Neil was right, I was a snob, and it took me ten years to admit it.

Neil put this in my hands in 2011; I ignored it for a decade out of pure snobbery, and he has never once let it go. He mentions it at Christmas. He mentioned it at his own birthday!

I had underestimated the formal ambition worst of all. That symmetrical chapter, the one reading the same forwards and backwards, could easily have been a stunt and isn't, because the symmetry is what the character inside it believes about time. Form matching argument, in a medium I'd lazily assumed didn't bother with either.

What has aged strangely is Rorschach. He's written as a diagnosis and he's been received as an aspiration — and you can trace a straight line from that misreading through thirty years of superhero films made by men who thought the joke was cool. Moore couldn't have prevented it. It happened regardless.

That pirate comic running underneath took me two attempts. First time round I skipped it, which I now consider close to reading half a book.

Where I'd mark it down: Laurie. She's written from the outside throughout, her interiority arrives via other people's monologues, and the sexual politics of a couple of sequences are grim in ways the book shows no sign of noticing.

Eight, and I've apologised to Neil in writing.