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Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. The series was published by DC Comics in single issue during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently published in collected form. Watchmen originated from a story proposal Moore submitted to DC featuring superhero characters that the company had acquired from Charlton Comics. As Moore’s proposed story would have left the many of recently-acquired characters unusable for future stories, managing editor Dick Giordano convinced the writer to create original characters instead.

Moore used the story as a means to reflect contemporary anxieties and to deconstruct the superhero concept. 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 from the superhero group The Watchmen 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.

Creatively, the focus of Watchmen is on its structure. Gibbons used a nine-panel grid layout throughout the series and added recurring symbols such as a blood-stained smiley face. All but the last issue feature supplemental fictional documents that add to the series’ backstory, and the narrative is intertwined with that of a another story, a fictional pirate comic titled Tales of the Black Freighter, which one of the characters is reading.

Watchmen has received critical acclaim both in the comics and mainstream press, and is regarded as a seminal text of the comic book medium. After a number of attempts to adapt the series into a feature film, director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is scheduled for release in March 2009. [via Wikipedia]