Watchmen - Publication and Reception

Publication and Reception

When Moore and Gibbons turned in the first issue of Watchmen to DC, their peers were stunned. Gibbons recalled, "What really clinched it ... was Howard Chaykin, who doesn't give praise lightly, and who came up and said, 'Dave what you've done on Watchmen is fuckin' A.'" Speaking in 1986, Moore stated that "DC backed us all the way ... and have been really supportive about even the most graphic excesses." To promote the series, DC Comics released a limited-edition badge ("button") display card set, featuring characters and images from the series. Ten thousand sets of the four badges, including a replica of the blood-stained smiley face badge worn by the Comedian in the story, were released and sold. Mayfair Games introduced a Watchmen module for its DC Heroes Role-playing Game series that was released before the series concluded. The module, which was endorsed by Moore, adds details to the series' backstory by portraying events that occurred in 1966.

Watchmen was published in single-issue form over the course of 1986 and 1987. The limited series was a commercial success, and its sales helped DC Comics briefly overtake its competitor Marvel Comics in the comic book direct market. The series' publishing schedule ran into delays because it was scheduled with three issues completed instead of the six Len Wein believed were necessary. Further delays were caused when later issues each took more than a month to complete. Bhob Stewart of The Comics Journal noted in Spring 1987 that issue 12, which DC solicited for April 1987, "looks like it won't debut until July or August".

After the series concluded, the individual issues were collected and sold in trade paperback form. Along with Frank Miller's 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns mini-series, Watchmen was marketed as a "graphic novel", a term which allowed DC and other publishers to sell similar comic book collections in a way that associated them with novels, but dissociated them from comics. As a result of the publicity given to the books like the Watchmen trade in 1987, bookstore and public libraries began to devote special shelves to them. Subsequently, new comics series were commissioned on the basis of reprinting them in a collected form for these markets. In 1987, Graphitti Design produced a special limited edition, slipcased hardcover volume that contained 48 pages of bonus material, including the original proposal and concept art. In 2005, DC released Absolute Watchmen, an oversized slipcased hardcover edition of the series in DC's Absolute Edition format. Assembled under the supervision of Dave Gibbons, Absolute Watchmen included the Graphitti materials, as well as restored and recolored art by John Higgins. That December, DC published a new printing of Watchmen issue #1 at the original 1986 cover price of $1.50.

Watchmen received critical praise, both inside and outside of the comics industry. Time magazine, which noted that the series was "by common assent the best of breed" of the new wave of comics published at the time, praised Watchmen as "a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi, political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats into a dysutopian mystery story." In 1988, Watchmen received a Hugo Award in the Other Forms category.