"Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian, Silky Ghost, Rorschach, the Owl and Ozymandias may not be stars, but they forever changed the way we read comics. Created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986, Watchmen is a milestone in the history of superheroes, a permanent game with the superheroic genre that it inspects and reevaluates to settle its score, Watchmen sometimes overshadows other masterpieces from the same culture. This belief forces us to rephrase the question: what makes Watchmen, rather than being the best superhero story of all time, a reset of the counters for all graphic novels. Who will follow? And what, ultimately, is a comic book? What can superheroes be used for? And above all, what political role should the reader play at the heart of all this? Aurélien Lemant

 Watchmen: Now by Aurélien Lemant. Cover illustration by Franck Biancarelli.