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Comics news site Bleeding Cool is reporting that, in the wake of Zack Snyder's block-rocking Watchmen movie, DC is thinking the unthinkable.

Alan Moore's graphic novel, untouched for twenty years, may finally get the franchise treatment.

The word is that, despite DC's very public falling out with the irascible Moore, head honcho Paul Levitz was always adamant that Watchmen, at least in print form, was not to be messed with. But with Levitz stepping down, Watchmen is now without in-house defenders. And with the movie propelling the book to the status of DC's all-time bestseller, the barbarians are howling at the gates.

Apparently an expanded Watchmen universe is now the pet project of DC's senior vice president Dan Didio, who has visions of a series of comics prequels, sequels and spin-offs, and, of course, further movies.

It'd be something of a poisoned chalice for any writer or artist that took it on: the only person that could feasibly attempt it without getting the full force of fanboy vilification would be original Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, who was more amenable to the movie than his writing cohort. But even Gibbons would be on very thin ice.

Since the original creative team will likely not remain intact for a sequel, Dan DiDio has been looking for new writers and illustrators to work on possible continuations or spinoffs of Watchmen, as DiDio’s plans seem to go beyond a single sequel.

Some of the artists that Bleeding Cool reports as possible selections to carry the torch are Rich Veitch, Jim Baike, and Gene Ha/Zander Cannon, given their previous experience working on Moore’s material.

Regardless of what happens as these plans move forward, there will still definitely be a lot of angry fanboys and fangirls out there who see this as Levitz saw it: a “creatively bankrupt move.”

Despite the lukewarm reception of the film adaptation, Watchmen is still DC’s best selling graphic novel of all time, and therefore it seems pretty likely that regardless of the integrity of the original story, it will be continued in the comic medium.