THE ADDENDUM TO END ALL ADDENDUMS

Watchmen is easily one of the most influential comics to ever be published. This is a fact that cannot be disputed even by the staunchest of critics of the comics. One of the things that made it great were the addendums at the end of each chapter to flesh out the characters of this fictional Earth and their society's problems. It was also one of the reasons why many speculated it would be impossible to make it into a movie.

Well, here we are two months after the motion picture's release without any of the addendums included and many, myself included, thought it was spectacular.

However, many diehards of the franchise were furious that Zack Snyder couldn't find a way to fit in several of the addendums and many newcomers to the series couldn't understand every facet of the Watchmen reality without them.

In response to their fans and in a stroke of money-making genius, DC has released an animated feature of Tales of the Black Freighter with the DVD including a live-action feature representing the Under the Hood addendum.

This DVD addendum to the movie (that started as addendums to the novel) is a near-perfect representation of these stories within the story.

The first story, Tales of the Black Freighter, is the response to the comic's quandary: "If there are superheroes in real-life for these people, what would their comics be like?" Not a common thought when developing a plot, but that's part of the beauty of Watchmen. The answer to this question was pirates and the supernatural (ghouls, demons, etc.) would populate the pages of these fictional rags. Tales of the Black Freighter is a mirror for the story of Watchmen as it shows in a microcosm that sometimes the best of intentions don't always have the best of results and that sometimes one's focus on the worst aspects of life can blind them from everything good in the world.

The Black Freighter is a ship of ghoulish pirates who have committed so many heinous acts over their lifetimes that their souls are cursed to sail the seven seas on hell's personal sea vessel in search of more damned souls to hoist her rotten masts. A testament to just how hard it is to find good help these days.

The particular tale in Watchmen that we see is how the Black Freighter attacks and ransacks another pirate ship, and how all the crew is slaughtered except the captain. The captain washes up on a desolate shore with the carcasses of his crew and the sole intention of seeing his family again. He also fears that the Black Freighter will sail towards his home and the very threat of his family being in danger is enough to keep his resolve strong.

In desperation, he strings up the carcasses of his crew into a makeshift raft and sets off in the hopes of reaching his family before the Black Freighter. Alone, hungry, and left to drink seawater, he begins to go mad, talking to his slaughtered friends' dead bodies. Disgusting sights begin to drive him further into madness as gases trapped in his crews bodies begins to make them explode and leave a trail of blood in their wake that attracts the seas' most feared predator: the Great White Shark.

With pieces of sharpened parts of his makeshift raft, he stabs one of the sharks in the eye and jams the staff deep into the cranium of the shark, killing it, adding it to his raft of death and scaring off the remaining sharks.

After nearly losing all hope and preparing to succumb to the sea, the raft finds shore. Convinced that the Black Freighter has reached here before him, the captain believes with every fiber of his being that all the shapes draped by shadows by the night sky are actually pirates laughing at his futile efforts.

He skulks through the town, approaching his home, the longing to see his family all that is keeping him going. The night continues to play tricks on him as he beats to death what he believes to be a sentry positioned at his home, only to come to his senses after his daughters' shrill screams piece the night air and to realize he just beat his own wife to death. In his panic, he runs back to the sea where he sees the Black Freighter waiting for him, ready to finally claim its next soul.

The captain was so blind to his hate of the Freighter and that it would hurt his family, that in the end, the captain was the only one to do the harm as he condemns himself to an eternity of sailing the seven seas as a member of the Black Freighter's crew with one misguided act.

The animated version of this on the DVD perfectly depicted the gruesome fates of the captain and his crew from the original story and Gerard Butler (300) played the voice of the narrator/captain very well, but I couldn't help but want to hear him yell "THIS IS SPARTA!" or more appropriately "THIS IS THE BLACK FREIGHTER!" the entire time.

The other story is much simpler. Under the Hood is an autobiographical story revolving around the original Nite Owl and his driving motivations showing why he put on a mask and fought with the Minutemen. Not as deep a part of the universe's main plot, yet still critical nonetheless because it retells almost the entire back-story to the Watchmen's world and sets the stage for the events taking place in the novel itself.

DC knew that an autobiography with no pictures clearly wouldn't work on a DVD though. In order to counteract this problem, Under the Hood was turned into a magazine news program episode. Similar to 60 Minutes, The Culpeper Minute gets all the minor and past characters of Watchmen to come out and tell their story as if a Mike-Wallace-type was interviewing them.

All the actors who took the extra time to make this half hour mini-feature were great and showed how in-depth they got into their characters while explaining a lot of the key details that the main feature movie had to bypass to keep it less than three hours.

This supplemental DVD for the movie Watchmen is really high in quality and succeeds in filling in several of the gaps from the main feature's plot, but considering both mini-features combined barely mark an hour, it is tough to say this is worth $20 (even with the sneak peak at this summer's animated Green Lantern feature included).

Unless you are a die-hard fan of the Watchmen, then you can probably pass on this DVD and wait till it is included with the Director's Cut Special Edition of the Watchmen DVD for a much smaller price. Rumor has it that these features will be worked in at key parts of the movie's story just like in the book, which would make the Director's Cut a much smarter buy for the die-hard fan than this DVD if they can wait a couple more months.

Good quality for poor quantity at an even worse price makes the Tales of the Black Freighter DVD only worth 2 out of 5.

-Ray Carsillo

THE RETURN OF KING TUT?!

I usually like to use my column here as a chance to inform people and maybe entertain at the same time. I usually like to use my column as a force of good. I also usually don't have the clarity of mind when driven to such a rage by bonehead maneuvers by the powers-that-be to properly channel it into a semi-coherent comic book rant. This article goes against that norm, though.

The powers-that-be in this case happens to be DC Comics, which also happened to be the subject of my last semi-coherent comic book rant after they killed off Batman.

Even with the death of the Dark Knight well behind us and being about one-third of the way through the "Battle for the Cowl" story arc, DC still has several titles that deal with the Dark Knight by using the spin that these are simply excerpts from Batman's greatest case files (after all, Batman kept meticulous records). These titles are the Batman/Superman crossover and Batman: Confidential.

For the most part, I've enjoyed these titles as you see interesting spins on Batman's first team-up with Superman against Lex Luthor or a different take on the Joker's origin story. However, recently I've been noticing a trend becoming quite clear after the events of the recent 3-issue story arc in Batman: Confidential.

This trend is the integration of long-forgotten villains or villains introduced through non-comic book media into the comic canon.

The most recent example is the villain King Tut. For those who are not familiar with the many forms of Batman in the media through the years, King Tut is a villain who never appeared in the comics, but was a fabricated villain for Adam West's 1966 Batman series. Victor Goodman was an archeologist obsessed with the legends of King Tut. While moving part of his King Tut exhibit into the Gotham Museum of History, an Egyptian urn was dropped on his head and when he awakened, he imagined himself as the ancient Egyptian ruler (As was the motif for the show, the villain was always played by a celebrated actor or actress; in this case, the split personality archeologist Victor Goodman was played by Victor Buono). WHAM!

The obviously bad idea that, 43 years after King Tut's appearance in the campy TV show, the brass at DC felt it was a good idea to bring this character into the comic storyline is a clear sign of desperation in terms of writing. It symbolizes a lack of confidence in their planned re-launch (when they bring the Dark Knight back sometime within the next six months) that they are adding campy 60s villains to one of the most celebrated rouges' galleries in comics. ZZZAP!

The next thing you know, we'll be seeing Vincent Price's "Egghead" character (a man with an egg-shaped head, pale complexion, and an obsession with poultry embryos) or Roddy McDowell's "Bookworm" (a really ticked-off librarian and a Riddler knockoff) with his "Book-Mobile" causing Batman and Robin about as much difficulty as they did in the 60s (also, both never in the comics). BONK!

"What about characters that did appear in the comics and the TV show?" you ask. What? Like False-Face (master of disguise character), who only made one appearance in the comics (Batman #113, February, 1958; a bad year of villainy for the Dark Knight as it was also the year Calendar Man made his infamous debut) before people said he was nothing more than a toned-down Clayface? (False-Face would be re-imagined again when the animated series Batman Beyond used him as an international spy, but he failed there, too) He was used in the TV show only because he was a jewel-thief and not a murderer which played better for 1966's primetime audiences and his costumes were easier to construct using the technology for the time (he was played by Malachi Thorne of Star Trek fame and nearly sued the producers of Batman for refusing to put his name in the credits in order to sell the illusion that False-Face could be ANYONE; in the end they settled on his name appearing in the end credits of the last part of his two-part arc). BAM!

If Louie the Lilac (played by Milton Berle, a gangster obsessed with lilacs and the color purple; basically a cheap Joker knock-off because Berle refused to wear any heavy make-up for a different character) makes an appearance, I may have to swear off Batman comics like I did with Spider-Man after his most recent re-launch. OOF!

To prove my point, with the "Battle for the Cowl" re-launch effort underway, old one-shot villains are re-emerging for no reason whatsoever. Jane Doe, Adam Bomb, Anarchy...do any of these names ring a bell? No? Of course not! They are being dragged out of obscurity and into the limelight for no reason except for DC to show you how much they've screwed up over the past 70 years and that maybe you can hope they'll just kill them off in one fell swoop and promise to do better in the next 70. KER-SPLASH!

And let's not forget Composite Superman who only appeared in a two-part arc in June and July of 1964 before his recent return in Batman/Superman a couple of months ago (basically a Bizarro rip-off that is one-half Batman and one-half Superman). One of the worst concepts ever, but DC brought him back for a one-shot story. THWOCK!

I love the history of comics. I love where comics have come from to where they are today. I understand why the characters in the 60s, no matter what the medium, no matter the level of success or failure, are important. That is why I am so furious that it seems that DC feels the need to try to re-justify a time period long since past by re-introducing these characters and re-working them for modern audiences into a canon they no longer fit into. POW!

The Joker has lasted 70 years for a reason. Clayface wasn't an original villain, but he has proved to be one of the most popular even 50 years later. There are reasons why some characters fail and some succeed and these reasons usually translate over time so there is no reason to believe that a character that failed in the 50s and 60s will translate to today even with some re-tooling. When DC makes major plot decisions like this, all I see is the tarnishing of my memories of the 1960s Batman and the watering down of modern Batman stories. It is unnecessary and, as tacky and campy as the 1960s Batman was, moves like these are even more so.

-Ray Carsillo