Watchmen Part One

The Post's Philip Kennicot says Watchmen is a bad movie, which may or may not be true, I haven't seen it yet. His reasoning: it's an overly reverent adaptation of a bad comic book. Now, everyone's entitled to their opinion--even opinions as wildly divergent from the critical consensus as that one--but sentences like this don't inspire much confidence in Kennicot's judgment:

The graphic design, by Gibbons, was manically detailed, hyperkinetic and worked out with the precision of a movie storyboard.

Manically detailed, yes. Precision of a storyboard, yes. But "hyperkinetic"? Does Kennicot even know what that word means? I'm not sure I could name a major comics artist whose art is less hyperkinetic than Gibbons'. The whole visual aesthetic of Watchmen deliberately avoids motion lines and splashy, jittery panel layouts in favor of a steady montage of mostly equal-sized panels in a standard 3 by 3 grid. This is just a case of a critic throwing in a word that's commonly used to describe comic books without actually knowing what he's talking about.