The Dawn of Watchmen

Back in 1985, Neil Gaiman, a young journalist at the time, wrote a profile of Alan Moore a few months before the release of the first issue of Watchmen. Back in last week, Gaiman posted a scan of that article to his blog. Sharing that same spirit of mining the past for fun reading, I've decided to tackle some of my old comic press magazines for content, too. I'm kicking off with a bit about Watchmen.

What I have here is the 1985 Preview issue of Amazing Heroes, a spectacular mag that's been discontinued for some time now. Amazing Heroes was published by Fantagraphics (go now and buy stuff from them) and covered "mainstream" comics as passionately as, say, The Comics Journal (which is also published by Fantagraphics) covers graphic storytelling in all its forms.

dig that Jaime Hernadez cover...sigh...

I could write a whole post on Amazing Heroes alone. A few years ago, I switched collector gears from buying stuff like single issues of random comics to buying stuff like single issues of random comics AND comics magazines. Especially stuff from 1985-1987, the comics era I'm most obsessed with in terms of wondering how BAD ASS it must have been to be a fan at the time. So, in my quest to recreate the feeling of being able to snag issues such as Dark Knight Returns #4, Watchmen #5 or, I dunno, Raw #8 off the new comics rack, I buy comics magazines from the era. And oh, how the treasure flows.

For instance, in this 1985 Preview, we get the following bit on Watchmen. This is the first that Amazing Heroes ever covered the book. Just try to wrap your head around that. Imagine you work at Amazing Heroes - a magazine whose staff included Heidi MacDonald, Mark Waid, Peter Sanderson and many other names you may recognize nowadays - and you speak to people at DC Comics and they say, "Oh, we have this book called Watchmen coming out from Alan Moore, the Swamp Thing writer, and Dave Gibbons. Maybe you should cover that in your Preview issue. We think it may be big" Guh. Here's what writer Frank Plowright had to say

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I thought it'd be nice to also add a scan of another article by Frank Plowright about a mystery project "coming in 1985" from Fantagraphics. Anybody know what this was/became/if it came out?

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Hope you enjoy! And all due respect to the former writing staff, editors and publishers of Amazing Heroes. I hope I'm not angering anybody by posting these. I'm just posting because I want to share with fans whom I'm sure would like to read this stuff, but may not be able to get their hands on it. I'm not sure the legalities of posting portions of content from magazines that no longer exist, so I apologize in advance if I'm doing anything wrong here. Please contact me if you know otherwise.