Alan Moore is too over-rated in my book. I cannot stand his writing. Just my opinion. I also felt he destroyed the notion of the Joker with THE KILLING JOKE.

Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme was a far better series than either Watchmen or Identity Crisis.

I would tell people to read Squadron Supreme before they picked up Watchmen

QUOTE: V for Vendetta was much much better and more powerful than the Watchmen as was Miracleman which was far more interesting and then Swamp Thing which was better as well.

I started reading V FOR VENDETTA a few months ago and tappered off a few chapters in in favor of some other reading material. I honestly was a little put off by it. The villains felt caricatured, the hero a bit of a condescending "Mary Sue" character (was this Alan Moore writ large, same as all of Ellis's leads are idealized versions of himself?). I'm figuring to go back and read it before the Wachowskis sexy it up on film, but quite rarely for an Alan Moore work...it failed to grab me.

Haven't read MIRACLE MAN, either. I was just onboard the straight-up hero stuff during MIRACLEMAN's heyday, and nowadays I can't see myself going back to read any more superhero deconstructionist stuff, no matter how seminal or highly regarded. Might change my mind if it ever sees reprintings, but I'm more interested in, say, Moore's TOP TEN work where he embraced the genre more affectionately, explored some new avenues.

SWAMP THING's pretty great. Works neatly on the fringes of the DCU and so manages to avoid muddying up DC's superhero world too much. Some stories aren't as powerful now as they doubtless were in their day, but when the book peaks, man does it peak. "Rites of Spring" is still one of the all-time greats.

KILLING JOKE is very readable, if gruelling, but only really works for me as a one-off about the writer's own struggles with trying to tell meaningful stories in a genre where the status quo rules. Clearly should never've been in-continuity.

FROM HELL may well be the masterwork, though even that's got its quirks. The showy guest-stars, for instance. It's a powerhouse, though. Dizzying.

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN I dig quite a bit when I remember that in addition to being a "Wold Newton"-type exercise, it's also a black comedy.

I really wish 1963 had finished. I wonder if Image was even aware at the time that the book was obviously meant as a scathing contrast to the books they were putting out?

Haven't read to much of Moore's other stuff...BIRTH CAUL and PROMETHEA and VOICE OF THE FIRE. The mysticism stuff doesn't suit my sensibilities, though Moore's as interesting a spokesperson as magic is ever likely to find. I was certainly fascinated by the magical doings in FROM HELL.

I loved Watchmen, but at the time I didn't think it was "the greatest."  My thoughts about it aren't jaded and weren't then.  Back then, when I heard people praising it to the heavens or read mega-glowing reviews, I often wondered how broad those people experiences were reading comic books in general and superhero comics in particular.

But I will say one thing that continues to surprise me to this day, nearly 20 years later.  Back then I ran into a lot of comic book buyers, some I knew well, some I only knew from seeing them at the various stores in Baton Rouge (when things were going well for the industry), and so many them actually did not care for Watchmen.  They didn't hate it, but Watchmen was just another comic book - one they sampled or outright ignored.

One of my old roommates even told me that he found it "too busy."

Two sides to every coin.

Admittedly, I had no interest in picking this up back when it first came out because at the time I was a devoted Marvel reader.  I snatched up the trade paperback for $5 a year ago, and read it one sitting on a sunny spring day in the backyard with a glass of iced tea.

The art was absolutely stunning, and the story was certainly engaging enough, but I didn't see what the big deal was.  Perhaps it's because I got to it almost twenty years later that something was lost on me.  I don't know.

Beautiful art, tho!

Steve Jones wrote: Some people just don't get Watchmen, do they?

What exactly does that mean?   Coming on the heels of JB's post, I'd suspect you may be saying that if people don't like WATCHMEN it's because they "don't get it". It couldn't possibly be that people both "got it" and didn't like it.