Speaking at the Los Angeles Festival of Books over the weekend of 21/22 April, DC’s Dan DiDio and Jim Lee presented a panel entitled “DC Entertainment Presents: Watchmen – It’s Not the End, It’s the Beginning,” at which various details of the new series were revealed.

Spoilers follow:

“Since we’re doing a prequel we have the challenge of featuring characters before they met so how do we make it feel like a team concept but they’re all still going to be individuals,” DiDio explained. “We realized that Minutemen, Comedian and Ozymandias were lengthier storytelling. They went over a period of time. Minutemen [focuses on] the formation of a team, the Comedian is from the time of the Minutemen to his death. Larger story, more time covered. Ozymandias is about the plotting, which is a much longer story. But the other ones are just snapshots of who these characters are. So they only wound up being four parts while the others were six.

“And then it was how do we roll this out. Also, let’s be honest, we have talent who are not the quickest of artists, so we gave ourselves room for running time. But the way the schedule rolls out we have anywhere from five to seven weeks between books so now the artists can have more time and we hope to maintain consistency of art throughout the series…

“What we’re really exploring are the individuals, about how they’ve grown and changed over the years, how they might of started off as focused and idealistic heroes and how they change their opinion of who they might be… There’s some really fascinating stories in there of just who they are. But it’s all character based because we didn’t want to approach that whole world building sensibility. We wanted to keep the focus on the individuals. That’s why Silk Spectre’s story is really a coming of age story and the Comedian is just him working his way through government and ultimately how he becomes who he is. It really gets into the psyche and personality of the characters. The goal was for it to remain consistent so it could be read as one unit. You could read the prequel material and the original and feel that they are the same world but with different sensibilities.”

The panel also dealt with Alan Moore’s reaction to the new books as well as other details. The full report can be read here.