Who Watches The Watchmen?

This is a mock-up shot for the forthcoming Watchmen movie from Zach Snyder, showing everyone's favourite psychopath - Rorschach - with the iconic, blood-splattered smiley face badge of the murdered Comedian.

According to Snyder, Wes Coller, one of the associate producers on 300, donned the trechcoat for the shot - which he stressed, over on ComicBookMovie.Com, is "just for fun". The single-frame shot was hidden in R-rated trailers for 300 ... but with modern technology and the internet, nothing stays hidden for long!

This adaptation has had a long and rocky history since the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comics came out in the mid-80s and turned the world of sequential art on its head. Many names have been attached to the project over the years - including Terry Gilliam - as either writers or directors, and Moore himself has called his masterpiece "unfilmable" ... but then again Lord of The Rings was always described as "unfilmable" but that didn't stop Peter Jackson from crafting his tour de force.

For me, Watchmen crystallised a teenage passion for superhero comics into a full-blown adult hobby. Suddenly there was literary merit and depth in the four-colour antics that had mesmerised an impressionable youth... and almost simultaneously HeroPress was also born.

Zack Snyder, the man who's already given us a version of Dawn of The Dead that was better than the already brilliant original and the epic 300, has a real challenge on this hands with Watchmen - the eyes of geekdom are on him and they are very unforgiving! The film isn't scheduled for release until late 2008, possibly even 2009, and no cast members have been named yet (although Zack has guaranteed Gerard Butler, who worked with Snyder as Spartan King Leonidas in 300, a role).