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There's also Daniel Clowes whose book Ghost World was turned into a movie a few years ago; James Kochalka who has been publishing his comic journals American Elf, several separate titles for both kids and mature; and Adrian Tomine whose Optic Nerve series have been collected in various volumes over the years and whose work you might recognize from Weezer album covers and the 2002 Best American Non-Required Reading anthology - another literary crossover.

More recently Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi have been released to critical acclaim- perhaps even more so from the literature world than the graphic novel community.

And then there's Christopher Ware. Oh boy, is there Christopher Ware! With his Acme Novelty Library which started in the early nineties, Ware soon became recognized as not merely a comics illustrator but as a supremely talented artist and writer whose work in the full-length Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth placed him on a pedestal in not only the literature world but also in the visual art world, with his work appearing on several best-of-the-year book lists and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. It's in Jimmy Corrigan that the worlds of comic books and novels truly collide. A coinciding history of milquetoast Jimmy meeting the father he never knew and his grandfather's relationship with his father, Jimmy Corrigan is (and this isn't said lightly) a work of unparalleled brilliance that ranks high in the annals of melancholy missives along with Thomas Hardy and in the sublime and subtle humor pantheon with Dickens.

Christopher Ware's art is reminiscent of early Bauhaus work in its intricately patterned geometrical structure and yet also contains a parody of the early Disney style character designs as well as a structure influenced by Herriman's early Krazy Kat newspaper dailies. Ware is also responsible for editing what is probably one of the best introductions to comic artists and the graphic novel in the McSweeneys Quarterly Issue Number 13 from 2003.

But what does all this have to do with Watchmen? It is, after all, a superhero story rooted in very traditional comic book style dialogue and illustration while the aforementioned are anything but. It's hard to say because the history of the graphic novel is being written while this is being read. It is beginning to look like Watchmen may get credited for creating a genre - or at least forcing old school denizens of literature to take notice of a form that has been discredited for so long- and still is by many. What is perhaps more important than Watchmen itself is Time's placing it on its list of important literature. Certainly other books are better - even other graphic novels. But Watchmen is the one that first stood up, the first one that proclaimed a story with emotional depth and historical relevance could be told in words and pictures, and that perhaps, as the old maxim goes, those pictures told more than words ever could.