Twenty-three years after its birth, the Citizen Kane of graphic novels, Watchmen, will finally be seeing the light of day as a two-hour-and-43-minute feature film.

The film is released in theaters the Friday most students leave for spring break, but College 9 manager Anthony Smith is not worried. The film will be around for about a month after students come back to school. Smith said he expects kids 17 and up, as well as an older crowd that grew up with the source material.

"We're more than just a student market," Smith said. "This is a town that loves to see a film that has a buzz around it whether it's negative or positive."

First published as a 12-issue series by DC Comics in 1986, writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' subversive epic landed on Time magazine's 2005 list of the All-Time Best 100 Novels since 1923; it is the only graphic novel on the list.

It's even used as a teaching aid for integrative arts instructor Patrick Trimble. He said the novel helped change the way people look at graphic storytelling.

"It is multiple stories being told simultaneously with a great deal of human dimension, a great deal of political consciousness and a great sense of literary complexity," Trimble said. "There's this kind of surreal connectedness with visual symbolism and wonderful narrative action."

He said while the book is not on a formal reading list for his courses, he recommends the book as a "must-read" for all of his students.

Adam Hosey (senior-media studies) said the novel served as a gateway for him into the world of graphic novels. He is excited to see the film adaptation but retains low expectations for the film.

"There's so much in the comic book," Hosey said. "And with a two-hour movie, I don't see how they can do all of it."

Sharing in that sentiment is Adam Lugibill, assistant manager at Comic Swap, 110 S. Fraser St. Lugibill said he is cautiously optimistic about the film adaptation because so many comic book fans view the novel as a seminal work of the medium.

"Personally, I'm not convinced it's going to live up to what I would want a Watchmen movie to be," Lugibill said, adding he considers Watchmen to be his favorite graphic novel.

He said he hopes the tone and message of the text remains the same.

But not all fans of the original work are proceeding with caution. Trimble, who is more optimistic about the upcoming film, said he is impressed by visual aspects of the film.

"I've seen some of the trailers and extended pieces and they look wonderful," Trimble said. "They really have a wonderful visual sense of what Moore's work was all about."

Aside from critical acclaim within the literature and comic book communities, the graphic novel retains its profitability 23 years following its release. Lugibill said the store has 50 available copies in stock and it has always sold very well.

"Sometimes we sell more in a week than we would in an entire year," Lugibill said.

Since the release of The Dark Knight in July, sales have been through the roof. Lugibill said he feels Heath Ledger's haunting performance as The Joker prepared audiences for the arrival of Watchmen in movie theaters.

"That atmosphere of storytelling is something we're very interested in right now as a country," Lugibill said.

Smith agreed, saying Batman Begins and The Dark Knight amended the postmodern superhero tale for moviegoers by amping up the realism, and people want more of it.

"Even though it's fantasy, it makes it feel real when you bring dark elements into it," Smith said. "You'd like to see the struggle."

Lugibill said the novel came out at a time when people were ready for a comic book that tackled superheroes with gravity and cast society in a cynical light --"pretty much the opposite of the Batman TV show."

"It's like literature because it introduces social questions," Lugibill said. "It's about everything the country was thinking about at that time -- the Cold War, McCarthyism and superheroes."

Smith said he is expecting a box office presence along the lines of 300, the 2007 film based on a graphic novel, since it shares the same time-slot (early March), the same production company (Legendary Pictures) and the same director (Zack Snyder).

"This is the one everyone is penciling in as the big movie before summer," Smith said.