A few more that really deserve a mention
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and John Lloyd - I'd bought a boxload of old comics from a car boot sale on a Saturday morning and spent the afternoon sorting them out. Three of them turned out to be issues of V for Vendetta, something I'd heard of in Pop Will Eat Itself lyrics but never read. I think they were issues 6, 7 and 8. At first I thought it was a bit dull and wasn't getting into the story very easily - I suppose jumping in more than halfway through didn't help - but then something clicked in my brain and I raced out of the house to the nearest comic shop to pick up the graphic novel. I got home and read it cover to cover. By the time I finished I was in tears. Then I picked it up and read it again. By about 11pm I'd read it three times. The phone rang - I was supposed to have met my new girlfriend for a date that evening. She wasn't my girlfriend any more. I didn't care though, I'd discovered something far better. Alan Moore truly does know the score.

Neuromancer by William Gibson - I've seen this mentioned once already, and suspect it will be a popular choice. This one really did change my life, I went from being a print graphic designer to a web developer almost immediately after reading it. Now I'm in Singapore, living the Gibson lifestyle to the full. Pretty much all of his other books are just as good (Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are fantastic real-world sci-fi), but this is the one I've read about 60 times and keep coming back to...every time I find something new in it.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - again, this one has been mentioned before in this QOTW but it was when I found that I'd bought it for my stepdad for Christmas and he'd bought it for me, and in the end (since Christmas was a few weeks away) we agreed to keep and read the copies we had, that I realised how well we were going to get on together. Shortly afterwards I managed to snag two tickets to see Dawkins speak at the Oxford Union debating chambers (the final date on his God Delusion tour) and we went together. It was an absolutely brilliant night and I got to ask the great man himself a question, then we went for a curry and a beer. My stepdad's marrying my mum this year and she's asked me to give her away (despite her dad still being alive), which I suppose is pretty life-changing.

The Transformers by Simon Furman - at the time the best-selling weekly comic in the UK and it still resonates with me now, because Furman never wrote down to kids, he included all kinds of graphic violence, complicated time-travel plotlines and realistic characters that truly breathed life into those toys I had...and still have. About 600 of them now. I've helped organise conventions, written and produced my own comics and last month I got a Decepticon tattoo. I've also made some very good friends amongst fellow Transfans and as we all turned 30 recently someone commented how "Furman's children are growing up...wait, that sounds wrong." He's still writing the comics to this day (nearly 25 years in the business) and I'll keep reading them until he stops.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Thu 15 May 2008, 19:08, 4 replies)

V
is excellent, but a hard read, my Library when I was younger had a fantastic collection of graphic novels
(Halfy By light alone, Thu 15 May 2008, 19:45, closed)

I was going to mention Transformers
Had the first 100 or so comics in the UK, god I wish I kept them :p

Re-read them 2 years ago online; there's a website with a load of them scanned on there somewhere (haven't got the link soz), really enjoyed it :)
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Thu 15 May 2008, 19:45, closed)

I'd choose a girlfriend over Alan Moore
Not that V for Vendetta isn't worth a look.
( rob, Fri 16 May 2008, 10:01, closed)

@rob
I was a lot younger and more cocksure back then...and a few of my friends still laugh at me for standing up a lady for a comic book. And then telling her I stood her up for a comic book. I was a bit of an idiot, truth be told :(

@Jeccy
Most of the old stuff is back in print, so almost all of the scanned copies got taken down...though www.oneshallstand.com still do the occasional story, and there are a bunch of torrents out there. In the real world, Titan published almost all of the UK stories in A4-sized graphic novels a few years back but they're kind of hard to find now, while IDW publish a monthly "Best of UK" title, collected into paperbacks every so often. The only problem is that since a lot of the UK stories feature Death's Head, IDW can't reprint them because of copyright issues with Marvel who still own the Death's Head character.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Fri 16 May 2008, 11:12, closed)