By now pretty much everybody has read Watchmen. It’s a good and important graphic novel but is by no means the best one ever and it’s not even Alan Moore’s best work. But let’s not argue about it. You might have a different opinion, which is cool. I just want to give you five other Alan Moore comics to check out before coming to any solid conclusions!

From Hell

From Hell is a deeply researched, consuming, and exhausting piece of graphic literature. It was published in comic anthologies intermittently over a long period of time, which makes sense. It’s hard to imagine anyone just sitting down and writing it from beginning to end! It tells the story of Jack the Ripper (an upper-class doctor) and gruesomely examines the killings and provides the occult and societal motivations for them. Eddie Campbell’s black and white penciling is impressionistic and maddening – a perfect fit for the story. It’s a big book (practically a tome) but page after page it draws you further and further into a frightening mind and bizarre time in English history.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Please, please, please forget the movie and do yourself a favor by reading this. In this story all the Victorian heroes and villains of adventure literature exist and fight in the same universe. In order to combat the threats of Fu Manchu and Moriarty the British government puts together a team of heroes/anti-heroes: Mr. Hyde, Mina Harker, Allan Quartermain, The Invisible Man, and Captain Nemo. This is a dark story featuring heroes with less then stellar moralities. But it’s a fun story, a completely convincing world, and makes you realize that the Victorian era – for all its faults – had some badass characters.

Lost Girls

If you’re at all offended by nudity and extremely sexual situations you should not read this book. Let’s just say that Alan Moore, in order to prevent the erotica/pornography debate, came out and said it was pornography. He wanted it to be described this way because it was his intention to make a porn comic that illustrated the beauty of all kinds of sex as well as using explicit sexual encounters to explore characters’ psychology and the political/cultural state of the world at the time. Dorothy (Wizard of Oz), Wendy (Peter Pan), and Alice (Alice in Wonderland) meet each other at a European hotel just before World War I breaks out. They get involved in sexual relationships with each other and other visitors at the hotel. Along with this they recount their first sexual experiences that directly tie into the children’s classics they were involved. What Moore proposes is that these original stories reflect the sexual awakening of their pubescent protagonists. The story is drawn, painted, and pretty much channeled by Melinda Gebbie, who drew influence from the art of the Victorian period. If you’re comfortable with explicit sexuality then read this – porn doesn’t get any better.

Swamp Thing

This is the series that launched Alan Moore to the forefront of the comic book world. In the 1980s Swamp Thing (another one of those hard to write inhuman characters) was a cool character with a dying series. Figuring they had nothing to lose, DC put Alan Moore on the title and with one issue he revitalized the character and the series became one of the most critically acclaimed and popular DC titles. It ushered in a new line of mature reader comics and DC was hunting down and hiring every British comic writer they could find. In the series Swamp Thing journeys to Heaven, Hell, outer space, and experiences the worst America has to offer (serial killers, ghosts, racism, etc.) Fun, frightening, and sometimes disgusting stories. Plus, this is the series that convinced Neil Gaiman to write comic books and introduced the character of John Constantine (“Hellblazer”) to the world. All of this plus gorgeous art by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch should be enough to convince you to pick it up.

DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore

This is a collection of Alan Moore’s miscellaneous DC stories in the 1980s. It was sorely needed – finding the individual issues was difficult as well as pricy – and I was glad to see it released. They’re all strong stories. The two-part Vigilante story, “Father’s Day,” is both moving and frightening. The Phantom Stranger origin captures the essence of a character known for being difficult to write. And, as with every collection, there a few standouts and modern comic classics.

Two of the Green Lantern stories, “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” and “In Blackest Night” are riveting and are such a subtle expansion of the mythos that the Green Lantern titles are only now catching up to what Moore hinted at. Moore was born to write the Superman/Swamp Thing team-up and he uses their encounter to bring out new aspects of their characters. The Superman story, “For the Man Who Has Everything,” is technically perfect. The paneling, pacing, and threading of storylines remains the height of Moore’s 1980s style. The “final” Superman story, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” is a heartfelt tribute and satisfying conclusion to the saga of the Silver Age Superman.