The Crimebusters are a superhero group that succeeds the Minutemen and are the main characters of Watchmen. A dark gray cell indicates the character was not in the film.

An A indicates an appearance by an in-universe actor portraying the character.A P indicates an appearance through a photographic still.An L indicates the actor or actress lent only their likeness for his or her film character.A Y indicates the model served as a body double, with the actor or actress's likeness superimposed onto the model.The television series Watchmen is set in the same canon as the limited series, taking place in 2019 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Later on, several Watchmen characters reappeared in the limited series Doomsday Clock, bringing them into the main DC Universe. The protagonists of Watchmen were reused in the prequel series Before Watchmen, which also gave backstories to several minor characters from the original graphic novel, and introduced new characters. Moore wished the main characters to present six 'radically opposing ways' to perceive the world, and to give readers of the story the privilege of determining which one was most morally comprehensible. Since the publisher planned to integrate Charlton's superheroes into the main DC Universe and the script would have made many of them unusable for future stories, series writer Alan Moore eventually agreed to create original characters.

Moore later based the team’s predecessors, the Minutemen, on the Mighty Crusaders. These characters were originally based on the Mighty Crusaders and then reworked in an unsolicited proposal to fit superhero properties DC had acquired from Charlton Comics in the early 1980s. Watchmen focuses on six main characters: the Comedian, Doctor Manhattan, the Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach, and the Silk Spectre. Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins, published by DC Comics in 19. The six main characters of the 1986 comic book limited series Watchmen (from left to right): Ozymandias, the second Silk Spectre, Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian (kneeling), the second Nite Owl, and Rorschach

Comic book the watchmen