One of the elements that makes Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen so difficult to adapt for the screen is the 'meta-comic' Tales of the Black Freighter, a faux EC classic drawn brilliantly by Gibbons working in the style of Joe Orlando. With its typical Al Feldstein interior monologue/first person narration, Tales of the Black Freighter is a pirate-themed saga that chronicles the physical and mental breakdown of a castaway -- a deterioration that mirrors what's happening to one of the main characters in the Watchmen saga. Tales of the Black Freighter is just one of many elements that add depth to the Watchmen narrative -- and filmmakers, who have to pick and choose which facets of Moore's saga to include, have typically excised the Black Freighter saga, but Zack Snyder has found a way to include it -- he is adding an anime-style animated version of the comic-within-a-comic as an 'extra' for the Watchmen DVD release.
Gerard Butler, who starred in Snyder's hugely successful adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, will voice the character of the castaway, who escapes from a deserted island on a raft made from the bloated corpses of his former crew, and whose mental and physical deterioration culminates in one of those heavily ironic 'twist' endings so typical of EC Comics.
