I don’t read many graphic novels, but I do read some. There’s no pattern, apparently, to the ones I’ve chosen to read, except that I tend to favor ones heavy on story (and not necessarily on action).

Watchmen (written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons) is in a class by itself.

Published as a regular “comic”-book series in 1986-87, from the very first issue it announced its difference. (See the cover of issue #1, over there on the left, for the opening evidence — surely among the most subversive uses of a smile symbol.) If you have no classic-comix-style used bookstores handy, fear not: its twelve issues were repackaged in 1995 in a single paperback volume, which you can obtain at many places (it’s still in print), including Amazon and all the usual brick-and-mortar sources.

The premise of the story, while neither unique nor original in the comic-book universe, will strike newcomers (in these days of superhero movies and other forms of media worship) as a little strange: Imagine a world in which superheroes are real, really real. They include superheroes you’ve never heard of, among them the seven who figure as Watchmen‘s protagonists: Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Nite-Owl, Rorschach, Captain Metropolis, and Silk Spectre. (That’s them in the image below and to the right, running clockwise and starting with the freaky blue guy at the top.)

They’re “people,” yes, of a particularly intense (and talented or perhaps even mutant) sort. But people nonetheless, with ugly or sympathetic pasts, who live in flophouses or penthouses, perhaps eat meals cooked in the equivalent of microwave ovens, have relationships with one another, get disappointed and p!ssed off.

Furthermore, as a class, they’re regulated, or rather registered with the mid-1980s government. Why? Because in the Watchmen world, there was a time when it seemed like any idiot with a stretchy-fabric uniform was running around, fighting crime (or imagining he was fighting it). They kept getting in the way of the real forces of law and order — the police et al…

I won’t spoil your pleasure in getting to know more about Watchmen on your own. (But I will note that it not only won a Hugo Award for science fiction in 1987 — the only graphic novel to have done so. In 2005, Time magazine also named it to its list of the best 100 novels in the English language published since 1923. Get that? Not graphic novels. Not comic books. Not fantasies or works of science fiction. Novels, period.)

But I will say I was delighted to learn recently that a Watchmen movie is scheduled for release sometime in 2009. (Here‘s the IMDB page on it.) Like many fans of the book — of superhero comics in general — I’m apprehensive about Hollywood’s take on it. They can never include everything, after all, and what’s left must necessarily be altered somehow to account for the subtractions.

Still, hope springs eternal and all that. Based on the trailer (below), they seem to have certainly captured the look of the comic — to the extent which any live-action film could: