Watchmaker

THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE SEMINAL GRAPHIC NOVEL WATCHMEN CHANGED THE MEDIUM, SHOWRUNNER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DAMON LINDELOF HOPES TO HONOUR THE WORK THAT INSPIRED HIM

- Tara Bennett

THEY SAY, “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.” For television showrunner/writer Damon Lindelof, there are certain topics he knows very well, and tackles often in his series such as Lost and The Leftovers: mysterious and supernatural phenomena, deeply conflicted characters, parental issues, faith and grief.

But there’s another topic he also knows intimately, yet he’s never tackled it until now: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen.

“I’ve been in love with Watchmen from the moment that I first met it. And that love has never wavered,” Lindelof tells SFX on the phone from his office in Los Angeles. The 12-issue series from the mid-eighties was the first real deconstruction of superheroes in the comics medium, positing what impact these “heroes” would have (at that time) on modern America if their power wasn’t always used for good, or the betterment of mankind.

Trippy, nihilistic, disturbing, yet darkly comedic and non-linear in its presentation, Watchmen rocked young Lindelof’s world and, in some way or another, it has inspired everything he’s written professionally. “I can tell you with a very high degree of certainty that had Watchmen never been written, I would not be where I am, there would be no Lost,” he states emphatically.

THIRD TIME LUCKY

In the years since Lost, Lindelof admits he’d been approached twice about adapting the book, which he says was flattering, but he was too scared to even contemplate it. But after he put