After sealing the deal, the two artists spent a day at Gibbons' house sketching costumes, brainstorming details about their alternative U.S., and discussing influences, including comic-book creators Will Eisner (The Spirit) and Steve Ditko (Spider-Man). Their surprising touchstone: MAD magazine's famous 1953 skewering of Superman, ''Superduperman.'' ''We wanted to take Superduperman 180 degrees — dramatic, instead of comedic,'' says Moore, who declares Harvey Kurtzman's MAD the ''best comic ever!'' Many choices for Watchmen deviated from the comics norm, like using moodier, secondary colors and dividing the page into a claustrophobic nine-panel grid instead of a few panels of varying size.
NEIL GAIMAN
My very small part in Watchmen is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...?'' He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.
Neat.