It is 1986. I am nineteen. I am in Portland. I stopped reading superhero comics a few years back when I traded them for underground /indie comics. I draw and publish comics of my own. I have nothing but scorn for superheroes. My friend Doug, who still reads superhero books, tells me there's this guy from 2000 AD DC brought over from England and he's doing Swamp Thing and I've really got to read that, and I scoff. He tells me this guy's got a new series and it's mind-blowing and I'm like "It's about superheroes, right? Snort." He makes me take home every Alan Moore issue of Swamp Thing and the two issues of Watchmen out so far, anyway. The next day, I go to the comic book store and get the first two issues of Watchmen and the new one and every issue of Swamp Thing I can afford. I also add the titles to my subscription box, along with Love and Rockets and Flaming Carrot and Tales of the Beanworld and The Comics Journal and whatnot.

It is 1987. I am twenty. I am in Seattle. Between the previous fall and now, "Hey, Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!" has become a media meme, first in the indie and music press, then everywhere. Many of the books I read, including Watchmen , are now cool. This news hasn't gotten to my roommates and most of my friends, yet, all of them big music geeks and people in bands who hold comics geeks in contempt. That'll change before some of them end up playing a part in the grunge thing a few years later, but for now, I am pretty much alone in my fascinations. Watchmen's dragged out longer and longer between issues since the series passed the halfway mark. It's been months since the second-to-last issue, and I go down to the comics store and dear god, the last issue is finally out. Since I will be mocked if I go home and read it, I sit down on some stairs in an alley and read the book three times over. This is the first time a comic book ever makes me cry.

It's a little hard to know where Watchmen ends and I begin, the novel is so central to my life and development, almost as hard as explaining to most other people how a superhero comic book could possibly have that kind of place in anybody's heart. I still pretty much sneer at superheroes. I get some looks when I tell other prose fiction readers, especially, that my favorite novel is a comic book and worse, it's not a personal story about mice going through the Holocaust or life during the Iranian Revolution, it's about dorks in flashy underwear beating the hell out of each other and wielding magic powers. Most of them don't take me up on my offer to loan the book, either.

At its core, Watchmen's a by-the-numbers murder mystery, except with superheroes. The setting is an alternate Earth United States in which superhero comic books never came about - instead, people put on costumes and started fighting crime in real life in the early twentieth century. Thanks largely to the only hero with super powers in the book, Dr. Manhattan, the history of the United States after WWII goes wildly askew. We won in Vietnam in less than two months and Nixon got the 22nd Amendment repealed and is still President in the book's 1985.

Watchmen opens several years after Congress banned costumed vigilantes in the face of massive public and police protest. Most superheroes have retired forcibly, save one. Rorschach, probably the most beloved and notorious character in the book, has kept up his own psychotic fight for justice and is public enemy number one for all kinds of good reasons. Investigating a murder one night, he discovers that the victim was secretly The Comedian, one of two heroes still working in secret as government agents. (Manhattan's the other.) Rorschach deducts that somebody might be killing off the old masked heroes and starts making visits to his former comrades to warn them. Where the narrative goes from there, in the main, will not be much of a surprise to anybody who's read enough superhero comics and Mike Hammer novels.

The plot's not the thing, here, although it is pleasingly serpentine and occasionally action-studded, and still startling in its brutality when action occurs even twenty-something years later. The climax contains a devastating rework of a hoary adventure story convention that tends to knock readers on their asses. There is, in other words, plenty going on in Watchmen for somebody who just likes good pulp stories about superheroic beat downs to grab hold of. It's everything else that makes the book special - everything superhero comic books normally don't pay attention to.

This is a novel in which the extra "prop" characters - the people who generally show up for a few panels in comic books to get mugged or murdered or interact briefly with hero characters - get as much time and description as any of the superheroes. You'll spend quite a bit of your reading time on the quotidian details of people who don't really seem like they matter all that much, or they wouldn't in a traditional superhero story, anyway. They matter in Watchmen , at least as much as the superheroes do.

That's one of the biggest differences between Watchmen and all superhero comics before it and virtually all of them since: Watchmen is about a world, a real one, even if it's got a twenty-story glowing blue guy in it that can probably create universes. The novel's Earth and America are not mere backdrops peppered with familiar landmarks and faces before which colorful battles play out. These are real places, real spaces, fleshed out in a way that sticks in your heart and makes you feel forever like you really visited Middle Earth or New Crobuzon or Oz, once. Or, much more to the point: Middlemarch. Yeah, I'll go there. If George Eliot were transported to 1986 and handed a pile of superhero comics and ordered to write one, she'd probably write something like Watchmen.

This is a superhero comic in which there is very little in the way of superheroics and characters primarily talk to each other. They talk over dinner, they talk in each other's homes, they talk while they're fucking and after and about how the sex didn't go so great, but that's cool, I love you anyway. They talk about their individual and shared pasts with, by turns nostalgically and disparagingly. They talk about their fears and they talk an awful lot about their parents. They cry with each other and get mad at each other about petty shit and hold grudges against each other and act against those grudges out of love, anyway, sometimes. There are horrible, non-superduper things they just don't talk about, the silence making those absent characters and events all the more present. This is where Watchmen tends to lose diehard fans of the pulpier side of comics: all that damn talking.

The illustration and design of the book work perfectly in tandem with Moore's writing - Dave Gibbons, the artist, made his name forever with this one book. Moore and Gibbons bucked a new trend in superhero comics around that time (and, indeed, Watchmen is the opposite, from a design standpoint, of Moore's graphical experimentation with his artists on Swamp Thing ) that continues to this day: going crazy with page and panel structure. Watchmen sticks to a very conservative nine-panel layout based on EC's fifties comics, with the occasional melding of panels for single larger scenes. Full-page panels are reserved for one important moment, and you will never see a tribe of multicolored mutants facing off against another across a two-page spread. The illustration is as rich in detail and subtlety as the writing, and Watchmen is one of those novels you find new treasures in every time you reread it. There are references within references to other references - visual and text. There's a chapter whose layout and action and color is symmetrical, and that actually matters to the novel.

Added to this, each chapter concludes with several pages of prose adding to and commenting on Watchmen's world, characters and events. Here and there are bits from a retired hero's tell-all memoir, articles from newspapers, even an academic paper on owls written by Daniel Dreiberg, who knows owls because he likes to go out at night dressed as one to spook crooks.

And did I mention the pirate comic book? Since superhero comics don't exist in Watchmen's world, kids read pirate comics instead, and Watchmen's got a comic-within-a-comic read by one of the nobody characters and that comic book comments on and matters to the larger comic book, too.

Some of this - the abolition of superheroes, the attempts to make superheroes into real people, is not going to sound new to people unfamiliar with Watchmen , even, because it's been borrowed and referenced and paid homage to so many times, since - most recently and publicly in THE INCREDIBLES. Watchmen remains, however, no matter how much good work since gives it props, a singular comic book reading experience. There is nothing quite like it, still. No matter how familiar any of this may sound and whatever your opinions about superheroes, you are in for a shock, reading it. You have no idea what this book is like, I guarantee it.

Watchmen - along with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns , published by DC the same year - is often credited with "changing superhero comic books forever." Would that were the case - I'd read a lot more superhero comics, these days, and wouldn't have as much cause to continue my nineteen-year-old snobbery about them. Watchmen and > The Dark Knight Returns are seminal works - don't get me wrong. They can even be seen as counterparts to each other in that pivotal year for American comics, 1986 - one left-leaning, politically, one right, each taking superhero comics in places they hadn't gone before. But they didn't "change superhero comics" in any real sense. What those two books did was completely reverse Marvel's pop cultural gains over DC in the sixties and seventies. Marvel had to hand the House of Cool trophy over to DC in the mid-eighties, and they've never gotten it back.

What drove me out of superhero comics a few years prior to Watchmen was growing out of Marvel's patented one-and-a-half dimensional character template. This is the very thing that distinguished them from DC's old school cartoonery early on and meant I took X-Men > way more seriously than Teen Titans . DC tried to do the Marvel "I'm a hero with one flaw or big problem" thing in some of their books, but the imitation was obvious and pathetic. Marvel, in the meantime, had tried its hand a few times at "adult" work by shamelessly ripping off Heavy Metal . So, you know, the definition of "adult" that puts the material geared almost solely toward an adolescent boy's darkest imaginings on a shelf where he's not supposed to be able to get it. For most adults, "adult" does not mean "Violent and gory as hell and you can jack off to it, too!"

What Watchmen , in particular, did was turn DC into the only mainstream comics publisher in America publishing comic books that really were adult in their themes, in their variety and scope, in intelligence and voice that speaks to the soul and enriches your life even as you delight in fantastic stories and settings. A stream of British writers followed Moore in through the door he'd kicked down: Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, et al, and Americans and others followed suit. At this point in American pop culture history, if you're going to read a cool mainstream comic that anybody except comics nerds cares about, you're reading a comic from a DC imprint, not from Marvel. Marvel's response to the rise of Vertigo was to pump the Heavy Metal vibe harder, so they do have some nice books if blood and boobs are your thing, I guess. Otherwise, they're pretty much the same comics I walked away from when I was sixteen.

Most superhero comics are still stuck in that same place and not very interesting unless you like reading the same stories over and over with increasingly grotesque illustrations as the years go by. That any mass-market comics have any relevance or appeal today to grownups who aren't impressed that the guy who shoots lasers at demons is also a drunk, so that makes him a real person, this is entirely due to Watchmen . More so than any number of valiant and more realist and more surreal and more more indie efforts before or since, Watchmen made American comic books into literature, for real, overnight. It is, perhaps intentionally and self-consciously so, what Moby-Dick was to American novels. Its position as the sole comic book on Time magazine's list of the hundred greatest novels of the twentieth century is no mystery to almost anybody who reads it. This is genius and passion and truth and love and life jammed up in a paper bottle, everything the most demanding adult reader wants in a novel. You do yourself a disservice if you never read Watchmen , and I can't think of many, if any, other comic books I'd say that about.


Next time: "Watchmen, We Love You All: Watchmen, the Movie"