Why 'Watchmen' is the best comic of all time

• "Watchmen" was a work of art that was never meant for the screen but a story that was strictly mean to show the greatest strength of the comic book medium.
• Artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins used many ingenious techniques such as the nine-panel layout and the use of secondary characters to breathe life into the world of "Watchmen."
• Legendary comic writer Alan Moore wrote a story of such philosophical and political depth never before seen in the comic book genre.
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Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Every art form has one work that is so monumental and profound that it forever defines and changes the medium. For comics, a medium with a surprisingly long history, that work is none other than "Watchmen." First released in 1986 as a 12-issue limited series, it forever changed the public perception of the medium and what comics can really achieve. But what makes "Watchmen" the greatest comic book ever written isn't what's on the page, but the people behind it.

From its inception, "Watchmen" had one objective: to create a work that can only be achieved by the comic medium. And no one played a more integral part than the artist Dave Gibbons, who was given complete control over its visual look and focused on making a unique and distinctive aesthetic unlike anything the readers had seen. Even in the weight of lines, where he used a hard, stiff pen to create bolded edges that were significantly different from the more fluid lines in other comic books of the era. And colorist John Higgins took the same approach with color, choosing to use secondary colors that were more common in European comics to achieve a moodier look and accentuate the use of primary colors, like the massive, overflowing blood from a massacre. At times, Higgins even freely experimented with color, like in issue No. 6, "The Abyss Gazes Also," which begins with a brighter palette that eventually turns darker and darker along with the character's descent into his dark past, finally ending in black.

The genius of "Watchmen" also lies in its structure, more specifically its nine-panel grid, a simple yet brilliant way of framing a story for multiple reasons. First, it allowed the writers to fit more scenes into a page, allowing for a faster-paced story. It also made it clear for readers to follow because they simply had to read from left to right and top to bottom without trying to figure out the order. Having nine panels also gave the advantage of having a central panel that naturally draws the eye, which both Gibbons and Higgins expertly used to include some of the most important and shocking images. And the nine-panel grid is shockingly versatile, with more than 300 different possible combinations the panels can be laid out on, a lot of which the book uses to show a passage of time or a gruesome aftermath of a disaster. The issue that exemplifies the genius of the nine-panel structure and perhaps the series' greatest is its fifth issue, "Fearful Symmetry," where the entire issue, like its title, is juxtaposed in a perfect symmetry that begins here, in the centerfold image in the middle of the book. The rest of the pages reflect one another in layout, color, composition, imagery, and sometimes the exact image.

If Gibbons and Higgins showed the possibility of comics as a respectable art form, it was "Watchmen" writer Alan Moore who elevated them to literature. The genius mind behind some of the most influential works in comics, like "V for Vendetta" and "The Killing Joke," Moore played a major role in creating a comic book that feels and reads like literature. "Watchmen" began with a simple question of: What would superheroes be like in a credible, real world? He took the superheroes inspired by the campy heroes of Charlton Comics that DC had acquired and wrote them into an alternate history where America won the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal never happened. This political backdrop created a world dripping with end-of-the-world anxieties and paranoia of the Cold War and provided a grittier look at the superheroes who live in it and that would influence the genre for decades to come. The same goes for the characters. Originally titled "Who Killed the Peacemaker?" from the Charlton Comics character that inspired The Comedian, "Watchmen" is constructed as a murder mystery. Yet the plot is merely a vehicle to show the personal and moral struggles of the flawed superheroes living in the real world. And to accentuate this conflict, Moore intentionally wrote characters with radically opposing views of the world. From a morally absolute vigilante who sees the world in black and white to an omnipotent yet apathetic God figure who questions what it means to be human, "Watchmen" possessed a political and philosophical depth that readers weren't familiar with in comic-book form.

Moore created the idea of "Watchmen," and Gibbons and Higgins built the world to contain it. And it's their collaboration that ultimately made "Watchmen" the masterpiece it is today, shown most obviously by the book's use of symbols and imagery. Moore wanted recurring symbols and images loaded with meaning, and Gibbons paid extra attention in designing and inserting them throughout the book. Some are obvious, like the bloodstained smiley face, which bookends the story and has become an iconic symbol that represents the series. The smiley face was designed to both geometrically and symbolically represent a doomsday clock, which acts as an important thematic device. And others are more subtle, like the phrase, "Who watches the watchmen?" - a quote that encompasses the theme of "Watchmen" and is graffitied onto the walls of various panels, never appearing in its entirety, yet still discernible to those who pay close attention. In fact, "Watchmen" is full of minute background details painstakingly drawn by Gibbons that add depth and philosophy to its world that are easy to miss on first reading, an intentional editorial choice resulting in a book that requires multiple readings to fully appreciate.

It's these small details and nuances that make it so hard to adapt "Watchmen" for the screen. Once deemed "unfilmable," "Watchmen" eventually received the silver-screen treatment by Zack Snyder in 2009. It's an adaptation that follows the original beat by beat, panel by panel, resulting in a work that distinctively looks like "Watchmen" but doesn't feel like it. "Watchmen" is a work that was envisioned, written, and drawn to be a comic book and nothing else, the work of two uncompromising artists who wanted to test the limits of the medium that they loved. And it's for this reason that, although we will see many great works in the future, there won't be another work quite like "Watchmen" ever again.