Watchmen

This is the book that forever changed how superheroes were written.  

In Watchmen, masked vigilantes started as a craze in the 1930s, and history got slightly bent in the process. We won the Vietnam War, Nixon stayed president, and...you'll have fun picking out all the bits of altered history in the background.

The heart of the book is its unforgettable characters - slightly over-the-hill superheroes brought out of retirement by the murder of one of their own, to face an ever-deepening mystery and their own midlife crises.

An underappreciated genius who helped breathe life into the dying comic book format, this dark tale of public heroes gone wrong delves deep into the psychology of those who pretend to have our best interests at mind.

It's no exaggeration to say that this work completely revamped an aging format for a new generation, winning accolades all along the way. To this day, Alan Moore's storytelling techniques (including scale models, notes and rough drawings, and well-crafted interludes that only later reveal their worth) are still unrivaled in the realm of comic books. A master of the craft that originally convinced… show more.

A slight cheat on my part, as Watchmen is a graphic novel instead of a prose novel, the almost nihilistic deconstruction of the superhero myth remains a modern classic. Set in an alternate 1980s, an alternate reality whose doomsday clock is bordering on midnight, it’s a broken mirror reflection of a world that is both frighteningly foreign yet uncannily similar to the era of my childhood, an era where nuclear war seemed like an imminent event. The superheroes of Watchmen were no longer super; the villains weren’t that easy to identify, and good and evil became truly subjective ideas, forcing… show more.

This 1986-87 graphic novel—for my money, the all-time best graphic novel—has by now been so imitated, adapted, and reimagined, all over the protest of its anti-commercialism writer, that it’s easy to forget how intellectually weighty it is. Its alternate-universe tale of a 20th century where superheroes really exist not only revolutionized a popular genre, and its formal innovations in graphic storytelling not only transformed an art form, but Watchmen also stages a conflict among political and ethical worldviews (The Comedian's right-wing nihilism, Rorschach's libertarian absolutism, Ozymandias's leftist utilitarianism, etc.) and develops provocative ideas about time and consciousness that Alan… show more.