Voted among Time magazine’s 100 Best Novels from 1923 to the present, a perennial bestseller over the past twenty years and widely considered the greatest graphic novel of all time, WATCHMENis a gripping, labyrinthine piece of comic art, which has earned an acclaimed place in modern literary history.

Now, you can enjoy the ultimate companion to the comics masterpiece, as artist Dave Gibbons gives his own account of the genesis of WATCHMEN in this dust-jacketed hardback volume, opening his vast personal archives to reveal excised pages, original character designs, page thumbnails, sketches and much more, including posters, covers and rare portfolio art. Featuring the breathtaking design of Chip Kidd and Mike Essl, WATCHING THE WATCHMEN is both a major art book in its own right, and the definitive companion to the graphic novel that changed an industry.

“I’ve had a great time, re-visiting the very beginnings of Watchmen and unearthing material I haven’t set eyes on for many years. As a fan myself, this is the kind of stuff I eat up and I’m sure the many devotees of the graphic novel will do the same!” says Gibbons.

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"For those of us who’ve already read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s mid-1980s autopsy of the super hero ideal 63 times, Gibbons’s new Watching the Watchmen is a treat: a scrapbook in which he dissects the artistic process that produced the original series, including his thumbnail sketches for every chapter.

Appropriately for a story whose theme is the clockwork of human experience, Gibbons arranged its components with admirable care, working out the look and feel of the entire project before he drew a single page but opening it up to happy accidents, like his discovery that one of the book’s visual motifs was echoed by a crater on Mars." New York Times

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Comics Art · Watchmen
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