Alan Moore

He is a practicing magician.

And a fine paragraph on the Watchman:

Snyder’s Watchmen labors a little under the burden of its fidelity to the original. The dialogue, some of it imported verbatim, tends to lie flat on top of the action as if penciled there. And the narrative switchbacks, matching those in the comic, are headspinning; as the credits roll, a sense of nonplussment disperses itself through the theater like an odor, a feeling of “What the *#%$ was that?” But this may also be the film’s triumph—its successful retention of the psyops flavor of Moore’s work, the dim sense that we are being addressed, strategically, at a level somewhere below the threshold of reason. In the movie’s compacted temporal layers, and in the lodestone strangeness of Dr. Manhattan (who for weeks loomed off billboards across America), Moore’s magic seems to be doing its thing. It’s art, after all.

In film training, there is a lot of discussion of craft, and very little of magic. Maybe what is needed in these things are a little more magic and a little less craft. What is magic, you say? Of course, you are already asking the wrong question...but I will try to explain. In high school it was for a little while fashionable to call a beautiful soccer play (or player) "magic." What did this mean? It meant doing something or trying something unreasonable...to dribble through three men, to make a bicycle kick mid-field, to nutmeg the best defender, or to tackle ferociously the toughest player on the other team...but the idea is to go for the unexpected - it probably won't work, but if it does, it is, well, magic.