American Flagg!

I'm SO on board the Watchmen hype train, I could be the engineer.

I remember telling a creative writing prof I had in 1989 that he should check the Watchmen out, that it was one of the greatest novels of all time and he sort of smirked haughtily and assumed it was the Mickey's Bigmouths talking.

I stand by this! Born out by such endorsements as being on Time magazine's 100 best novels of the 20th century list! Etc!

So, when I started seeing stills and then the PREVIEW (!) for the movie, I assumed they would foul it up. I mean, back in the Joel Silver days, Arnold Schwarzenegger was mooted for Dr. Manhattan, for cry yi. But it doesn't indeed look excellent and the level of venom that serially tetchy series creator Alan Moore has spewed at all and sundry serves as a ringing endorsement.

But, before the Watchmen, there was the hyper-futuristic American Flagg, which ran as a series starting in 1983. Reuben Flagg is an actor reassigned as a cop in a bombed out, gang-ridden Chicago. He traffics with all sorts of sleazy types, all of them from the gallery of writer/artist Howard Chaykin's sorta 1930s-styled future for which he is famous. And Reuben Flagg himself is another handsome Jewish hero who looks more than a bit like his creator.

There is a new compilation out of this series, to make this nerdy-as-hell post at all topical.