dick Giordano, Managing Director of DC at the time, point blank whether I could draw this thing Alan was writing. He said How does Alan feel about that? I said Yeah hes fine with it and Dick said Yep, OK, its yours!

To complement the story, Gibbons remembers working on rough character designs (which ultimately changed little from their final looks) from "the descriptions that Alan had provided," trying to come up with "a classic superhero feel but be a little bit stranger ... a sort of operatic look ... an Egyptian kind of a look."

Gibbons returned to Watchmen in 2008, producing the behind-the-scenes book Watching the Watchmen to tie into the release of the 2009 film. Watching the Watchmen is his take on the creation of the seminal work, and features a number of rarely seen pieces of artwork including sketches and character designs, as well as "stuff," he says "that I just don't know why I kept but I'm really pleased I did.

-Wikipedia.org

-I do not own the video

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