OK...I admit it. I've been counting the days for the release of Watchmen. I have a couple of students who are Watchman fans and we share stories and hopes about the movie. I won't be at the opening night but will make it to an evening performance sometime this week. Jim Kakalios, the author of The Physics of Superheros was a consultant for the film and this interview about the Science of Watchmen is on YouTube. (Embedded below)Clever way to move a discussion of the movie into a discussion of science with your students.
If you haven't read the graphic novel, give it a shot. Comic books were my gateway drug into short stories and then to novels. As an adult, I moved away from comics and never got caught up in the graphic novels that started coming out while I was a young man. I resisted the Watchmen for years. Finally, after reading that TIME magazine listed it as one of the best 100 English language novels from 1923 to the present, I gave in and read it last year. I loved it. It's complex and multi-layered. It's the kind of thing you can read over and over. I convinced my wife who never read comics to read it. She was skeptical. She likes science fiction though, so out of love for me and the genre gave it a try. She loved it, too. If I was still in a reading group, I'd recommend it as a novel for discussion. Give it a try and then casually mention to your students that you read it. At least one little Watchman groupie will come up to talk to you about the book afterwards.
