The X-Men scripts written by Chris Claremont emphasised the growing pains of the troubled cast of misfits; John Byrne’s clean, eye-catching artwork brought Hollywood glamour to the pages of The Fantastic Four. But two mini-series published by DC Comics raised the medium to the level of literature, and they both hit newsstands and comic shops within weeks of each other. One was The Dark Knight Returns, a four-issue series, written and drawn by Frank Miller, which reimagined Batman – or rather, “The Batman” – as a middle-aged sadist. The other was Watchmen, a 12-parter from the British writer-artist team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Given that they were being written and drawn at the same time, and so they had no chance of influencing one another, it’s remarkable how much the two mini-series have in common. Both of them divide their pages into neat grids of small rectangles, packing in far more information than a typical superhero comic; both of them set their stories in a recognisable, but crumbling US on the verge of nuclear war; both of them ponder what sort of person would put on fancy dress and punch muggers every evening (in short: a crazy person); and both of them ask how such gaudily-garbed do-gooders would be perceived in the media and by the man in the street. Even to the most casual browser, these twin landmarks proved that superhero comics could be as sophisticated as any novel or film, despite all the people in them who strode around wearing underpants over their tights.

Flawed characters

It’s debatable which is the better of the two, but Watchmen is the more ambitious, largely due to its writer, Alan Moore. A long-haired, bushily bearded autodidact from Northampton, Moore was expelled from school for selling LSD, but that didn’t stop him making his mark on two British anthology comics, 2000 AD and Warrior, at the start of the 1980s. Both magazines exploded with wild ideas and unconventional characters, from the blue-skinned, genetically-engineered soldier, Rogue Trooper, to the fascistic future lawman, Judge Dredd. But even among all these eccentric aliens, robots and mutants, the strips written by Moore – The Ballad of Halo Jones, V For Vendetta – stood out: they were funnier, weirder, more erudite, more poetic, and more structurally inventive than anything being done by his peers.