YMMV / Before Watchmen

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Travis Bickle shows up out of nowhere, and gives Rorschach a ride through Times Square. Weirdly enough, they seem to like each other.
• Broken Base: Do yourself a favor, don't ask the online fanbase if the prequels are good or not. Even the better acclaimed ones by Cooke and Straczynski have their own share of detractors.
• Complete Monster: Unlike the original comic, which deals with the moral ambiguity of so-called masked heroes, here we get to see exactly what they faced:
  • Minutemen: Rolf Müller is a sadistic child Serial Killer, possibly having targeted and molested Hooded Justice when he was a boy. Joining the Nazis for the opportunity to torture children to death in an orphanage, Müller was eventually discharged by the Nazis for being too revolting even by their standards, continuing his usual operations under the guise of a circus strongman afterward.
  • Nite Owl: Reverend Taylor Dean is a preacher who strangled a hooker he was sleeping with after she tried to blackmail him, at which point he realized he enjoyed killing. Choosing to target prostitutes as they are "sinners" against God, Dean kills well over 30 hookers, male and female, young and old, and creates a massive shrine of more than 20 of their corpses to be burned as a sacrifice to God. Hoping to burn Rorschach alive in the process, Dean hopes that his "offering" will result in God blessing him and the city to get rid of more sin, and plans to continue killing people he decides are sinners over and over, repeating the process as he believes he is blessed by God and can't be stopped, and when Twilight Lady tries to take him down, Dean attempts to strangle her to death while shooting off sexually violent remarks.
  • Rorschach: "The Bard" is a Serial Killer who kidnaps women, mutilates their bodies by "writing" on them with a knife, and then dumps their corpses for the world to see. Killing many women this way and increasing the speed and intensity of his murders, the Bard lures his long-time waitress and friend Nancy into a dark alley, where he brutally assaults and mutilates her before slashing her throat and leaving her to die. The Bard gets off nearly scot-free with his killings after being acquitted by a jury, with every indication he hopes to continue his spree before Rorschach murders the madman in revenge for Nancy.
  • Silk Spectre: The Chairman is an amoral music producer who peddles an altered version of LSD to eager teenage consumers to make them more vulnerable to corporate suggestion. The Chairman is apathetic about the rash of overdoses and near-deaths the drug causes, and the moment his operation is in danger, the Chairman opts to have everyone even tangentially connected to it murdered, from witnesses to his own security and staff.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Silhouette gained a small fandom with the release of the series even though she's alive for only 4 issues of Minutemen. The expansion of her backstory, her love interest, and her relationship with her teammates being praised as a good use of an Ascended Extra. Her redesign into a classy suit, trench coat and boots, was also well received.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Most of the original's fans are ignoring these titles, presumably since Alan Moore famously dismisses everything outside of the original novel. Even Dave Gibbons, despite encouraging the writers and artists, clarifies that the only thing he considers canon is what he and Alan Moore worked on together. Given that these comics Retcon several ideas from the original graphic novel it's understandable.
  Dave Gibbons: "As far as I'm concerned, what Alan and I did was the Watchmen graphic novel and a couple of illustrations that came out at the same time. Everything else - the movie, the game, the prequels - are really not canon. They're subsidiary. They're not really Watchmen. They're just something different."
  • Interestingly the Watchmen Wiki has decided that these comics are instead canon with Doomsday Clock, and take place in what is considered the DC timeline.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Issue 2's cover depicts a younger Eddie Blake cheerfully beating someone to death with a baseball bat. A few years later Jeffery Dean Morgan, who played The Comedian in the film adaptation, would later go on to play Negan, a character who also heavily enjoys bashing people's heads in with a baseball bat.
• Jerkass Woobie: Moloch in the first half of the series, embracing crime after the bullying and hate he received as a child.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "It's time to shit," a line by the Comedian in his series that pretty much instantly became a meme for embodying everything wrong-headed about the whole project. People were very happy to edit it pretty much anywhere, such as using it to replace Comedian's dialogue in the original.
  • "Bitch to be you right now," a line by Rorschach that followed the exact same track as the above. The two are often paired together.
• Smurfette Breakout: Silk Spectre is the best-loved of the Before Watchmen series by the old-school Watchmen fandom.
• The Woobie:
  • In Minutemen, all Byron Lewis wanted to do was use his flying harness for good, but his subsequent career as a costumed hero wreaks havoc on his physical and emotional health, and by the end of the miniseries, he's confined to a sanitarium.
  • Moloch in the last half of his miniseries. The poor guy...

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