Good suggestions for people new to the superhero genre.  And now I want to read Rising Stars again.  Straczynski is so good at the multiple-character-management thing.  I think that’s why I like Babylon 5 so much, despite it being a little hokey at times.  It’s an epic, five-season story that spans centuries and galaxies, but it’s ultimately about all the individual characters’ motivations and beliefs; their struggles and triumphs.  When done as well as JMS does, a story told through so many unique viewpoints is very compelling and realistic (in a human-condition sense).

I could imagine your newbie friends being put off by some of the storytelling elements. All the “Black Freighter” sequences in the book are hard for me to understand, for one.

But I hadn’t considered people who haven’t really read any comics. I mean, I thought that was universal!

Granted, the question exists regarding whether you need to be familiar with the printed incarnations to enjoy the film versions of things.  I tend to err on the side of caution, and knowing the level of detail in Watchmen, not to mention its heavy elements of symbolism, cultural context, and even genre satire, my opinion is that for a film to even remotely pull this off, it will have to be extremely faithful to the book or be a massive failure. 

At that point, I would recommend that for maximum appreciation, viewers should be familiar with it going in, and from that stems the suggestion for prerequisite recommended reading. 

By way of brief testimonial, my wife (currently in the midst of LXG and who had never really picked up a comic book before) has said she’s glad that she took up the challenge.  She’s mentioned she’s been learning about some of the visual “jargon” that goes into the storytelling process through the printed graphic medium — things like pacing and structure and visual symbolism — as well as grasping better some of the character archetypes and plot devices that Watchmen then takes apart. 

Anyway, I’m sure that’s more answer than you were looking for, but that was my reasoning.  Obviously it’s up to each reader/viewer to make their own call.  This was just for comic book newbies.  It’s kind of like recommending Mark Twain or John Steinbeck prior to Fyodor Dostoevsky.