“Watchmen,” a 12-part comic series published in 1986 and 1987, is now universally acclaimed as the greatest superhero comic of all time, but what does that mean, exactly? If I told you that a polka album was considered to be the greatest polka album of all time, it doesn’t tell you much about the music itself or the ways in which it forever altered the course of polka. Now imagine we lived in a world where polka music has come to dominate the Billboard charts, is played exclusively on nearly every streaming channel, generates billions of dollars in profits each year and is produced to the near-exclusion of every other genre of music. Would that change your curiosity about a highly influential, 30-year-old polka classic?

The legacy of the original “Watchmen” graphic novel is of renewed interest today thanks to the arrival of a new HBO series of the same name, created by Damon Lindelof. Rather than attempt a straight adaptation — a feat that has proved treacherous if not impossible in the past — Lindelof has described his premise as a contemporary “remix” of the original, akin to the connection of the New Testament to the Old (his analogy, not mine). Having seen the first six episodes, I can report that Lindelof’s series has a complex and uneasy relationship to its source material, just as its source material has a complex and uneasy relationship to the superhero genre as a whole. Yet the “Watchmen” show has tasked itself with the same mission that the graphic novel undertook so successfully 30 years ago: To reinvent a pop mythology that, like it or not, has swallowed the culture whole.

Let’s rewind to 1986. If you, like me, spent that decade as a comic-loving teenager you may recall that things were moving pretty quickly. Superhero comics, long considered a popular but critically disregarded juvenile indulgence, were undergoing a stunning artistic renaissance.