Watchmen #1

A proposal built on borrowed heroes

Alan Moore first proposed a story using superheroes DC had acquired from Charlton Comics. The managing editor Dick Giordano persuaded him to invent new characters instead, reasoning that the Charlton heroes would be unusable after the events Moore had planned for them. Moore and Dave Gibbons created a new cast, including Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan.

Watchmen #1 went on sale on May 13, 1986, cover-dated September 1986, at $1.50 in the U.S. and $2.10 in Canada. The issue ran 36 pages. Len Wein edited it, Dick Giordano was executive editor and Richard Bruning was credited as designer.

The series was planned as 12 monthly issues. When serialization began only three issues were finished, though Wein believed six were needed, and the series ran into delays. It finished with a cover date of October 1987.

Two Englishmen

Alan Moore was born on November 18, 1953, in Northampton, England, and grew up in a poor neighborhood called The Boroughs. Before Watchmen he had begun V for Vendetta in 1982 and was writing an acclaimed run on Swamp Thing for DC, the character Len Wein had co-created.

Dave Gibbons was born in London on April 14, 1949. A self-taught artist who had worked as a building surveyor, he drew 108 of the first 131 issues of the British weekly 2000 AD from its 1977 launch and was the lead artist on Doctor Who Weekly. On Watchmen he penciled, inked and lettered the story and drew the cover; John Higgins colored it.

Gibbons won two Kirby Awards for Watchmen in 1987, and in 2014 he became the United Kingdom's first Comics Laureate.

At Midnight, All the Agents

The story opens with a line from Rorschach's journal dated October 12, 1985. Detectives Joe Bourquin and Steven Fine investigate the death of Edward Blake, and the masked Rorschach takes an interest. The issue introduces Dan Dreiberg, Laurie Juspeczyk, Doctor Manhattan, Adrian Veidt and Hollis Mason, with the 1940s team the Minutemen seen in photographs.

The title comes from Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row," and the full verse is printed in the story's last panel. The issue ends with the first two chapters of "Under the Hood," a prose text and the first of the supplemental documents that run through most of the series.

Gibbons built the book on a nine-panel grid, and a blood-stained smiley face became the series' recurring symbol.

A common book in its top grade

No print run or census count appears in the sources consulted here. Watchmen was a commercial success that briefly helped DC overtake Marvel in the direct market, and many copies survive in high grade. CGC 9.8 copies sell for hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

A CGC 9.8 copy sold at auction on August 26, 2025, for $488, against a presale estimate of $400 to $600. In 2026, CGC 9.8 copies sold at auction for $525 on April 30 and $439 on May 14, and online sales through September 2026 ran mostly between about $380 and $720.

Buyers should separate the original from later printings. The Grand Comics Database lists a second printing of issue #1, still carrying the September 1986 cover date, released in February 2009, the month before the film opened in the United States.

The moment comics grew up

Watchmen won a Hugo Award in 1988 in the "Other Forms" category; Gibbons later said Moore kept his upside down in the garden as a bird table. Time magazine named it among the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923, and the BBC called it "the moment comic books grew up." The collected edition, first issued in 1987, had gone through at least 24 printings by March 2017.

Moore fell out with DC over the rights. He said he had understood that ownership would revert to the creators once the book went out of print, but DC never stopped publishing it. He left the company and declined to take part in later adaptations. Zack Snyder's film opened in the United States on March 6, 2009, without Moore's name in the credits, and earned $187 million worldwide.

DC published the prequel series Before Watchmen in 2012 without Moore or Gibbons, and the sequel Doomsday Clock ran from 2017 to 2019. Damon Lindelof's HBO series premiered on October 20, 2019, set 34 years after the comic, and won 11 Emmy Awards from 26 nominations.

The numbers

Cover price

$1.50 U.S. / $2.10 Canada

Pages

36; lead story 26 pages

Print run

Not documented in the sources consulted

Census

No verified CGC census count found in the sources consulted

Later printing

Second printing, February 2009

Series length

12 issues, September 1986 to October 1987

Timeline

1. 1977

   Dave Gibbons draws for the first issue of 2000 AD.

2. 1982

   Alan Moore begins V for Vendetta.

3. May 13, 1986

   Watchmen #1 goes on sale for $1.50, cover-dated September 1986.

4. 1987

   Gibbons wins two Kirby Awards for Watchmen; the series is collected.

5. Oct 1987

   Watchmen #12, the final issue, is cover-dated October 1987.

6. 1988

   Watchmen wins a Hugo Award in the Other Forms category.

7. Feb 2009

   DC issues a second printing of Watchmen #1.

8. Mar 6, 2009

   Zack Snyder's Watchmen film opens in the United States.

9. Feb 2012

   The prequel series Before Watchmen begins.

10. 2014

    Gibbons becomes the UK's first Comics Laureate.

11. Oct 20, 2019

    The Watchmen HBO series premieres.

12. Aug 26, 2025

    A CGC 9.8 copy sells at auction for $488.

13. Apr 30, 2026

    A CGC 9.8 copy sells at auction for $525.

The world in 1986

• Jan 28, 1986

  Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after launch, killing seven astronauts.

• Feb 25, 1986

  The People Power Revolution ousts Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

• Apr 15, 1986

  U.S. aircraft bomb Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya.

• Apr 26, 1986

  The Chernobyl nuclear disaster begins in the Soviet Union.

• May 16, 1986

  Top Gun premieres.

• May 25, 1986

  About 6.5 million people join Hands Across America.

• Oct 11, 1986

  Reagan and Gorbachev meet at the Reykjavik Summit.

• Nov 3, 1986

  A Lebanese magazine reveals secret U.S. arms sales to Iran.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Watchmen #1 is number 80 of 100 in the comics entries of the FLOAT 100. 92 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (76 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Watchmen began as a story about characters DC had bought from Charlton Comics.
• Dave Gibbons lettered the series as well as drawing it.
• The first issue's title comes from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row."
• Alan Moore reportedly used his Hugo Award as a bird table in his garden.
• Only three issues were finished when the series began coming out.
• Alan Moore's name does not appear in the credits of the 2009 film.