Planned Parenthood is having a contest to design their newspaper ad for their April "March For Women's Lives" event. Kinda cool. If I were a little bit more graphically inclined, I'd try to whip something up.

I've been reading this new site called The Gadflyer. It bills itself as a new progressive Internet magazine, but really it reads like a bunch of posts from some reasonably intelligent and entertaining lefty blogs. Not that this is at all a bad thing, you understand.

I just finished reading Alan Moore's Watchmen for the very first time. I no longer need fear the shame of being exposed as Not-a-True-Comics-Fan by the casual question, "You have read Watchmen, right?" (I was about 13 when Watchmen came out. I didn't start reading comics until I was in college, when I started reading Swamp Thing and Sandman. I remember picking up Watchmen in bookstores several times when it came out in graphic novel format, being unable to make any kind of sense out of the first few pages, and putting it back down.)

So, yeah, I finally read it. Wow. Yes, it really is that good. Considering that pretty much all of the comics I've read were written post-Watchmen, and that the kind of deconstruction of the superhero that was new and startling when Moore did it in Watchmen is practically de rigeur now, I wasn't sure what kind of impact Watchmen would have read now. I've also frequently heard it said that to really appreciate Watchmen, you need to be a die-hard superhero comics fan, and I'm really not.

But, you know, Watchmen still works for me. I'm sure that I'm missing more than a few subtle superhero references, and
obviously the sheer idea of "Hey, let's look at superheroes as if they were, like, real people!" isn't so new to me that it's turning my head inside out. But if that were all that Watchmen had going for it, it wouldn't be a classic. It's just a really great piece of storytelling.

It's also a really great showcase for some of the things that you can do easily in comics that are difficult to do in other media, like having two narrative lines running simultaneously on the same page. If I ever write a comic book script (an idea that I've toyed with but never pursued very seriously, because I think my particular strengths as a writer are shown off to better advantage in straight prose), I'll definitely be studying Watchmen while I'm doing it.

Interestingly, I notice that Zed's been re-reading Watchmen.

Now I just need to decide what I'm going to read next.