So I read this: Hack/Slash: The First Cut by Tim Seeley.

Conceived in the spirit of Carol Clover and Misty Mundae, Hack/Slash is the ongoing story of Cassie Hack, an alienated girl whose mother was the slasher "The Lunch Lady." Now, along with her misshapen compatriot Vlad, she's made a life out of taking down slashers, those killers whose sprees extend from beyond the grave.

The First Cut, a birthday gift from the overmind at Safe in Heaven Dead Films, collects the first three Hack/Slash stories together, and it's pretty entertaining. The characterization is minimal, and occasionally dips into some predictable cliches, but things move quickly and Cassie and Vlad make for a good team.

Word has it that there's going to be a Hack/Slash film in 2009, and it's perfectly geared for that sort of thing. The second of the three main stories in The First Cut, "Girls Gone Dead," is perfect for the big screen. There's a little of everything that horror fans can dig on, and I look forward to seeing how the story of Cassie Hack continues to evolve.

So I read this: Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons

Pretty much everything you've heard is true. This really is the grandaddy of the postmodern comic book. It haunts me to no end that this came out back when I was a serious comic reader and collector and it completely passed me by. Though, truthfully, a lot of Alan Moore's more meta conceits would have gone right over my head. Certainly this was aiming higher than anything else at the time, but it still took Elektra: Assassin to bring me into the world of adult comix, and I still stand by that. You can take Frank Miller's hypersexed reactionary fever dreams of statuesque assassins and the grotesque violence they deal and respond to that from the perspective of a twelve year-old, which I was. But I worked my way through its fragmented and experimental narrative and found it rewarding. I would probably not have been able to appreciate anything about Watchmen had I been reading it back in '86-'87.

But I will say this, and it's the damned truth; Dave Gibbons' art is kind of boring. Perhaps that is intentional- a way to get some of the more baroque narrative touches across without triggering to many warning lights until Moore's ideas get their hooks into the soft grey matter. But if you could have had Moore working with Bill Sienkiewicz on Watchmen- holy shit. I mean, that would have been a work of art that society couldn't withstand. It would have been amazing.

But Watchmen on its own is something unique and well-worth exploring. The forthcoming (if you can call March of next year forthcoming) movie adaptation by Zack (Dawn of the Dead remake "yay," 300 "boo") Snyder has got interest in the title up, which is good. But it's not a particularly cinematic work, and I don't think that this movie will work. But it's good to have some of the concepts in Watchmen resonating throughout global culture.