Its funny that Time put this on its list of top 100 "novels". It wasn't even a Graphic novel, it was a monthly limited series that was the collected into what now would be called a "Trade paper back". It is not a graphic novel in the traditional sense of " A History of Violence" or "300".
Kind of strange but many writers who fall into the cannon of great writers serialized their work. Charles Dickens comes to mind as an example. It's just a symptom of the medium, I guess.
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I read the novel about 3 months ago to prepare for the movie, absolutely loved it. I understand some of the criticisms (pirate side story? no thanks) but it really did inspect many conventions within comic books. The whole idea of these "super heroes" and their origins, and how they interacted with the real world around them, dealing with becoming obsolete, these are all things not normally touched on in comics. The Nightowl's impotence without his costume was really smartly written.
Personally found Dr. Manhattan's justification for viewing Laurie Jupiter as a miracle to be be extremely touching and quite a pick-me-up for all us average people out there.
Saw the movie Sunday, really liked it. It wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but the one major change (Ozymandias making Dr. Manhattan the villain instead of an alien) made more sense than the original graphic novel, the fight scenes were excellent, and I thought it was a really faithful adaptation.
It didn't take the story someplace new, like I think The Dark Knight did for Batman, but it didn't mess it up. A lot of times that's all I hope for.