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About a week ago, a friend relayed to me his disgust over walking into a certain bookstore chain and greeted by a pyramid of Watchmen-related merchandise, including action figures of the heroes. Of course, there are so many things wrong with this sight, as any Watchmen reader would know ("It's like you walked into Ozymandias' souvenir shop," my friend hissed). There are unruly images that come up when you imagine these characters as toys. Nite Owl! With realistic impotence feature! The Comedian! Now with action rape grip! Brr.

Poor Alan Moore must be going out of his mind. The Watchmen creator, already famous for his cantankerous opposing of the movie, is not exactly a fan of this sort of merchandising. Now it's not just action figures. In anticipation of the movie, stores are racking up Watchmen mugs, Watchmen calendars, Watchmen lunchboxes and yes, even Watchmen coffee. Capitalism at its best.

I wonder if they also have Shark Repellent Nite Owl Spray...

Organic Coffee Cartel, under the guise of the fictional Veidt Enterprise, is selling the Nite Owl Dark Roast on Amazon. Yes, even a wink-and-nod joke in the film is turned into an actual marketable product. In the actual movie, the coffee is featured briefly as a way to satirize Batman's status as Aesop's goose in the merchandising world.

In Watchmen lore, it's only one of the many signs of how Adrian Veidt (formerly the costumed crimefighter Ozymandias) has sold out and turned into a corporate mogul, cashing in on his former teammates' well-known likenesses. There's a scene where Rorschach visits him and calls him a "prostitute" for turning his back on justice to build a conglomerate empire—which can be seen as Moore's distaste for superheroes being used as commodities rather than pieces of storytelling.

It's hard to believe that before all this movie business, one of the most popular and acclaimed graphic novels of all time never had its characters turned into toys. We're so used to thinking of action figures and comic heroes going hand-in-hand that this sounded like some kind of miracle. I assure you, it's not for lack of trying.

Back in 2000, DC Comics tried to release a set of Watchmen action figures to coincide with the book's 15th anniversary. Alan Moore was able to stop them from ever going on sale because, though DC owns Watchmen completely, they need Alan Moore's okay to distribute the products; as the creator of the property, Moore retains Moral Rights to veto derivative works even though he doesn't own it. The reason why we can have all these Watchmen merchandise now is because they're all labeled as tie-ins of Warner Bros' Watchmen movie—which, by Moore's own request, doesn't have his name anywhere near it, therefore forfeiting his moral rights.

Perhaps the action figures figure little in the film, but the irony is also part of the bigger picture. While Watchmen is a complex novel full to the brim with ideologies and themes, at its basic core it's a deconstruction of the superhero mythos. It posits a world where the costumed "heroes" are real people with not just flaws and vices, but also certifiable personality disorders. Watchmen suggests that it takes someone literally insane, fetish-obsessed or desperate to go out and fight crime in a costume; and anyone with honest-to-gosh superpowers like Superman would be a deity rather than a "superhero." The idea of these people being corporate goods is laughable at best—if not utterly and frighteningly disturbing.

From this...

To this...?

It's not exactly hypocrisy, since the man who made the anti-corporate claims is not at all involved in the making or approval of these products, but like the Fight Club video game, it is a blatant disregard of shame. They know it's satirized in the source material, but they also know that tie-ins make mad money. It's willful ignorance.

The real hypocrisy, if there is one, lies in the consumers. And by consumers, I'm including myself in this. Like many from my generation, I grew up in a Disney-tinted world where the notion that any kind of popular art would be accompanied by a profitable product is simply common occurence.

Entrenched in the world of fanboys, I know the value of displaying a certain product related to a work of art I love. It's a way to quickly display fandom and pride, by encouraging the mass-production of useless crap. I myself made a Rorschach figure a few years ago using a Munny doll, some colored markers and a piece of tissue—cheap! I think I robbed four Asian kids of their factory jobs just by doing that. Take that, DC.

Until that doomsday clock strikes twelve and we find ourselves in the face of an Armageddon that forces us to change our ways, we might as well admit: we live in Adrian Veidt's world.

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In case you need more merchandise horrors, here are just a few of them, but it gives you an idea of the kind of insanity people will come up with when they want to make a buck. If I see just one kid on their way to school with a Dr. Manhattan lunchbox, I'm going to ask them if they like big blue dicks.