(Moore has even indirectly compared the work to Moby Dick.) And Watchmen should be counted beside opuses from authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy in the canon of post-war American literature. While Watchmen wasn't the first of the graphic novel form, it did make the stridently bloody argument for the comic as a serious artistic and literary medium. After the twelve were released, publisher DC Comics bound the series into a single work, marketing the collection as a “graphic novel” in order to disassociate it from traditional serialized comics. Paranoid and threatening, Watchmen first hit shelves in 1986 as a twelve-issue “maxiseries” (a comic with a set number of installments). (Or it’ll just make you seem like a giant nerd. And just make you seem generally smart and well-read and all that cocktail-party-bragging shit. Comic awareness will also help you anticipate plot lines and character twists before all your other friends. Because it means the writers respect their source material they want to do justice to the universe.Īnd while you won’t necessarily need to read the comic in order to dive into HBO’s TV version, knowledge of the graphic novel will no doubt enhance viewing experience the series is absolutely stuffed with Easter eggs and literary references-to the point of it almost being obnoxious. In a way, the comic acts as the historic spine of the HBO spin-off. (So yeah, those leftovers are all pretty old by now.) Set almost three decades after the novel (which unfolds over two weeks in October 1985), HBO’s Watchmen spins forward the consequences of the comic, following several new and a few leftover characters from the original story. This Sunday, HBO debuts its next face-stomping antihero extravaganza in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, the TV spinoff of the classic graphic novel. Here’s everything you need to know about the literary touchstone before you tune in.The series is a continuation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’mega-hit graphic novel of the same name.

Watchmen by alan moore and dave gibbons