Watchmen

Watchmen is literature, at least it is according to Time magazine. Watchmen was the only graphic novel to appear on Time's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".

Watchmen (1985) is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by the brilliant but temperamental writer Alan Moore. A near-mint, first printing of the entire series now sells for about $200. Moore also wrote From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both of which have also been adapted for the screen. (League was a great comic book, but a terrible movie. Definitely explains why Moore has so much distrust of filmmakers attempting to adapt his works.)


Moore is also known for his 1986 masterpiece Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. This was intended to close the book on the original Silver Age Superman's history subsequent to the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Hard to explain, but anybody who enjoyed Superman comics as a kid in the 60's and the 70's should check it out. You can pick up the back issues for about $8.00.

In a nutshell, Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. After government-sponsored superhero The Comedian is found murdered, the vigilante Rorschach warns his former colleagues of what he believes is a conspiracy to kill costumed heroes. As the story progresses, the protagonists discover that one of the heroes has devised a plan to stave off war between the United States and the USSR by carrying out a plan that will kill millions of innocent people.

Watchmen also features a comic within a comic in the form of Tales of the Black Freighter, a fictional comic book. Moore and Gibbons used a pirate comic because they reasoned that since the characters of Watchmen experience superheroes in real life, "they probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics."

The most important character of Watchmen is probably Dr. Manhattan. In fact, he is the only 'superhero' in Watchmen that actually has superpowers. Through a nuclear accident, he acquires almost total omnipotence, which results in an interesting exploration of quantum mechanics. Due to his almost total mastery of his environment, time has no meaning to Dr. Manhattan. Time folds into itself, and he experiences all time frames as happening simultaneously. A similar theme is explored in Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel Destination Void, wherein the creation of a powerful artificial intelligence results in the folding of space/time.

Along with Frank Miller's 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen was a breakthrough deconstruction of the superhero genre, and ushered in an entirely new approach to comics and the movies inspired by them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_happened_to_the_man_of_tomorrow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Dark_Knight_Returns