I wasn't gonna buy it. I really wasn't. Seventy-five bucks, I said, is a lot of money for a book I've already owned three copies of (two went missing when I made the mistake of lending the paperbacks out). But I did it. Because I'm a chump. And sweet mother of God, was it worth it. The smell (yes, the smell) of the book alone justifies the price. I don't know what sort of ink they printed with, but the whole book smells like fresh oil paints. Glorious. This means you can't spend more than 10 minutes in an unventilated room without incurring severe, possibly permanent brain damage, but it's a great smell. The whole thing's recolored. Not in the current Photoshop style (wih lots of reflections and lens flares and crap), but rather in a refined variation on the original coloring. It's subtle, but it's there, and very much better than the original. Bonus materials: Great. The character designs, early art, original proposal, writer/artist notes, and script excerpts add another 40 pages or so, bringing the total pagecount for this volume up to around 86,000, and gross weight to that of a Volkswagen. In summation: It's bigger, longer, prettier, better-smelling, and much shinier than any previous version of Watchmen. If you're a diehard fan of this story, snag one. Sell your loved ones into indentured servitude if you have to. I don't relish telling Mom why my brother won't be coming home for Thanksgiving, but it'll be worth it.
DC certainly don't do high end reprints by half, my copy of the Green Arrow/Green Lantern slipcased hardcover is the most nicely produced book that I own.
eh. as much as i loved and rever LOEG, i havent the nerve to splurge on the super duper expensive repackaged HC version. ive read watchmen couple'a times but yet to buy myself the regular TPBK. only for the l33t i guess.
Amazon has it for $47.25. I'm should be getting mine in a couple of days. I love these Absolute editions. I can't wait for Crisis Absolute. Hush Absolute rocked!! I was they did Kingdom Come like this.
Must get Crisis, I missed the first hardcover and I could never bring myself to pay the absurd aftermarket price it commands. I'll be suprised if there isn't a new Kingdom Come hardcover next year for the 10th anniversay.
If it wasn't so much I'd be all over it. I guess my old paperback will have to suffice. RabidYak that sig is beautiful.
I'm waiting for mine to come in. I'm ordering this just because I never got around to buying the TPB yet (only borrowed it from the library), and since this has extras from the long out-of-print hardcover, I think I can forgo the TPB. Anyone notice that the lettering for the ABSOLUTE WATCHMEN title seems similar to the lettering for ABSOLUT VODKA?
I've got Deadman and the first Batman volume as well, althougth I was none too happy with the redone inks and colours that some of the strips in those books have.
I agree rabid yak about the first neal adams batman book's colors for some of the stories, i just don't look right. I think it does not help his very excellent art. I want the watchmen hc and the LOEG ones. My favorite absolute book is planetary volume 1 reprinting 1-12 of my favorite comic of all time.
They kind of already did, way back when. I've got my hardback w/bonus + slipcase sitting around here, somewhere ... -XCN-
I'm tempted to pick this up myself. I bought the Crisis Hardcover many moons ago and love it. Although it really pisses me off that they are going to do a new Crisis hardcover. When the one I got was released they said they wouldn't re-print it again. Then the next year the paperback came out. I was ok with that as the Hardcover had that great Perez/Ross cover. Now I see they are making a new Crisis hardcover and going back on their own word. I know it's a buisness, but that was the big selling point of the book, "Printed to order, will never be reprinted again". I still kick myself for not getting that Kingdom Come Slipcased set. I did however get the Kingdom Come Hardcover novelization signed by Ross, Waid and Maggen (the guy that did the novelization).
Just got mine in the mail today. Yes, the coloring is very close to the original, but did anyone notice that the pirate comic segments now have the dot coloring in the style of the older comics? It's kinda like the contrast in Moore's SUPREME between 90's Supreme and Golden Age/Silver Age/Bronze Age Supreme flashbacks. Lots of great extras, including a comparison between the Charlton characters from the original proposal and the Watchmen characters that replaced them.
To be fair though, I think the CRISIS hardcover came out back when the TPB market wasn't quite as major as it is now, and they probably weren't sure if it'd do well.
I know, and I'm not really upset about the trade paperback edition. I'm glad others got to read one of my all time favorite Maxi-series. But to go ahead and make another hardcover version with more stuff in it, after I paid 100 bucks for the first one is kind of like a slap in the face. But that is buisness and nothing I can do about it, hell I'll probably buy the new version as well.
Yup. That's actually one of the first things I caught before going back and literally doing a page-by-page comparision of what they'd changed. The dot-printing really pops, given that there are absolutely NO dots in any of the other printing. Any normal comic, despite how well printed, has those dots. They aren't as blatantly obvious as they used to be, but as an artifact of the printing process, they're there (You have to look really closely, but they exist). This thing... I don't know how they did it, but the entire book (with the exception of the pirate bits) is completely SOLID color, and holds up to the closest scrutiny.
