Watchmen: A

More revisionary than even Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns that came out in the same year, Alan Moore's Watchmen is a piece of literary billiance and mastery. Widely considered the greatest graphic novel (read: comic book) of all time, it pioneered the use of moody coloring and 9 panel pages. Plus it featured a tour-de-force narrative involving Cold War anxiety and the assasination of a defunct superhero group known as "The Minutemen".

By deconstructing archetypes with the creation of the deranged vigilante Rorschach and the atomic god Dr. Manhattan, Moore delved deep into a persona that has been sucked dry and created something that is both engrossing and entirely original. It evokes Citizen Kane in it's innovation.

With unique voices and dialogue this side of Joss Whedon (who was inspired by Watchmen to create Buffy The Vampire Slayer) the epic graphic novel, at nearly 350 pages, is hilarious and thrilling on every page. By doubling back on itself with self-references and chapters that mirror their beginnings as well as the sporadic injection of "outside information" like character bios and a grisly pirate comic that is continually read by one of the comic's characters, Watchmen is a work of architechural genius. Knowingly bleak and yet buoyantly irreverent, Watchmen marked the end of hokey comics and began an age of sophisticated literature.

It has influenced everything in pop culture including Lost and the work of Jude Law. Time magazine called it one of the best novels ever written and they weren't wrong.