Valerie D’Orazio speculates on what DC might do as a potential sequel to The Watchmen. There may have been an opening for that when the movie came out, but I think the time has passed. We’re back to the only people who care about it are comic book fans and they’re likely to resist. Then again, they may resist in spirit but but it anyway. But if they do choose to go forward with a series, D’Orazio’s idea isn’t bad. The only exception is that it would probably need to be a prequel rather than a sequel so that you can include the characters that died in the making of the series. Plus, while I suspect I am more amenable to commercial follow-ups than most fans (I can ignore it if I don’t like it), I think that it is important to leave the ending on an ambiguous note rather than specifying whether the New Frontier read the article or not.

Having gotten that out of the way, one thing that DC really needed to do was capitalize on the publicity surrounding the movie by releasing new and original artwork. The series doesn’t have much in the way of splash pages with the main characters. There aren’t a whole lot of pictures of the individual characters that don’t have word balloons and whatnot in them. There is no clean image of the picture taken of the Minutemen and comparatively few of the Watchmen characters together. Further, by releasing a gallery, you can take advantage of the story without much fear of backlash from changing or sullying it. It wouldn’t be hard to get a whole bunch of artists on board. I would probably pay a pretty penny for it. It would be relatively inexpensive to make.

It they can sell galleries with Batman and Superman and so on where there are thousands upon thousands of great splash artwork, I would expect such a venture with Watchmen could be lucrative. Most of the upsides of a follow-up series with almost none of the downsides.