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So, whereas I might have been exaggerating a little bit for the purposes of the interview by saying there was only those three titles, I wasn’t exaggerating *that* much, either. There was really almost nothing of the kind of good quality, full-colour, one-storyline-in-a-volume, trade-paperback editions of comics that are commonplace today, and there wasn’t really any expectation of there being the huge marketplace for them that now exists. And the fact that there were occasional other books – that pretty much all came out after Watchmen – doesn’t invalidate my argument.

I don’t doubt that DC went into it in good faith – they’ve certainly never dispute the version of events as put forward by Moore and Gibbons, for instance – and I’m not suggesting for one moment they intended to pull a stunt on them. After all, the huge growth of the GN marketplace presumably took them as much by surprise as it did everyone else, or they wouldn’t have been easing themselves into it so slowly.

So, what does all of this prove? That all of our memories are faulty, perhaps? I might just sit down one day and try to maker a chronological list of what came out when, just for some sort of historical perspective on it all.

Thanks for commenting, by the way. How long were you working for Titan, and do you have any interesting stories to tell about you time there?

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Of course, at that point, DC and Moore should have re-negotiated in a similar way that publishers and authors are having to now about ebooks and other new electronic formats but, again my suspicion, DC probably didn’t feel the new trade paperbacks were going to be a long-lived format and were merely trying to exploit the expanded market at the time. As you describe, most comic shops at the time expended a lot of resources (space, racking equipment, etc) in back issues and the feeling was that most “real” comic collectors were also going to want the original edition in preference to any reprinted format.

Of course, as you sort of say, the difference between comic shops in London and those in, say, Dublin, or Cardiff, or Newcastle, etc, is the London shops carried a wider range of stock due to the demographics of London itself. This is not to put the regional shops down, merely to say London is bigger than the next 12 major British cities put together and the customer demographic is going to reflect that at the till. Books that were staple items on London shop shelves were treated as special orders in many regional comic shops.

The bottom line: DC owns the rights to Watchmen, they have decided to exploit the brand. This maybe should not be happening, the two sides should have sat down and ironed this out by now, but the best Alan Moore could have ever hoped for from this scenario is a better rights package, not exclusive control over the Watchmen. Personally, I won’t be buying Before Watchmen; the original stands alone as a piece of literature but, I think, most of the problems with material from this time (Marvel/Miracleman, etc) is caused by the changing nature of the comic book market and the antiquated contracts the publishers were using and the creators signing at the time.

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At the time the Forbidden Planet – now more correctly called Forbidden Planet International – opened their shop in Dublin, generally the only way you could read comics back-stories was to buy back-issues, and expensive back-issues at that. If a comic was popular, or ‘hot,’ these back-issues got to be very expensive, very fast. I can remember the front part of their original shop in Dawson Street was dominated by wooden back-issue boxes, and was a very real part of the shop’s turnover. These would eventually die off, as more and more back-issues were collected together, but at the time I’m talking about, that was well into their future.

It’s interesting that you should mention Sandman, because that has a peculiar reprint history. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that, as the first issue wasn’t published until 1989, this was actually a few years beyond the time I’m talking about.) When DC decided to reprint the Sandman stories in 1990, the practice was still so unusual for them, and so unstructured, that the first volume they published was actually what would now be called The Doll’s House, containing issues #8 – #16. It wasn’t until the end of 1991 that they published the first eight issues – yes, both volumes contained #8, at the time – and then slowly collected the rest of the issues, until they’d caught up. It was still very much a step off the precipice for them, but they had decided that, if people were prepared to pay out good money to read the back-story, they’d much rather they profited from it, rather than the comic shops profiting from their over-priced back-stock. So, no, no volumes of Sandman on the shelves in the late eighties, I’m afraid.

As for the rest of the titles you mentioned. Let’s see… The first collection of Maus was originally published in 1986, the same year as Watchmen first appeared. I seem to remember the UK edition was published by Penguin Books, so it may have been tardy in turning up over here. No, no collected Eisner over here, even though they were available in the US. Ditto for Pekar – it’s only in the last five years or so that I’ve seen his books available over here, actually. You see, although these were published and available in the US, there was no distribution for them on this side of the Atlantic, and no mechanism to get them over here. The very fact that they were published as books in a different jurisdiction meant that they were often embargoed from being sold over here, and it would be quite some time before this would be ironed out. Again, the same goes for Love and Rockets, and for Elfquest. I’d *heard* of some of these, and seen some of the original comics, but collected edition on the shelves of comic shops in Dublin was still a long way in the future. And, once again, this also applies to ‘shelf upon shelf clogged with DC and Marvel superhero reprints,’ which would turn up here sooner than some of the other American produce, but certainly not in the eighties, or for quite a bit of the nineties. Indeed, I’d question that these existed anywhere at the time I’m talking about.

I’ll allow that there were Titan reprints, but these were mostly 2000 AD stories, and not hugely great in quality. There were also a very few attempts at publishing some European albums, but we were very wary of these strange, slim volumes. But, as far as what is generally seen as graphic novels nowadays, either as good quality collection of recently published material, or original work made especially for publication in book form, then no, really, there was nothing like that, and would not be for a while.

I’m still standing by my assertion that Watchmen is the most important work to come out of the comics field. I mean, you can disagree with me, but it’s just *rude* to suggest that I’m delusional, and certainly does *you* no honour.

The problem with Beyond Watchmen is that its an unnecessary addition to a well-regarded earlier work for crassly commercial reasons, and which can be thwarted by the crassly commercial option of Not Buying The Bloody Thing. The problem with Beyond Watchmen is certainly not because it violates the principle of “Alan Moore uber alles”.

The Watchmen characters were not designed to be ongoing characters like other branded superheroes (and they are clearly *not* the Charlton characters, whether that was the original jumping off point or not). They were designed to tell one specific story. Which has been told and told well.

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