I'm confused by the fact that many call this Moore's best work.

The art is difficult to parse through. While it suits certain scenes, it made the pages completely unreadable at times. This is not a matter of me not enjoying the art style. Often times I had no idea what character I was looking at. People are either men or women, mustache or not mustache, fat or skinny. There are at least 5 sets of characters that look exactly the same,wear the exact same clothing, and speak the exact same. There were times I didn't realize it was a different character until 40 pages later.

While I am normally a fan of Moore's writing, I feel like the length of this text was masturbatory, especially when combined with the difficulty in knowing what the hell is ever going on at any given point. The story itself is meandering to such a length that I frequently asked myself if there was even a point. The last few chapters shine, and at the very least add a bit of sense to the story as a whole.

The best part of the book is the appendix 1, where Moore provides a page by page breakdown of what was happening in each square. When a book requires a full section just to explain what you're seeing in every section, and why it was included, maybe it's a bit too long.
When you need to explain your brilliance, maybe it's not quite that brilliant.

Appendix 2 is equally useful for understanding this behemoth tome, and why and how it came into being. Oddly enough, it happens to have better art than the rest of the book, and I knew characters as things other than "Fat moustache" or "Lady black hair".