Who'll Watch the Watchmen?

I was a teenage comics geek who thought he'd grown up when the realisation had to be faced that even the most feted works in the genre (which obligatorily had to be referred to as graphic novels, lest they be confused with The Beano) were held back from the expressive power of cinema or the written word by their very nature as a medium, lifelessly static compared to the former, imagination-stripping and overly literal compared to the latter. More often than not they were only masturbatory, vicarious pieces of wish-fulfilment. So I sold up the lot...and yet twenty years later find myself waiting in line with my fellow boy-men, easy marks for any grifting studio offering all those vigilantes and freaks, that seemed inadequate to a teenager, now up there live with FX. What went wrong?
I'm tempted to think that the roots of my regressive downfall lie in media coming together, fusing to create a bridge. Musically, I found the reliance on rhythm alone of old-school scratching and rap gratingly barren, until it incorporated melody as increasingly sophisticated samples and hip-hop was born. Similarly, aided by CGI, cinema has progressively pilfered the visual style of the most imaginative comics so that we now have a form of eye-candy that could only have been dreamed of twenty years ago. The catch is not to be seduced by the package, so much more fluid and visceral than the static images on the page.
But was a rejection of the medium in the first place in fact a failure of the imagination? The compellingly articulate FT film critic Nigel Andrews wrote recently, in the context of the forthcoming adaptation of a totem of the graphic novels of the '80s, Watchmen:

Comics are made up of frames in motionless sequence, movies of frames in kinetic sequence. The second merely hitches a ride on that human quirk called the persistence of vision. The Oxford Dictionary defines this as “the continuance of a visual impression after the exciting cause is removed”. (“Exciting cause”! On the high seas of sensory impact, emotion is a stowaway even in phrases intended for scientific neutrality.) When a picture flashes on a screen from the projector, the mind carries it forward to the next picture. Ingmar Bergman, in his memoirs, commented on the miracle whereby human perception erases the shuttered intervals between frames, annihilating the fact that a large percentage of a watched film is actually complete darkness.

So is it just that in the merging of media, the interval between frames is bridged for us, helping the denuded faculty that once enabled a sequence of frames to have continuity in the mind?
And does that Zimmer frame matter, as long as they don't give Rorschach a scary Batman growl?