Booksellers across Britain and the US are reporting a dramatic uptick in the sales of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s
groundbreaking 1985 comic book series Watchmen.
The graph above was given to me by the very kind people at
Amazon UK and represents their sales of the Watchmen trade paperback over the last year.
The surge starts in early July, around the time that the gloriously exciting trailer for Zack
Snyder’s big screen adaptation of the 23-year-old comic book was released.
In my view, the only real obstacle (apart from the acrimonious
court case between the two rival studios who both believe they owned the rights
to the story) to the Watchmen movie’s success was that film audiences
unfamiliar with the source material might struggle to grasp the slippery
concept of a superhero-driven science fiction movie set not in the future, or
even in the present, but in a parallel universe a quarter of a century ago.
With the comic book that many commentators - like TV favourite and self-confessed comics geek Jonathan Ross - have hailed as the
best of its kind finally making its way to the top of the bestseller lists the
number of people who don’t understand the story’s setting is getting smaller
and smaller.
Watchmen was always going to be one of the most talked-about
films of 2009. Now there’s every chance that it might be the biggest, too.
See the Watchmen image gallery - including some previously unseen sketches, here
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