I loved the graphic novel, but the precise nature of the climax - basically, Moore plagiarizing "The Architects Of Fear" and passing it off as homage by inserting a reference to it on one of the last pages of the book - struck me then and now as cheesy and cheap.
To be fair, "The Architects of Fear" stole that plot point from the midpoint of
The Sirens of Titan...
And back beyond that, I'll bet.
There was a political/science fiction thriller published sometime between 1974 and 1976 that utilizes the "Fear" plot with an enormous amount of detail that (coincidentally?) tracks point-for-point with Moore's "Watchmen" plot. I don't remember the title but keep looking for it online and in used book stores, because I'm loathe to synopsize something like that when I can't present specific references for it.
I don't know, maybe someone else remembers it: it revolved around a plot authorized by a (post-Watergate, obviously) U.S. President to counter radical political unrest by manufacturing an "alien threat." The hoax involved a team of scientists and engineers designing a fake alien spacecraft that would be made to appear to crash into a residential area of San Francisco releasing a poisonous gas which would kill quite a considerable number of people.
Although the poison gas part of the plot is kept from the eager researchers who are assigned to fake up alien corpses, develop alloys for the "ship" and so on at least two of the researchers come to realize that the whole project has to end in their deaths to prevent any chance of the hoax ever being revealed. One of them uses his specialized knowledge to code a message to the outside world in RNA injected into chocolates in a box(!) that he tries to have sent to someone outside the project.
Of course, such supposedly permitted contacts with the outside world are routinely interdicted and disposed of by the spooks running the project. In this case, though, the box of chocolates is found in the very last pages by a security type whose assignment is to clean up the compound (after all the researchers have been disposed of) and who - without knowing the significance of the thing - decides to send it as a small "peace offering" to an estranged daughter who's into radical politics at school.
I remember a few lines of dialogue from the book - the opening sentence is something like "Mr. President, they took out the Lincoln Memorial" (an after-midnite phone call reporting on a successful bombing by a group of domestic radicals) and during the internal debate about greenlighting the hoax the President mentions Watergate (to which the spook who's developed this diabolical plan responds tersely "Amateur night."). There's also an ongoing challenge involving each of the teams of scientists trying to come up with the x-factor (not what they called it, I don't think, but I don't remember what they did call it) that would lead someone examining, say, the alien bodies or the alloy composition of the spacecraft or the fake stardrive to the "proper" conclusion that yes it must truly be from outer space.
It was such a peculiar story that it reminded me at the time of some of Edwin Corley's odder fantasy/thrillers like "The Jesus Factor." I'm sure it wasn't one of his, though, because I'd remember that. It was not, to my knowledge, a best seller or otherwise successful book - I knew of it and browsed it heavily only because a friend who absolutely devoured speculative political thrillers - "Night Of Camp David" at about the same time, anything by Allen Drury - was reading it.
