On his blog, Neil Gaiman linked to an interview with Alan Moore, which I am linking to right here.
I found that the introduction to the interview - in particular the last few sentences - really resonated with me:
I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of Watchmen, his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. I had always been fascinated by comics but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy Watchmen; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary it was some quite unheard-of sum of money. I began reading on the Tube home. I read all weekend and by Monday morning I still had a couple of chapters to go. For the book itself, I refer you to pretty much any review – intelligent, multi-layered, extraordinary, etc – but what I remember 20 years later is not so much what I thought of it, as its effect on me. That Monday at work I felt almost physically sick: sick from not being able to read Watchmen. The primary colours of Dave Gibbons's art danced in my head – everything else seemed grey and unreal. No other book ever took hold of me like that. That evening I went home and finished it. Then I was no longer sick. Only bereft.
I had actually been a fan of Alan Moore for some years prior to reading Watchmen, but as amazed as I had been by all of his previous work, nothing could have prepared me for the effect Watchmen would have on me.
And what makes him such a remarkable talent is that he can still manage to take you by surprise.
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