Alan Moore signs deal for five-volume fantasy series and short story collection

Retired comics writer Alan Moore has signed a deal with Bloomsbury for six volumes, including a short story collection and a five-volume fantasy series.

Illuminations, the collection, will come first in autumn 2022 and will be followed in 2024 by the first book in the Long London series, an alternate-reality fantasy saga that begins in 1949 London and moves to "a version of London just beyond our knowledge."

Moore, best-known for his 1986 comic masterpiece Watchmen and other work including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, retired from working on comics and graphic novels in 2019. In 2016 he published the utterly gigantic novel Jerusalem, a dizzyingly complex and stupendously long novel about his home town of Northampton in different time periods and different versions of reality.

Watchmen: The Limited Series

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2019. A white supremacist group, the Seventh Kavalry, is fighting a long-running battle with the Tulsa Police Department. To protect their identities after several of their number were assassinated, the police have been given special dispensation to hide their identities under masks; the Kavalry likewise hide themselves under masks based on that of the vigilante Rorschach. Police officer Angela Abar, who goes by the nickname Sister Night, is tasked with helping flush out the Kavalry and receives assistance from Jean Smart, formerly known as Silk Spectre, now an FBI agent. Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt, formerly Ozymandias, "the smartest man in the world" who may be also its greatest mass-murderer, finds himself trapped in the strangest puzzle box ever devised.

When it was announced that HBO was proceeding with a TV series based on the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel Watchmen, there was widespread scepticism. The previous film version of the novel (only released in 2009) was not particularly accomplished but was adequate, raising the question of if a further adaptation was necessary. The TV show, however, quickly hewed in a different direction, becoming more of a thematic sequel to the comic book and being set more than thirty years after its events.

The TV mini-series (which started as a regular series but was converted into a mini-series when the production team expressed doubt about returning) has ended up being, somewhat surprisingly, a qualified success. Damon Lindelof and his writers have crafted a new story which at first glance feels only tangentially connected to the original, but as the episodes pass it becomes more and more deeply entwined with the events of the original graphic novel and ends up being a strong continuation.

In the original graphic novel, Alan Moore (who was, as is his custom, not involved in this new project) created Rorschach as an exploration of what a vigilante without any oversight would end up being like in the "real world." Rorschach ended up giving his life for his belief that the people deserve to know the truth about what really happened in New York City and his message did get out in his journal...which was promptly dismissed as the tinfoil ramblings of a lunatic. Conspiracy theorists have gotten hold of his journal and used it to further their own insane agendas, further discrediting Rorschach's story, although we (as viewers) know it was completely true.

The tie-ins with the original series take a back seat for the first three episodes or so, which focus more on Sister Night and the Tulsa Police Department fighting the Seventh Kavalry. This is a pretty good story on its own merits, propelled by excellent performances from Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Louis Gossett Jr., and examines themes of racial inequality, bigotry driven by externalisation and police authoritarianism. As the story unfolds we also spend time with a mysterious character played by Jeremy Irons relaxing at a country house with some servants, which feels like a huge non-sequitur until the stories begin converging.

In the second half of the series the Kavalry storyline dovetails back into elements of the original Watchmen narrative, as we learn more about the backstory of the Minutemen and also what happened to Dr. Manhattan after the events of the original series, culminating in the episode A God Walks into Abar, easily the season's strongest episode and a callback to the original comic sequence where we see Dr. Manhattan's creation. Events culminate in a grand finale which feels distinctly true to the story's comic book roots, even down to the somewhat ambiguous ending.

Watchmen (the TV show) is a reasonably strong and effective work. It is clearly the work of the more restrained and thoughtful Lindelof who worked on The Leftovers rather than the self-indulgent and trite one who worked on Prometheus and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek films. The tone of the series walks a careful line - not dissimilar to the original comic book - of developing weightier themes and ideas whilst also remembering that it is a comic book story, with a more colourful ending. In this sense it is both a deconstruction and a celebration of comic books, rather than a cynical deconstruction alone (as Amazon's recent series The Boys is). Threading this particularly needle is not easy and it's impressive the show ends up as accomplished and well-judged as it is.

There are a few problems, particularly with character set up. It feels like the Lady Trieu storyline was not set up well enough in earlier episodes, meaning it feels a bit odd when this story assumes prominence towards the endgame. The Veidt story is entertaining on its own merits, but its psychotic comedy of English manners feels tonally disjointed compared to the rest of the series, but overall it adds variety to the story.

The Watchmen TV series (****½) (which feels like now it should really have been given a distinct title) is accomplished television. It's superbly well-acted, mostly well-written and manages the difficult balancing act of introducing new elements to this world whilst also picking up on story elements left behind from the original and addressing them. Combined with a haunting score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, it makes for impressive viewing. The series is available now in the UK and USA, as well on HBO's streaming services in the United States.

WATCHMEN TV series gets new trailer

HBO has released a new, longer trailer for Watchmen, their sequel TV series to the Alan Moore graphic novel.

The TV series is set several decades after the events of the graphic novel. Dr. Manhattan is apparently still living on Mars and the United States is caught in a tidal wave of panic, triggered by a band of vigilantes wearing masks and aping the slain Rorschach. They mount an attack on the police force of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which seems to backfire when it allows police forces across the US to become more militarised and crack down on masked heroes.

Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons) is still around, as apparently is Laurie/Silk Spectre (Jean Smart), now an FBI agent having taken the surname of her late father, the Comedian.

The series will also focus on some new characters, namely a new vigilante named Angela Abar (Regina King) and Tulsa Police Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), as well as Marionette (Sara Vickers) and Mime (Tom Mison), characters introduced in the Doomsday Clock comic series.

Watchmen will debut in the United States on HBO in October and (presumably) will air on Sky Atlantic in the UK.

HBO drop teaser for WATCHMEN TV series

HBO have dropped a teaser trailer for their upcoming Watchmen TV series.

Watchmen is a sequel to the graphic novel - not Zach Snyder's 2009 movie - and picks up on events thirty years after the end of the story. The trailer hints that law and order is breaking down, with a growing movement of copycat vigilantes basing their actions on the character of Rorschach from the original novel. The only major character from the original book confirmed to appear is Adrian Veidt (aka Ozymandias), played by Jeremy Irons, although some characters from Doomsday Clock (a sequel series to the original graphic novel) will also appear. Details of the story and characters are being kept close to HBO's chest.

The series is produced and showrun by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers). It is expected to debut in autumn this year.

Jeremy Irons to play an iconic character in HBO's WATCHMEN sequel series

SlashFilm are reporting that Jeremy Irons will be playing an older version of the character of Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, in HBO's currently-shooting Watchmen sequel TV series.

HBO's new series, produced and written by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers), is set approximately 30 years after the events of the original Watchmen graphic novel (and specifically the novel, not Zack Synder's 2009 movie) and picks up on storylines and characters. Veidt was the antagonist of the novel, but one motivated by what he claimed was altruistic goals: achieving world peace by faking an alien attack on New York City in 1985, giving the United States and Soviet Union a common enemy to unite against. Famously, Veidt succeeded in his plan and was left alive at the end of the story to live with the millions of casualties he had unleashed in the process.

Jean Smart (Fargo) is also playing a character, an FBI agent with the surname "Blake", the same as Edward Blake (aka the Comedian, whose murder kick-started the original story). SlashFilm suggest she may actually be playing Laurie (aka Silk Spectre), the daughter of Edward Blake and a key protagonist of the original mini-series, but this is supposition (although supported by her age).

Season 1 of Watchmen has been shooting for several months and is expected to air on HBO in the summer or autumn of 2019.

HBO greenlights Damon Lindelof's frankly unnecessary WATCHMEN TV series

HBO has greenlit Damon Lindelof's frankly unnecessary Watchmen TV adaptation, having been impressed by an internal pilot filmed earlier this year.

...BUT MAYBE IT SHOULD?

Lindelof's new take on Alan Moore's graphic novel is actually a sequel to the original graphic novel, catching up on the world in the wake of the events of the original story. However, this TV show will not have any relation to Zack Snyder's faithful (possibly too faithful) 2009 feature film version, with new actors taking up the roles from the graphic novel and new characters coming on board.

Although Snyder's film had some merit to it, such as solid casting and some good imagery - it's still easily his best film - it was also slavishly overly faithful to the graphic novel but also revelled in the violence. If anything, a fresh adaptation that was both slightly looser and also had more time to tell the story properly might have some merit.

As it stands, a TV show set thirty years after the events of the original story, presumably with the original characters missing or very old, feels a bit pointless.

It might be that the show has merit: Lindelof, for all the much-deserved criticism he gets for his handling of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies and Prometheus, did write some very good episodes of Lost (even if the last season had some issues) and his recent HBO project, The Leftovers, had an excellent critical and popular response. But it does feel that either an original, deconstructionist take on superheroes could have been attempted, or maybe a superhero property that hasn't had a relatively recent adaptation (such as Wild Cards).

As it stands, the purpose and appeal of this project remains somewhat head-scratching. HBO seem to planning on hitting the ground running on this project though, with the show planned to hit the screens before the end of 2019.

Damon Lindelof penning frankly unnecessary WATCHMEN adaptation for HBO

Damon Lindelof has been tapped by HBO to adapt the graphic novel Watchmen, by professional writer-druid Alan Moore, to television, despite this not being anything anyone really needs in their life.

Zack Snyder helmed a perfunctory but perfectly serviceable movie version of Watchmen back in 2009. Although it was a little compressed fitting the big graphic novel into just two and a half hours, it got the job done and was reasonably faithful - maybe too faithful - to the novel. However, HBO have now picked up the TV rights so they can make a new version which will probably be pretty similar to the 2009 version, since it will have an identical plot and the same cast of characters, just with different actors playing them.

Scriptwriter Damon Lindelof will be helming the new project, as he continues to play Russian Roulette with his career. He charmed millions of fans with his TV series Lost, only to annoy them with a somewhat confused ending, and then really annoyed lots of people with his scripts for Star Trek (2009) and Prometheus (2012), which were both troubled. More recently, however, he has won plaudits for his work on HBO's The Leftovers, which recently concluded a three-season run with a lot of critical acclaim and plaudits.

Meanwhile, graphic novel fans have confirmed that there are more graphic novels in existence than just Watchmen, and if maybe someone wants to take a shot at one of those instead, that would be just fine.

The Longest SFF Novels of All Time

With the recent news that Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer is going to be very big indeed, I thought it'd be interesting to look at the longest SFF novels and series.

These lists are not exhaustive and consistency of reporting these figures can be quite variable. I have opted for word counts as the most accurate way of estimating length, as page counts can vary immensely based on page margins and font sizes.


Longest Novels

1. Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest
667,000 words • 1845-47

This long novel was serialised in "penny dreadfuls" of the mid-19th Century and chronicles the adventures of Sir Francis Varney, a vampire. This book's genre credentials have been disputed (with the suggestion that Varney is actually a madman rather than a real vampire), but there seems to be a general acceptance that the book is a genuine work of the fantastic, and the longest SFF work ever published in one volume (which it was in 1847). The book was also influential on Bram Stoker's later Dracula (1897) and introduced many of the tropes of vampire fiction, including the "sympathetic vampire" protagonist.


2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
645,000 words • 1957

Highly debatable as a genre work rather than a political novel, although the story is partially set against a dystopian background and genre historian John Clute identifies the novel as SF (plus it inspired the very SF Bioshock video game series and fantasy Sword of Truth series), so okay, we'll count it.


3. Jerusalem by Alan Moore
615,000 words • 2016

Alan Moore's prose magnum opus is a massive, dizzying and baffling journey into the surreal. It's so huge that it is available in a two-volume edition in a nice slipcase.


4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
545,000 words • 1996

Infinite Jest has primarily literary allusions, although the book's setting - a North American superstate consisting of a unified Canada, USA and Mexico - is a futuristic dystopia. The book could have even been bigger, with 250 manuscript pages trimmed for length by the publishers.

5. To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams
520,000 words • 1993

The concluding volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is bigger than the first two novels in the series (The Dragonbone Chair and Stone of Farewell) combined. A titanic, shelf-destroying novel, it is only available in mass-market paperback in two volumes, subtitled Siege and Storm.


6. The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon
502,000 words • 2001

The fifth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series, spiced up by a time-spanning culture clash, is absolutely gigantic.


7. A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
501,000 words • 2005

The sixth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series doesn't quite match its predecessor.


8. Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
500,000 words • 2000

Mary Gentle's novel is a dazzling mix of SF, historical drama, fantasy, alternate history and generaly bizarrity. The novel was published in one volume in the UK, but the American publishers released it as four in the USA.


9. Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (estimated)
495,000 words (estimated) • 2017

The final word count could go up or down, but Brandon Sanderson has estimated that the third volume of The Stormlight Archive will be 25% longer than the already-huge second volume.

10. The Stand by Stephen King
472,376 words • 1978

Stephen King's biggest novel in a single volume, notable for also foreshadowing The Dark Tower series. The above word count is for the expanded and revised edition.

11. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
470,000 words • 1954-55

This book needs no introduction. The most influential fantasy novel ever written, often incorrectly cited as the biggest genre novel of all time. Due to paper shortages after the Second World War, the book was released in three volumes, inadvertently creating the classic fantasy trilogy at the same time.


12. The Naked God by Peter F. Hamilton
469,000 words • 1999

The biggest space opera ever written, even more remarkable because it was the concluding volume of an even bigger trilogy, The Night's Dawn.


13. It by Stephen King
445,134 words • 1986

Arguably Stephen King's most famous single novel.


14. Sea of Silver Light by Tad Williams
443,000 words • 2001

This is the concluding volume of Tad Williams's fantasy/cyberpunk mash-up Otherland. Williams likes to end big.


15. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
422,000 words • 2000

George R.R. Martin started his Song of Ice and Fire series being somewhat concerned about the word count and went to great lengths to keep the first two books down to a friendly 300,000 words or so apiece, dropping chapters back into the next volume if necessary. However, with Martin planning a five year time-jump after this book, he had no choice but to write the story to its natural conclusion. The result was a book that pushed the UK publishers to the limits of what they could publish in one volume. The paperback version, in fact, was released in two volumes.


16. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
420,000 words • 2011

The difficult-to-write fifth volume in A Song of Ice and Fire ended up being somewhat longer than A Storm of Swords, but Martin cut it down to slightly shorter in the final sweat and edit.


17. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
415,000 words • 1999

Neal Stephenson's first gigantic book, but not his last (although this remains his longest book) is an interesting romp through WWII history, cryptography and weirdness. A stand-alone, but it also acts as a thematic prequel (and actual sequel) to his later Baroque Cycle.

18. An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon
402,000 words • 2009

The seventh Outlander novel is huge, but feels quite modest compared to the longest books in the series mentioned above.


19. Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon
401,000 words • 1996

The fourth Outlander novel. Given the several books in the series that are just under 400,000 words, I can only assume that the author gets through a lot of keyboards.


20. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
400,000 words • 2011

Patrick Rothfuss's sequel to The Name of the Wind is considerably larger. It remains to be seen if the final volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Doors of Stone, will be bigger still.


21. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
400,000 words • 2014

The second volume of The Stormlight Archive is about to lose its record-setting status as Sanderson's biggest novel and the biggest novel in the series to Oathbringer. But it's still pretty big.

Below 400,000 words, the number of fantasy and SF novels in that size bracket shoots up massively. So rather than try to come up with an exhaustive list, here's some notable SFF novels with their word counts:

• Lord of Chaos is the sixth and longest Wheel of Time novel, clocking in at 395,000 words.
• Toll the Hounds is the eighth and longest Malazan Book of the Fallen novel, reaching 389,000 words.
• Maia, by the late Richard Adams, is 379,130 words.
• Magician, by Raymond E. Feist, is a relatively breezy 313,410 words (about 330,000 words in the 1992 extended edition). Which makes the decision to publish the novel in two volumes in the United States (as Apprentice and Master) all the weirder.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is 309,000 words.
• Temple of the Winds, the longest Sword of Truth novel, is a modest 307,520 words in length.
• The Order of the Phoenix, the longest Harry Potter novel, is 257,045 words in length. That's over three times the length of the shortest novel in the series, The Philosopher's Stone. 
• The Sword of Shannara, the novel that gave birth of the modern fantasy genre, is a relatively modest 228,160 words. It's also still Terry Brooks's biggest novel, by far; none of the other Shannara novels top 200,000 words and only three top 150,000 words.
• SF is generally a lot shorter than fantasy, but the fact that Frank Herbert's seminal Dune is only 188,000 words - shorter than three of the Harry Potter books! - might be surprising.

The Longest SFF Series

This is a much more debatable list, since some series are more diffuse than others. The Riftwar books, for example, form nine distinct series, but also have narrative elements spanning all twenty-nine books in the series. The same is true of the Shannara series. The Discworld books I haven't even attempted to fit on here for this reason. This list is therefore a bit more speculative.

• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (15 volumes): 4,360,000 words.
• The Shannara Series by Terry Brooks (28 volumes, incomplete): 3,865,000 words.
• The Riftwar Cycle by Raymond E. Feist (29 volumes): 3,831,670 words.
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson (10 volumes): 3,274,000 words (5.5 million including all related works by Erikson and Ian Esslemont).
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (8 volumes, incomplete): 3,227,000 words.
• The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson (11 novels/1 anthology, incomplete): 2,971,940 words.
• The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind (11 volumes): 2,761,170 words (3,643,650 including the sequels).
• The Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts (9 volumes, incomplete): 2,600,000 words.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson (10 volumes): 2,062,000 words.
• The Belgariad/Malloreon by David & Leigh Eddings (12 volumes): 1,861,000 words.
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (5 volumes, incomplete): 1,749,000 words.
• Worm by John McCrae (30 "arcs"): 1,680,000 words.
• Crown of Stars by Kate Elliott (7 volumes): 1,622,720 words.
• The Solar Cycle by Gene Wolfe (11 volumes): 1,368,000 words.
• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson (3 volumes, incomplete): 1,275,000 words.
• The Dark Tower by Stephen King (8 volumes): 1,256,000 words.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton (3 volumes): 1,247,000 words.
• Otherland by Tad Williams (4 volumes): 1,189,000 words.
• The Second Apocalypse by R. Scott Bakker (7 volumes, incomplete): 1,172,000 words.
• Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams (3 volumes): 1,126,000 words (1,542,440 including The Heart of What Was Lost and The Witchwood Crown).
• The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (3 volumes): 1,125,000 words (1,540,000 including Cryptonomicon).
• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (7 volumes): 1,084,170 words (1,183,370 including The Cursed Child).
• Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (6 volumes, incomplete): 1,077,560 words.
• The Elenium/Tamuli by David Eddings (6 volumes): 1,006,000 words.
• The Sword of Shadows by J.V. Jones (4 volumes, incomplete): 945,047 words.
• Dune by Frank Herbert (6 volumes): 839,000 words.
• The Expanse by James S.A. Corey (6 volumes, incomplete): 834,000 words.
• The Acts of Caine by Matt Stover (4 volumes): 768,000 words.
• The First Law by Joe Abercrombie (3 volumes): 618,000 words (1,216,000 including the stand-alone sequels).

Why Page Counts Vary

It's remarkable what difference shifting a margin over by a few millimetres can make. One-volume editions of The Lord of the Rings, for example, can vary from 750 pages (for tiny-font editions on onion paper) to the better part of 2,000 (for large-print versions for readers with bad eyesight). Back in 2001 Pan Macmillan were able to squeeze thepaperback of The Naked God (469,000 words) into almost the exact same page count as its predecessor novel, The Reality Dysfunction (385,000 words) despite being significantly longer, just by manipulating font sizes and margins.

This is why page count is a poor guide to working out a novel's true length, and word count is more reliable indicator.

Word counts can also differ, depending on the programme used (most modern word counts come from the ebook editions) and how they count punctuation. Some counters will also include cast lists, footnotes and appendices, others will disregard them. The publishers may even give differing word counts because they did a count before the last edits were finalised, or they forgot that the new edition has more stuff in it.


Sources

SFF blogger Abalieno has been keeping tabs on book lengths over on Looping World for many years and some of these figures come directly from there. Excellent work from him there.

Reading Length is a great site which extracts book lengths from multiple sources and then works out how long it will take to read the book. It tends to the conservative, so some of the above figures may actually be less than what is actually the case. However, it does make mistakes: its word count for Dune, for example, is for the 50th anniversary edition which includes several hundred pages of bonus material which isn't part of the novel.

Novel Word Count doesn't seem to be as exhaustive as it was planned to be, but its Stephen King page is pretty good.

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Alan Moore's audiobook reader goes on 6,000 mile mission to meet him

Simon Vance is an experienced audiobook reader, known for his dulcet tones which are just right for reading lengthy novels (he's the guy who read a lot of Guy Gavriel Kay's stuff.. His latest gig is an epic one: he is recording the audiobook for Alan Moore's monster novel Jerusalem, which reportedly clocks in at over 600,000 words and 1,200 pages in hardcover (of presumably fairly small print), with an estimated audiobook run time well north of sixty-five hours.

Judging that this was a bit of a special occasion, Vance decided to meet the author and get some insight into the reportedly "difficult" novel, which shifts prose styles every chapter and includes several lengthy sections of verse (one of which extends over twelve pages, which even Tolkien might have balked at) and an entire play. The problem? Vance lives in San Francisco, California, and Moore lives in Northampton, right in the middle of England. And he only had a few days clear in his schedule. Cue a round-trip of 6,000 miles to visit the UK for just two days, only a few hours of which he got to spend with Moore (and he only got that because they have a mutual friend in Neil Gaiman).

Early reviews for Jerusalem indicate that it is a good book but also a massively challenging one, as Publisher's Weekly says:

"In this staggeringly imaginative second novel, Moore (Watchmen) bundles all his ruminations about space, time, life, and death into an immense interconnected narrative that spans all human existence within the streets of his native Northampton, U.K. Reading this sprawling collection of words and ideas isn't an activity; it's an experience... It's all a challenge to get through, and deliberately so, but bold readers who answer the call will be rewarded with unmatched writing that soars, chills, wallows, and ultimately describes a new cosmology. Challenges and all, Jerusalem ensures Moore's place as one of the great masters of the English language."

Jerusalem will be published on 13 September. The audiobook should be out around that time or later.

What will HBO's next big show be?

HBO have a problem, they've had it for a couple of years and it's getting more of a pressing issue as time goes on. In 2018, Game of Thrones will end and HBO will be left, for the very first time since 1998, without a big hit show that everyone is talking about.

Way back in 1998 HBO, still new to the original scripted drama game, debuted Sex and the City. It was a massive success, got lots of people talking and won HBO a huge number of subscriptions. HBO doubled down on this a year later when it began airing The Sopranos, a violent crime series about the life of mob boss who tries to keep his business running under constant surveillance. Over the next decade HBO aired many critically-acclaimed and popular dramas (including Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Deadwood, Big Love, Rome and The Wire, as well as mini-series like Band of Brothers, The Corner and John Adams) but The Sopranos and Sex in the City were the jewels in the network's crown.

Sex and the City ended in 2004. The Sopranos followed suit in 2007 and it looked like HBO might have to survive without a big, successful show on the air. However, by luck the following season they debuted a TV drama series about vampires. True Blood would go on to almost match the success and buzz of The Sopranos (although not quite the same level of critical acclaim). And just at the point that True Blood's critical and commercial success began waning in 2011, they debuted Game of Thrones, which would go on to become the most successful show in the network's history.

According to HBO, they've never "needed" a massive, genre-defining show to lead with. They get a lot of subscriptions for their sports and movie channels, and their original drama and comedy programming has really been an added bonus on top of that. Their top executives seem relatively sanguine about the possibility that they may end up in a situation where they have no massive, subscription-encouraging series on the air for a few years. How the reality of that feels after twenty years of being the top dogs will likely be a different story, however. More of an issue for HBO has been that original scripted cable drama used to be very much the field they owned exclusively, but now other channels such as Starz (Black Sails and Outlander), AMC (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad) and Showtime (the new Twin Peaks) are fighting for that space, not to mention the competition posed by Netflix and Amazon with their original programming. HBO isn't the automatic "go-to" network any more for talented creators who want to get a pet project on the air any more.

Paradoxically, despite HBO making quite staggering amounts of money, they have also become more risk-averse. They have cancelled shows after producing pilots and canned projects that should appear to be slam-dunk successes. Embarrassingly, some of these projects have gone on to great success on other networks and in other venues (most famously Mad Men, which HBO turned down and went to air with AMC).

More impressive is the fact that HBO turned down no less than three absolutely killer shows based on books which would have been a perfect fit for them and perfect follow-ups for Game of Thrones, being fantasy shows but "different" kinds of fantasy to Thrones. The first of these was The Dark Tower, based on the Stephen King novels. HBO developed this both as a joint TV-film cross-media project and then just as a TV show. However, HBO got cold feet and dropped it. It's been picked up by Sony Pictures as a major film project and shooting starts in a few weeks with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey starring. The second was Preacher, based on the violent but critically-acclaimed graphic novel series by Garth Ennis. The series was in an advanced state of development when HBO apparently (and uncharacteristically) got cold feet over the show's controversial stance on religion and dropped it. AMC picked it up and shooting has wrapped on the first season, which should debut in a few months. Early buzz on pilot screenings is extremely positive, and the show should make an excellent companion series for The Walking Dead. Finally, there was American Gods. HBO had developed multiple pilot scripts with Neil Gaiman, the writer of the novel, and had looked virtually certain to greenlight it when they very abruptly dropped it, to the puzzlement of just about everybody. Starz has since picked up the series and production is currently underway in Toronto.

So, we have to ask, what does HBO have on its development plate right now, what is available and what could they do to produce a follow-up hit show to Thrones? Let's take a look.

Westworld

Westworld is based on Michael Crichton's 1973 film of the same name and is set in a futuristic theme park where the robot exhibits start to break free and take control. This has an absolutely stellar cast, with Sir Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden and Thandie Newton starring and Jonathan Nolan writing and directing. The series is in the final stages of filming right now for a debut airdate expected at the end of this year. However, the show has experienced major production problems including a four-month filming shutdown amidst rumours over writing problems and controversy over some of the actors' contracts. In addition, the show seems to be mainly a cerebral affair about the future of artificial intelligence and consciousness, which will make for a stirring SF series (and this is HBO's first-ever outright science fiction show) but is unlikely to win over a mass audience.

Watchmen

Director Zack Snyder (The 300, Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice) actually made a movie of Watchmen in 2009, to a mixed critical reception (I liked it). However, even the most ardent admirers would have to admit that the film had to rush a lot of Alan Moore's material from the seminal 1985 graphic novel to fit into just two hours, so Snyder has gone to HBO with the intention of re-staging the story as a TV show (possibly drawing on some of the materials published since, such as the Beyond Watchmen project). HBO seem to be interested, but have not formally greenlit the project yet. With Snyder committed to Superman and Justice League movies for some time, this would likely be handled by other writers. To be honest, this could be a really good series, but I suspect it would only work as a mini-series rather than an ongoing, multi-year project.

Foundation

Jonathan Nolan has proposed a TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's seven Foundation novels to HBO, who have optioned the book rights ahead of further discussions and seeing a script. HBO took the step of buying the rights whilst they were already held by Roland Emmerich (who was developing a film before the buy-off), so seem to be pretty serious about this project. However, Nolan is now working on Westworld so this project has likely been kicked down the curb a fair ways.

Foundation is one of science fiction's most famous series. Set 22,000 years in the future, it chronicles the collapse of the vast Galactic Empire and the attempt by a scientific thinktank, the Foundation, to preserve scientific knowledge and wisdom through an estimated thousand years of barbarism to follow. The novels span roughly the first half of this period, culminating in the rediscovery of the long-forgotten homeworld of humanity, Earth.

This could make for an interesting series, especially if HBO adopt an anthology approach and jump forward decades or centuries between seasons a la True Detective. However, there will have to be a lot of invention for the series as Asimov's view of the future is seriously outdated by this time.

I, Claudius

As has been said a few times, Game of Thrones feels very much like a spiritual successor to Bruno Heller's excellent historical drama series Rome, which aired for two seasons and 23 episodes between 2005 and 2007. Rome was cancelled due to budgetary concerns, something HBO later regretted when they checked the DVD and foreign screening sales. However, HBO left the elaborate outdoor set in Italy standing as a tourist attraction and a filming location for other series and documentaries. In 2011 HBO announced that they were developing a fresh adaptation of Robert Graves's classic novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, previously filmed by the BBC in 1976. Given that the original plan was for Rome to jump forward to this story in its fourth or fifth season had it stayed on the air anyway, this could be very much a clever way of getting Rome back on the air, potentially using the same sets but sadly (due to a time-skip forward of several decades) not the same actors. However, HBO have not commented on the project in some years, so the enthusiasm for it may have fizzled out, which would be a shame as a new series set in Ancient Rome would be very welcome.

The Warlord Chronicles

HBO don't have the rights to this book trilogy, but Bad Wolf Productions do, having optioned it a few months ago. Bad Wolf also have a co-development deal with both HBO and the BBC, but the BBC are likely too busy with Bad Wolf's His Dark Materials series to take this on as well. Hopefully, HBO will give this a look. Written by Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom, Sharpe), The Warlord Chronicles are a "realistic" take on the legend of King Arthur, set during the 5th and 6th Centuries in a Britain riven by religious and political turmoil. The Roman Empire has collapsed, but some of the Roman settlers and armies remain. The native Britons are trying to re-establish themselves, but the first waves of Saxons are starting to invade from the east. Roman religious cults and the newly-arrived religion of Christianity are struggling against the native pagan druids and other old faiths. It's a time of great danger, enhanced when King Uther Pendragon dies and the protection of his infant son and heir Mordred falls to Uther's bastard child Arthur. Unable to ever become king, Arthur instead takes on the mantle of Warlord.

It's a rich and atmospheric take on the legend of King Arthur, noted for its much greater focus on realism. There were no knights (in the medieval sense), massive stone fortresses or armies in the tens of thousands at this time, so the focus is on fighting with spears and shields, holdfasts are mostly made of wood and a formidable army might only consist of a few hundred - or even a few dozen! - men. Merlin is a randy priest of the old faith, Guinevere is a warrior chief and Lancelot a warrior with tremendous PR skills. The whole story is being related in exacting detail by a warrior of the Round Table, Derfel Cadarn, to some monks. To his horror, they start "sexing up" the stories with magic swords and ladies in lakes, forming the legend as we currently know it.

This would make for a great follow-up to Game of Thrones, especially if handled by a good writer. It might only be a three-season project (the books are quite slim) but there's still plenty of excellent material to get onto the screen.

Wild Cards

This would be a very different kind of story to Thrones, but potentially one with broad appeal. This series of short story collections and "mosaic novels" began in 1987 with Wild Cards and now extends across 23 books and several comics. George R.R. Martin created the universe, edits all of the books and has written several stories for the series, but the stories are the actual creation of many other writers. It seems likely, especially if HBO decides not to proceed with Watchmen, that they'll want to dip their toes into the superhero genre at some point and this story of flawed people who are more likely to be broken or corrupted by their powers than turned into paragons is right up HBO's alley. It would also tie in with HBO's development deal with Martin and give them lots of stories to adapt as well as the freedom to create their own material. The rights were until recently held by SyFy, but are due to lapse imminently.

The premise of the series is that in 1946 an alien virus is released on Earth. Thousands of people are affected: 90% are killed, 9% turn into malformed "Jokers" with useless powers and abilities and 1% into "Aces" or outright superheroes. An alternative history of the 20th Century unfolds as the Aces and Jokers take part in historical events, face discrimination and try to make their own lives in a changed world.

Temeraire

This is a bit more of a stretch because HBO's name has not come up in relation to it. However, it would be a good fit. Years ago, Peter Jackson eyed Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels with the intention of turning them into films. However, first the Tintin trilogy and then the Hobbit movies got in the way. With two Tintin movies still to make and other projects on the fire, Jackson is likely years away from even getting close to making this as a film. A few years back he acknowledged this, combined with the problem of adapting nine books, and confirmed he was repurposing it as a TV series with him only taking a producer's credit.

HBO joining forces with Weta Workshop to make a TV show about dragons fighting for both sides during the Napoleonic Wars? That's a high concept that I think would be up HBO's street and I think could make for an entertaining (if highly-budgeted) show.

Alan Moore's million-word prose novel JERUSALEM gets a release date

Alan Moore is one of the most revered names in comics books, having written the seminal, acclaimed Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell and contributed to many of the most famous names in the field, including Batman (most notably The Killing Joke), Superman (most famously Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?) and Swamp Thing. He has now announced that he has completed a one million-word prose novel for release this September.

Moor has been working on Jerusalem for over a decade and has occasionally dropped hints as to what the book will be about. One element the book deals with is the "consciousness event horizon", the idea that our individual consciousnesses cannot conceive of our own deaths, so at the moment of death our consciousness "rewinds" to the moment of birth and we get to live our lives over again. Some ideas suggest we are trapped into making the same exact decisions and living the same life through each time, others suggest we have freedom to change things. What version of this idea Moore will be exploring, or if that old idea for the book even holds true, is unknown.

Based on the blurb, I suspect this will not be an easy read.

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the second-century Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent specters of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlors laborers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.

Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Alan Moore’s epic novel, Jerusalem, is the tale of Everything, told from a vanished gutter.

Jerusalem will be released on 13 September 2016.

New WATCHMEN comics on their way

This summer, DC will commence an ambitious project, Before Watchmen. This umbrella title covers seven separate mini-series, each one focusing on a character from the iconic original graphic novel, for a total of 34 issues released weekly.


The following characters or groups of characters are being featured:

• Rorschach - 4 issues, written by Brian Azzarello, art by Lee Bermejo.
• Minutemen - 6 issues, written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke.
• Comedian - 6 issues, written by Brian Azzarello, art by J.G. Jones
• Dr. Manhattan - 4 issues, written by J. Michael Straczynski, art by Adam Hughes.
• Nite Owl - 4 issues, written by J. Michael Straczynski, art by Andy & Joe Kubert
• Ozymandias - 6 issues, written by Len Wein, art by Jae Lee.
• Silk Spectre - 4 issues, written by Darwyn Cooke, art by Amanda Conner.

Each issue will also feature a two-page back-up strip called Curse of the Crimson Spectre, written by Len Wein with art by John Higgins.

Original series creator/writer Alan Moore is not supportive of the project in interview with the New York Times:

"...completely shameless...I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago...I don’t want money, what I want is for this not to happen."

Original artist Dave Gibbons is more diplomatic:

"The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted tell. However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire."

J. Michael Straczynski - yup, the Babylon 5 writer/creator - has a lengthy interview with Comic Book Resources here in which he discusses why he chose to take on the project.

In my view, this is an interesting idea but arguably an unnecessary one. The original Watchmen stands on its own two feet as a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. The idea of exploring the backstory in more detail is very enticing - the glimpses we get into the Minutemen's adventures are intriguing - but ultimately they can add little to the story as it originally stands. Regardless of Moore's approval or lack thereof - and Straczynski gives interesting reasons why that should or should not be an issue - there seems to be little to no storytelling reason to flesh out the universe in this way. I certainly hope to be proven wrong.

Before Watchmen kicks off in the summer with one new issue published per week, likely taking us through the end of this year.

Wertzone Classics: Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Published in 1986-87 as a 12-issue mini-series, Watchmen is the most critically-applauded graphic novel of all time. The comic industry's answer to Citizen Kane, this is a complex, literate story that belies its premise and makes maximum use of its medium to deliver a story that couldn't be told any other way (although the forthcoming movie adaption promises to have a damn good try). As well as its impact on comics, Watchmen is one of the defining modern works of science fiction (winning a Hugo Award in 1988), and was rated as one of the one hundred most important novels of the 20th Century by Time Magazine.

The book opens in 1985 with the murder of Edward Blake, a government-sponsored crimefighter who worked under the alias 'The Comedian'. A masked vigilante known as Rorschach investigates. Rorschach, the Comedian and a number of other 'superheroes' fought crime together until the 1977 Keene Act outlawed heroes unless they worked directly for the US government. Most of the heroes retired, but Rorschach turned vigilante. Apart from the Comedian, the only hero left in government employ is Dr. Manhattan. Unlike the other heroes, who are simply well-meaning ordinary people, albeit with superior mental or physical training, Dr. Manhattan is the real deal. In 1959 an experiment with intrinsic field theory went catastrophically wrong, disintegrating Dr. Jon Osterman and transforming him into a being with total mastery over matter.

Rorschach continues to investigate the crime, but tensions are rising between the United States, led by President Nixon (serving a fifth term of office after the mysterious deaths of two Washington Post investigative reporters in 1971), and the Soviet Union. With the nuclear doomsday clock ticking ever closer to zero and other retired crimfighters either being killed or attacked, it falls to a select group of people to try and discover who or what is driving the world towards destruction.

It's a classic set-up, but you might argue not a revolutionary one. The trick is in the details. The world of Watchmen, which is on one hand close to that of the 'real' 1985 and on the other totally different, is meticulously constructed with every logical ramification of the existence of a genuine superhero pursued to its end. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan's scientific genius, the world is largely pollution-free, thanks to cheap electric cars and clean airships that provide international transport. Unfortunately, Manhattan's role as a nuclear deterrent and his assistance in helping the USA win the Vietnam War in just three months has also encouraged American imperialism and belligerence, slowly pushing Russia into a diplomatic corner from where it may feel it has no choice but to lash out. The other 'superheroes' are just ordinary people who like to dress up and fight crime, but largely they come to realise that their efforts are for nothing, since they cannot fight the underlying social and economic conditions that are the breeding ground for petty criminals.

As well as the characters involved in the story itself, the narrative spins backwards in time to investigate the prior generation of heroes and what role they are playing in events, and also encompasses a number of ordinary people on the streets of New York City who are witnesses to events: a newsstand vendor and his most regular customer, a young man obsessed with a pirate comic called Tales of the Black Freighter (which acts as a commentary and reflection on the main narrative, whose author plays a minor role in the story); a criminal psychiatrist driven to despair by his patients; and a homicide detective whose investigation of the Comedian's murder threatens his own career. It's a vast, dizzying web of storytelling with each storyline interconnected with many of the others in surprising and revelatory ways, and a commentary on superheroes and their psychology, capitalism, world politics and the morality of war.

As well as Moore's astonishing script, Dave Gibbons delivers excellent, detail-filled, rich artwork which captures the nuances of the story perfectly. Rereading the book, the reader discovers more details, more clues to the story that they missed on a first reading.

Watchmen (*****) is, twenty years after it was first published, still as astonishing, readable, entertaining and thought-provoking as ever, and still stands at the very apex of its approach to storytelling. The graphic novel is available from DC Comics in the UK and USA. A special edition of the comic book, Absolute Watchmen, featuring production notes and a new, clearer reprinting of the artwork, is also available in the UK. A movie adaption, directed by 300's Zack Snyder, is currently in post-production and will be released in March 2009. A trailer (set appropriately to the Smashing Pumpkins' 'The Beginning is the End is the Beginning') can be found here.