Watchmen ushered in a new era of dark comicbook stories, and the long awaited film opens Friday. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

With this Friday's highly-anticipated Watchmen release, we thought it would be fun to ask some industry experts to chime in on their favorite comicbook movies (despite Alan Moore's vocal dislike of them). We even got a few Watchmen participants: Visual Effects Supervisors John DJ DesJardin (who admitted to being in full "geek glory") and Pete Travers of Sony Pictures Imageworks (with tongue very much in cheek), Concept Illustrator Scott Lukowski and Dave Gibbons, who, of course, illustrated the original graphic novel. They are joined by such distinguished vfx supervisors as Eric Barba of Digital Domain, who just earned the Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Double Negative's Paul Franklin, who was nominated for The Dark Knight; ILM's Ben Snow, an Iron Man nominee now working on Terminator Salvation; and Sony's Scott Stokdyk, Oscar winner for Spider-Man 2 now in the midst of G-Force. The results, as you will see, run the gamut from predictable to very idiosyncratic. We'll begin with the Watchmen guys:

John DJ DesJardin
"It's really a tough thing to do [narrowing down this list]. Maybe they all deserve to be on one line, as a foundation upon which all good comic movies should be built. Here's my Top 10, although not in order (and, yes, I think it's important to acknowledge the importance of the animated films in this list... perfection does not always equal live action)."

Hellboy II is an example of a well-done, thoughtful comicbook movie. Courtesy of Double Negative. © Universal.

1. Iron Man (An excellent movie that also takes its reference comic seriously)

2. The Dark Knight (Batman finally taken seriously, again)

3. 300 (The best attempt at taking a stylish graphic novel literally)

4. Sin City (A great attempt at taking a stylish graphic novel literally)

5. Superman: The Movie (The classic that got it right and started it all...)

6. The Crow (Only like the graphic novel in spirit, but that's saying a lot)

7. Akira (The first anime I ever saw... blew me away! And it's just like the comic)

8. Ghost in the Shell 2 (Ghost in the Shell is so good, 2 is so good, too)

9. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Also well done, by Guillermo del Toro and the original creator, Mike Mignola)

10. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (Arguably the best Batman movie to date, designed and executed by the guys [Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm] who did the amazing animated series from the early '90s)