Written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and coloured by John Higgins, Watchmen was first published in 1986 and is regarded as the pinnacle of graphic novel writing and the start of a new era for comic books, with a darker, harder agenda that bore more resemblance to the real world than hitherto, and wherein a pair of tights and a mask were not enough to fix the world. You could argue that without Watchmen there'd be no brooding 'realistic' comic book movies like Batman Begins (although the seminal Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns came out the same year).

Watchmen's influence can clearly be seen in the TV show Heroes, where a group of mismatched, bickering do-gooders come together to try to prevent a cataclysmic event from wiping out Manhattan and thwart a killer who's offing their kind. The Incredibles also owes a debt to Watchmen, with its depictions of super types enduring the mundanities of modern domestic life after their do-gooding is outlawed.

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