Watchmen Mania Continues: Animated Comic Available On iTunes

It's a good week to be a Watchmen fan! First we get the assiduously "faithful" trailer for Zack Snyder's film, and now the first of twelve animated shorts (one for each issue) constructed from Dave Gibbons' beautiful original art has hit the iTunes store for FREE! The "short" is about twenty minutes long, and boasts an unabridged telling of the Watchmen tale, something the live action feature will not be able to come close to accomplishing. It even has the chapter headings and closing quotes. And there's no worry about deviating from the source material in any way, because it IS the source material. The only problem is that it's narrated audio book style, meaning one man does all the voices. And not particularly well, all the time. But it didn't bother AHR, and this is still a really exciting new way to experience the book. I can't imagine how long it took to construct some of these animations from tiny comic scans. But the hard work paid off. With an adaptation this spot on, I'm actually left to wonder... Why do we need the movie?

After the jump bonus... A leaked video of the first full Watchmen movie scene?

Sam and Max: The Animated Series Has A DVD Release Date

The wonderful thing about this modern age is that any canceled TV show you've ever loved, no matter how obscure, no matter how unpopular, will one day be immortalized on consumer DVD. You just have to wait. March 11th is the day my waiting ends, because that's the DVD release date for Sam and Max: Freelance Police - The Complete Animated Series. Finally, those who blinked and missed the show's less than one year run on Fox Kids will be able to watch and rewatch every episode in all their light-hearted, anarchic, unabashedly violent glory.

The three-disc set will include creator interviews, animated shorts, and plenty of cross-promotion with the new Sam and Max games from Telltale studios. One of the more interesting items promised on the Amazon product page is an "original series bible by Steve Purcell" though I would guess this will consist mainly of the character design charts which have been displayed before in the official Sam and Max sketchbook, A History of S&M (no longer available at Telltale's website, but you can probably find a copy on ebay. It's worth it!).

Of course you can already watch a number of episodes on YouTube, and GameTap has 23 episodes available for download. But the Telltale site says the DVD includes all 26 episodes, and unless that's a misprint, 26 is actually two more episodes than listed on the Wikipedia episode list, so we might even be in "lost episode" territory. I hope, I hope.

Of course not every episode of this series was great, there are almost as many misses as hits, but the moments where the series does nail Purcell's sense of high flying comedic chaos, it does so in a way that makes it's Saturday morning timeslot all the more admirable and/or questionable. I'll close with some of my favorite near-inappropriate lines from the series.

Note how Purcell's arch verbosity was kept in tact, expanding the vocabularies of kids across the nation.

(after getting zapped with a laser gun)
Max: The pain is almost euphoric, Sam.
Sam: Like falling asleep in a tanning booth.

Max: Can this be of any help, Sam? It's my old fully functional HO scale nuclear reactor. Sure gave model railroading a modern touch of urban peril.

The show did a great job of preserving Max's character without watering it down too much. He's much the same lovable yet dangerously insane bunny he was in the comics...

Sam: You kill me, little buddy.
Max: Only if we're taken alive, Sam.

Sam: I'm sure a heaping helping of our persuasive charms will soon have him seeing things our way.
Max: Or not seeing things at all!

Sam: Good work, little buddy. Thanks to your addled shenanigans, I was able to collar this carp without gunfire or loss of life.
Max: Don't mention it, Sam. May I be rewarded with the pleasure of tenderizing - er, I mean "mirandizing" the prisoner now?
Sam: Okay, but do it in the back, these poor folks have seen enough atrocities for one day.

And who could forget the sheer number of grotesque Alligator-Eating-Max's-Arm jokes, from the classic episode, That Darn Gator...

(figuring out how to feed him)
Sam: That's it, Max! He'll only eat things off your finger.
Max: Like the first three layers of skin.

Max: I think I'm experiencing the heady bond that can only come from motherhood....or loss of blood.

Sam: Look at him go, he'll be on to solid foods in no time!
Max: Good. All this arm hair and muscle tissue can't be good for him.

(having fed the alligator everything in the house)
Max: Well, that's the last of it.
Sam: Not quite, there's still some bean-dip.
Max: I mean the sensation in my arm.
(both laugh uproariously)

Geekanerd's past coverage of the Sam and Max renaissance...

Reel Geek: Webcomics In Hollywood

Every Tuesday, Geekanerd Correspondent Bishop rocks it movie geek style...As geeks and/or nerds, I can pretty safely assume that you enjoy four things: comics, the internet, movies, and animation (if you dislike any of these things then you probably misspelled a word on Google and somehow ended up here). Well, today we’re going to talk about all four of those things coming together in a writhing orgy of tangled limbs and sweaty buttocks.

Oh my! Upcoming WebComic to Animation info and video, after the jump!


As many of you may know, Scott Kurtz, author of Player vs Player, the popular gaming comic, has launched an online animation series based on PVP. The series is set for 12 episodes, pumped out once a month, for a fee of $24.95 for the year. So far the reaction has been a mixed bag, but the internet is full of critics who would nitpick the way a popular website was giving away free money, so I’d rather not sit around debating how a character’s voice didn’t sound like what a 13 year old in Iowa felt it should.

PVP: The Series is being brought to us by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which is the studio that produced Tim Buckley’s “Ctrl+Alt+Del” series last year (see the trailer here). Blind Ferret is the creation of “Least I Could Do” writer Ryan Sohmer et al. Now I know I’m supposed to be discussing movies here, but bear with me.

Blind Ferret recently announced plans to create a full-length feature animated film starring the cast of “Looking for Group,” another comic that Sohmer writes. Sohmer posted a short that he and the BF team had put together for everyone to see, so take a quick peek at the video below.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the very fact that webcomic creators are pushing into the frontier of animation and film is pretty exciting to me. What we’re seeing is another expansion by webcomics into a venue traditionally only seen in syndicated comics. Garfield, Heathcliff, Peanuts and others were all syndicated newspaper strips that branched out into merchandising, which included animated features and television series. Webcomics have really only proven themselves to be financially profitable in the past few years, with powerhouses like PVP and Penny Arcade and collectives like Dumbrella and Dayfree Press. Now it looks like webcomics are taking up the challenge to produce animated series and movies without the backing of a large syndicate, and personally I’m glad to see them doing it. Sure things are going to be a little rough at first and there are going to be a lot of false starts and misfires, but that’s just part of the game.

Blind Ferret said that CAD: The Series was indeed financially profitable, and PVP still seems to be attracting subscribers, so we may start seeing more and more webcomics pushing into the animation field. Better still, we’re going to be seeing them get there on their own terms (or at least much closer than they would working under a syndicate and a network). Now I know some people out there are going to scoff and roll their eyes because webcomics are “trying too hard” or “going commercial.” Well those people have herpes. All we’re seeing is artists branching into another field of expression, one that allows them to create new material and give a new voice to their work. It may also push web-based animation ala Homestar Runner more into the spotlight and encourage more young artists into animation. This means not only more series like Homestar, but more series like “Venture Brothers” hitting the channels as networks see that these web-based series can garner an audience and make more compromises with creators about content and themes that carry over to air. Sohmers’ “Least I Could Do” has already been optioned and is in development for a TV series.

I’m looking forward to seeing web-based animated series grow and garner larger audiences. The scripts will probably be a little unsteady early on (writing for the screen has a different pacing than with a 4-6 panel comic strip), and the animation will be a little uneven, but go watch an early episode of the Simpsons and tell me you KNEW that it was going to be the success that it was.