Unlike writing partner Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons signed up when Hollywood called to do an adaptation of the pair's seminal graphic novel, Watchmen. Gibbons, who turns 60 next month, got his start illustrating British comics until the early 1980s, when DC Comics recruited him to work on Green Lantern titles. Following is an excerpt of an interview Gibbons gave to Wired. Click here to read more of the interview.

Wired: Were you involved at all in any of the earlier attempts to make the [Watchmen] movie?

Gibbons: No. A long, long time ago, when the world was young, Alan and I had a meeting with Joel Silver, who owned the rights at one point. He was very keen that Arnold Schwarzenegger should be Dr. Manhattan. He was also very keen that Arnold Schwarzenegger should be Sergeant Rock, which is even more of a stretch. Apart from that I knew nothing until this Zack Snyder production. I think Alan had met very briefly with Terry Gilliam when he was attached to it at some point in the '90s. But actually I used to get my news from my mum when she was alive. She'd phone me up having read something in a tabloid newspaper and say, "Oh, David, David, that Monty Python man's going to make your comic into a film. Oh, that will be funny." That was as much as I knew.

I've been quite involved with the Zack Snyder one. I introduced myself to him at the U.K. premier of 300, and right from the very beginning we kind of hit it off, and I really had that gut feeling that he was going to do it properly. And I must say everything that I've seen since has only increased my confidence, to the point that I just think it's a wonderfully fortuitous piece of timing and the right man at the right place at the right time.

Wired: He definitely has a vision for it. I mean he definitely sees it, you know.

Gibbons: Oh yeah. He does completely get it. I'm absolutely sure of that.

Wired: It is the kind of thing that, as you suggest from talking to Joel Silver about it, that not everybody has been able to get. Not everybody has been able to think you could film it.

Gibbons: The graphic novel is the graphic novel. But the whole thing about Watchmen is it is self-contained. It is a story. It's not a thing that's like a Batman movie or a Superman or Spider-Man or Iron Man movie, where there is this character and he or she can have this infinite number of adventures, and you pull elements from one story and elements from another story and make a big deal of some particular aspect that you've chosen from a comic book. I mean, Watchmen is a story that has to hit all the beats of that particular story, that has to include the facts of that story. So I think it was always going to be a great challenge.

In the '90s, the vogue was very much for action movies, and I can imagine a version of Watchmen as an action movie that would have been disastrous. I think also the fact that comic book movies seem to be evolving in the same kind of way as comic books has meant that the timing is good as well. It's strange, because when Watchmen was out, The Dark Knight Returns was also out, which was Frank Miller's version of a very dark Batman. So you had The Dark Knight and Watchmen together then at that particular point in comic book history. You've now got The Dark Knight and Watchmen together at this particular point in comic movie history, and I think that the movie-going public is now familiar enough with the superhero movie, indeed has grown up with the superhero movie, to the point that Watchmen can ask the questions and people will understand the resonance of the questions and the kind of icons that are being smashed.

Wired: So, that's the real trick, right? That the idea has to be that Watchmen came out at a time when comic book readers and the industry were finally ready to interrogate some of the basic notions of what they'd been doing for 50 years?

Gibbons: Yeah, yeah.

Wired: So, the notion would be now that comic book movies, if you consider them in your current form, have been around since Christopher Reeve's Superman maybe? So, 30 years? And now it's time to start asking questions about those conventions too?

Gibbons: I think so. However, just as Alan and I always—not "regretted," because it was something that was beyond our control—but what we slightly deplored was that following Watchmen and Dark Knight everything in comics became dark and dirty, and grim and gritty, and often really depressing and somewhat tedious. I would hate to think that from now on the only possible flavor of superhero movies would be, you know, dark and down. The one thing that Alan and I discussed that we would ever do after Watchmen was that it would have been great to do something like Captain Marvel, the original Shazam Captain Marvel, that was almost like a fairy tale, something very, very allegorical. I think that the superhero genre has many, many flavors. It's a shame if any one of them pushes out the others, because I think it's the diversity that is probably the saving grace of superhero books.