Trivia / Before Watchmen

• Disowned Adaptation: Alan Moore has expressed distaste with the existence of the series ^note  he's been pretty bitter about anything Watchmen related that he wasn't involved in. Dave Gibbons, however, is more supportive, if not slightly ambivalent since he stated that he considers the prequel "subsidiary but not really Watchmen" and does not consider it canon.
• Recycled Script: The Crimebusters scene and the death of the Comedian in particular.
  • Subverted with Dr. Manhattan when the Crimebusters scene is presented in a retconned version that doesn't correlate with what it was like in the original Watchmen.
  • For Ozymandias:
    • Several passages where Adrian describes his past are taken verbatim from the original Watchmen. The first issue is about 50% recycled, in fact.
    • The Crimebusters scene is repeated word for word, but with new art.
    • The part where Moloch meets Adrian after being released from prison has Adrian greeting him saying the exact same thing as in the Moloch series, though Adrian's posture isn't the same, and his car is a different model.
• The Comedian appears in more titles than any other character. Rorschach and Curse of the Crimson Corsair are the only ones where he doesn't show up.
• No character appears in all of the books.
• Rorschach is the only one of the books to feature no one from the original Watchmen except for the titular character, and to not reference any plot elements of the original.
• Several scenes appear in multiple titles. The most frequently seen of these is the Crimebusters meeting from the original series, which appears in Ozymandias, Nite-Owl, Silk Spectre and Dr. Manhattan.
• Prequel Gap: Around 25 years after the last issue of Watchmen was initially published.
• Schedule Slip: Several of the series have been delayed for unspecified reasons.
• What Could Have Been: The basic idea of a Watchmen prequel dates as far back as Alan Moore himself coming up with ideas for one during the Minutemen days, and said had he not been stiffed by DC, he would have actually worked on Minutemen. The story we got about them here wound up being vastly different from what Alan Moore originally planned. In an interview around the time of Watchmen being published and before DC stiffed him (i.e the honeymoon period), Moore suggested that Minuteman would have been a huge stylistic shift, recapturing the innocent and childlike attitude of the Golden Age. Dave Gibbons confirmed this, "In fact, the next thing we would’ve done after Watchmen would’ve been something like Captain Marvel, you know, something really light and mythical."

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