Losing My Graphic Novel Virginity

I finally did it. I took the plunge.

I read a graphic novel.

Hi, I'm Jenny. I'm 25 years old, and I'm no longer a graphic novel virgin.

I chose "Watchmen" for my first time, for three main reasons:

1. It's the only graphic novel in our house.

2. I LOVED the movie. A lot.

3. I made a deal with my husband that if he read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," I would read "Watchmen." He read "Harry Potter," so it was my turn to read something I was apprehensive about.

After I saw the movie last year, I tried to read the book, but I put it down quickly. To a longtime novel reader like me, the graphic novel format was a completely different way to experience a story. Instead of just reading the words and imagining the characters, setting and action, I had to allow Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins to show me what was happening.

The flow of reading a graphic novel is quite different from reading a novel. At first, I realized that I was just reading the dialogue without really looking at the pictures, and I was missing a lot of the plot. Many times, especially in the first two or three chapters, I had to make myself go back and look at the pictures so that I could get what was going on. It was a completely new experience for me.

I loved the story of "Watchmen" when it was a movie, and I appreciated the story even more in graphic novel form. If you don't know, "Watchmen" is an alternative history story about what might have happened if masked vigilantes/superheroes were real. The U.S. wins the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon is still president in the 1980s, and the world is on the brink of nuclear war with Russia. I love seeing superheroes as normal people - only one of them has real "super powers." They have character flaws, and are just generally weird, dysfunctional people. Let's be honest, you'd have to be to dress up in goofy costumes and fight crime. I liked the somewhat complicated structure - it tells the story, but in between chapters, there are "documents," such as chapters of an old superhero's memoirs, that help tell the story. In addition, interspersed throughout the book are parts of a comic about an adventurer at sea, called "Tales of the Black Freighter." Confused yet? It gets a little complicated, but it does a great job telling the story in a less straightfoward, normal way.

The biggest thing about reading graphic novels if you've never done it before is getting used to the flow. If you're an accomplished novel reader, it will take you a while, but if you stick with it, it will get easier. The other thing that you might have to get over is the idea that a graphic novel is somehow a "lower" form of storytelling, or that it is not literature, somehow. A book as good as "Watchmen" is literature. It tells a great story, but it tells a story in a different media. It's just like accepting that animated movies or TV shows can be a perfectly good way to tell a story. Neither medium is inherently better - they're just different, and people can use them all to tell great stories.

If you've never read "Watchmen," I highly recommend it. If you've never read a graphic novel, I suggest you try "Watchmen."

And if you have any suggestions for great graphic novels to try, let me know ... I'm ready for round two!