I'm unsure if "role" is a useful way to think about the Watchmen. Since the 60's there have been plenty of "adult" comics with sex and violence, and with the Watchmen being released in 1986 (I think), the adult themes weren't anything new. The "new" things I remember about The Watchmen, at the time, were (1) increased popularity of a mature themed story, and (2) the sales success of an adult themed story by a major publisher.

Similar could be said for the "Superhero without superpowers" plot device, and "Heroes with fairly regular human problems" plot device. The plot devices were old and well tested by the time they were used in The Watchmen.

On the other hand, the idea of using a limited series outside of the normal (cannon) universe to both introduce new heroes and kill them off in the same book/series was a deviation from the usual comics industry methods (for maximizing profits). Of course, DC eventually did a follow-on prequel "Before Watchmen" in 2012 after the release of the movie adaptation of the original in 2009. The price of success in comics is typically repeated dilution.

Permanently killing heroes became normalized in 1988 with "A Death In The Family" when they killed the second Robin in Batman (and started the "Replaceable Robin" and/or "Replaceable Sidekick" trope).

I've never seen the Watchmen as an analogy to the comics industry. After all, it was from one of the big two publishers. To me, the Watchmen was mostly just a product of its time; at the height of the seemingly endless threat of the cold war when everyone wanted the cold war to end. The trope of "endless threat resolved with substantial losses and significant change" was fairly prevalent in stories from the mid 80's. To some degree, the trope is still reused in current works, but to a far lesser degree. The toughest thing to grasp is what the mid-80's were like, and unless you're in your mid-40's or older, it will be tough for most to imagine. If I didn't know what the time was like, I doubt I'd consider the Watchmen to be such a fantastic story.

> On the other hand, the idea of using a limited series outside of the normal (cannon) universe to both introduce new heroes and kill them off in the same book/series

Alan Moore actually originally wanted to use a bunch of characters that DC had just bought, in order for the characters to be recognized to the readers before he revealed their flaws and/or killed them off.

Needless to say, the DC editor that read his proposal did not believe DC would be willing to have characters they'd just spent good money on killed off, or (much worse - death does not need to be permanent in these universes after all -), morally compromised in a way that readers would not forget. So Moore was convinced to go back and find a way to make it work with new characters.

I didn't know that. Fantastic comment. Thank you. It got me thinking about both how and why Moore was able to make it work with new characters. I think one of the major reasons how/why it worked with new characters is neatly stated on Wikipedia:

> "All but the last issue feature supplemental fictional documents that add to the series' backstory ... Structured as a nonlinear narrative, the story skips through space, time and plot."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

I am sure i am not the right person to answer that question. I am convinced it is an important role, but i could be wrong. But i will try.

Watchmen was not so much a satire, but a humanized version of what a superhero could be. But that is eclipsed through the end by its deep sociological question and its dubious answer. For me, the genesis of the comic genre that deal with mature subjects for mature audiences.

For me these were the guidelines used by Hollywood to make the comics to cinema transiction right. Teenagers by themselves can sustain the comic business, but not the movie business. So i understand the role of the Graphic Novel as the ingredient needed to make comics an art media for ali audiences. Something that Pixar made for animations through clever humour, for example.

I didn't actually read Watchmen until after seeing the movie, despite very well remembering seeing it in my local stores when I was a kid, and remembering what a splash it made. At the time, it did not appeal to me for exactly the reasons it is great and stands out: It gave superheros a grown up treatment.

Reading it now, it stands out to me first and foremost as a symbol of typical British deadpan satire, applied to superhero stories, just as the "normal" superhero stories themselves were more out there than ever.

While the shops were full of series with superheros in costumes trying to beat each other in most ridiculous abuse of colour and spandex (incidentally, I think the moment it became truly clear how ridiculous many of these costumes were, was as Hollywood started trying to give them bigger budget treatments, only to find out how incredibly hard it is to put them on a movie screen without making it comical), saving the world with more and more ridiculous deus-ex-machina and bizarre powers, there was a series about a bunch of semi-retiree "superheros" without powers, full of moral issues and drenched in cold war seriousness. (Sure, the cold war was everywhere in comics, up to and including playing central roles in origin stories, but rarely given a grown up treatment).

While X-Men, for example, issue after issue had characters whine about how they could not justify killing without ever getting into the meat of the issue (despite the occasional fantastic story line like Days of Future Past), here was a series where someone who had been presented as one of the heroes was prepared to go to that kind of length to re-make the world in a way he thought better. Where one of the "heroes" dies in the first issue, only to have his image ripped to pieces bit by bit. Where all of the heroes are deeply human and flawed, and not necessarily in ways that made you like them more for it. And the eventual-antagonist wasn't stopped at the last minute, with the countdown on a doomsday device at 1, and there was no great save.

It also different in presentation: Readers were treated as grown ups with more than 5 minute attention spans, while if you read X-Men from there period, the amount of unnecessary exposition is tedious to the extreme. I'm actually re-reading those issues now, and it is fascinating to see how much I've "supressed" from my childhood. E.g. the amount of times the saw it as necessary to explain the powers of every single member of the team, or have characters carry out de-facto silent soliloquys rather than trust that the reader would be able to figure things out for themselves, is just bizarre seen with modern eyes.

Note that Watchmen was not the only series to do better there, by far. Phantom for example, amongst many, did not have nearly the amount of exposition, to name another "superhero" without special powers. And more serious literary treatment was also not new (including Alan Moore's fantastic run on Swamp Thing), but it stands out for its combination.

It was "superheroes" in the real world given a serious literary treatment against a dark and serious backdrop, handling moral issues seriously. And it was a clever caricature and satire over a genre that itself largely is a caricature, but that very often is not very clever caricature.

> While X-Men, for example, issue after issue had characters whine about how they could not justify killing without ever getting into the meat of the issue (despite the occasional fantastic story line like Days of Future Past), here was a series where someone who had been presented as one of the heroes was prepared to go to that kind of length to re-make the world in a way he thought better. Where one of the "heroes" dies in the first issue, only to have his image ripped to pieces bit by bit. Where all of the heroes are deeply human and flawed, and not necessarily in ways that made you like them more for it. And the eventual-antagonist wasn't stopped at the last minute, with the countdown on a doomsday device at 1, and there was no great save.

You're probably right, but as someone growing up in an objectively racist household, I can say with certainty that the X-Men titles had much more effect on my outlook than Watchmen ever will. Sure, they were really far from perfect, but I always found that Marvel never hesitated to touch real-world issues in a way that DC rarely did. Take Rachel Summers for instance. Introducing a teenage mutant with survivor's guilt, after being forced to track fellow mutants in the future, this was pretty grownup for a medium often dismissed as mindless entertainment.

Of course, it had plenty of crappy moments too (how many times did Xavier regain and then lose the ability to walk?), but I'll always have fond memories of them. Not to say that Watchmen, Sandman or V for Vendetta are not masterpieces, because they are.

Going from movie to comic, how did you feel about the difference in ending?

I was frustrated by that specific change in the film, as in the comic it is building and building and building and then absolutely shocking at the end.