Director Zack Snyder, who made this year’s massively successful 300, is blogging about his experiences adapting Alan Moore’s classic comic series Watchmen into a feature film.

If you’ve read Watchmen you know how awesome the story is, but it’s the storytelling itself that’s still about 50 years ahead of its time.

I don’t know how its 12 issues of social/political commentary and complex superhero relationships that span across decades can possibly be streamlined into a movie, but Snyder did an awesome job translating Frank Miller’s admittedly spartan tale of Spartans in 300.

So, we’ll see.

Anyway, one of the film’s most interesting characters is Rorschach, a conspiracy theorist and all-around wacko whose detective skills and paranoia might just be the keys to stopping the murders of his fellow heroes. He’ll be played by Jackie Earle Haley in the movie.

And Snyder has furtively given us our first glance of Rorschach — aside from one frame hidden in a trailer for 300 — in one of the new photos he just posted in his latest blog entry.

Click the photo below to see the others, and then click the photos themselves to see them in their original, high-resolution glory:

Wow! Watchmen occurs in an alternate history where Richard Nixon never stopped being president, and most of the action happens in 1985. The photos look amazing and appropriate. So even if the film struggles narratively, at least it’ll look great.

More Watchmen coverage here.

You’ll watch the Watchmen on March 6, 2009!