Birthday Dog also has a metal crotch

I’ll be honest, I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to all things graphic novel.  But here are the first character stills (via the official blog) from 300-director Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen adaptation. I’ll let WickedPedia do the heavy lifting:

Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternative history United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union (the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight). It tells the story of a group of past and present superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. Watchmen depicts superheroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings, and who – with one notable exception – lack anything recognizable as super powers. Watchmen’s deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film.

Okay, sounds reasonably cool.  The Sci-Fi lovers at io9 say: 

it’s obvious Snyder’s obsessive attention to detail will make Watchmen the most perfect homage to Dave Gibbons’ art and designs you could imagine. Of course, copying Gibbons’ 1980s images is the easy part: doing justice to Alan Moore’s dark allegory of power-mad superheroes and Cold War paranoia will be much, much harder… especially so far removed from the Cold War. 

Hey, I got an idea: instead of making movies about zombies and magical centaurs and superheroes with flaming codpieces and then trying to convince me it’s some parable for a real-life problem, maybe just make a movie directly about the problem?  People might take the story more seriously when it doesn’t involve a guy who shoots boxing-glove arrows.  But, you know, just a thought.