The movie Watchmen is out now, and I'm really excited to see it. The comic originally came out as a twelve-issue limited series when I was in high school, and I read every issue many, many times. I even studied it for a class in college. I highly, highly recommend Watchmen.
In some ways, Watchmen is a standard superhero comic, although from a different perspective that ends up deconstructing a lot of superhero clichés. It's also a pretty straightforward murder mystery. It's also a good science fiction alternate history tale. All of that together would be great, but then add in an incredibly dense, groundbreaking comic and you've got an all-time classic. Watchmen starts with the premise "what if masked vigilantes really started fighting crime in the 1940s?" and then goes from there, to examine a world where police riots force a law to be passed outlawing costumed crimefighters, where Richard Nixon is still President in the 1980s, where one man with superpowers can utterly change the world. Watchmen is thrilling, gritty, dark, disturbing and complex. The words and images play back and forth in a way that comics can but rarely do exploit. From start to finish, it's an amazingly well-written and illustrated piece of work.