Thirty-three years after this writer first turned the pages of an issue of Watchmen in its first printing, that long-gone comic is once again in the news. HBO’s new miniseries – a “remix” of the ideas in the comic book, set in an alternative 2019 in Tulsa, Oklahoma where Robert Redford is president, Vietnam is a state of the union and it occasionally rains baby squid – has just gone live to general critical acclaim.

It should be said that Alan Moore – writer of the original Watchmen and the presiding genius of the grown-up superhero comic – has disavowed the series. As, in turn, he disavowed Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie; and DC’s recent Doomsday Clock series, which folded Watchmen’s cast of characters into the DC multiverse. He has been down, for that matter, on pretty much every cinematic or televisual version of his characters from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to V For Vendetta.

But you can see why he’s specially tetchy about Watchmen. A work of genius it may have been, but he wrote it in 1986 and he’s done a lot since. I’d probably be annoyed if everywhere I went people were still going on about my GCSE results.

But leaving More’s objections aside, the work is out there – and there’s a reason it’s still being picked over and discussed. Superhero comics are a mythographic form – and where the Marvel and DC universes took nearly a century to acquire their archetypal resonances, Moore’s script and Gibbons’s drawings created a powerfully mythic superhero universe more or less from scratch. Those universes – like myths - are always open-ended.