The Mary Sue: Watchmen, Damon Lindeloff’s massive and ambitious remix of the iconic comic book, is simply one of the best shows airing on television right now. Last night’s episode, “An Extraordinary Being,” was the high point of a season that’s reinvented itself with each episode.
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I always love reading about how people come up with their ideas. It is interesting to see what they think about and pull from that works its way into a completed creation. Such is heavily present here as the Costume Designer for Watchmen considered that the costumes would be made by ordinary people and wouldn’t be super fancy. Essentially, they would be something I could probably make. That is really cool! The thing is, it also makes a lot of sense and it isn’t something we, the viewers or said television show, will think about but we do get that message subconsciously. A great scene comes to my mind to illustrate something like this and that’s the series of scenes in Deadpool where Deadpool is going around killing people to find this one guy and changes costumes every time because he notices one thing new each time until he has finally come to the right costume for him to wear. That is what reading about these things feels like, its totally logical but unless I read about it, I usually just get the message without the reasoning.
I've never seen Watchmen, nor have I ever really heard of it, but these costumes look really cool. Like the article said, it takes place in a timespan of one hundred years, which makes it a little more difficult to design. It is overwhelming, yet it still must be exact. However, designing with such a broad time period might give the designer some freedom. Noticing how fluid fashion styles are, they tend to blend into each other (except silly bands. those things just went extinct one day). Therefore, with the audience's awareness of that large time frame, it may give the designer a broader scope of the fashions of the show's times.
Also, designing for a pre existing storyline is often harder than designing new work because people already expect what your designs should look like before you even think of anything. Judging from the comic book pages, the designer did a great job capturing the essences of the characters.
Wow, these costumes look amazing! I always am interested in how costume designers for these comics work with an existing material. You already have a dedicated fanbase who is expecting their characters to look a certain way. I also wonder how much the comic owners have influence in what the design looks like. How much can the costumer change? I am trying my hardest to remember back to when Ruth E. Carter came and did her talk to the student body last fall, but I cannot remember if she said how much Marvel had a say in how close to the source material her Black Panther costumes had to look. I do recall her saying that every single rendering had to be passed through Marvel for approval. I can assume that it is the same for the Watchmen costume designer a well. I am interested to see future comics and graphic novels to be adapted to the screen and to see what would happen if the designs are completely changed.
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