Is “Watchmen,” the 1986 serial comic book written and created by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, really one of the “Best 100 Novels of All Time,” as Time magazine dubbed it in 2005?

Not quite.

But potential readers — and potential viewers of the $100 million movie adaptation, opening next week — can still appreciate Watchmen. Just don’t believe the hype, fiction writer Lydia Millet says in a piece published today in the Wall Street Journal.

And I’ll add: Stay away from those giant piles of “Watchmen” miscellany now on display at your favorite bookstore — and, I’ll guess, in toy sections.

“If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it,” Millet writes. “This isn’t high culture and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.”