The Greatest Superhero Comic Runs
What makes a run
A run in American superhero comics is a sustained period of work by a creative team on a single title. The best runs share a quality that is hard to define but recognisable: the writer and artist have something specific to say, and the fictional world of the character allows them to say it.
Frank Miller's run on Daredevil from 1979 to 1983 introduced a darker, more realistic tone that changed how the character and the genre were perceived. Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing from 1984 used a horror title about a plant-human hybrid to explore politics, sexuality and the nature of identity in ways mainstream comics had never attempted.
Both are cases where a medium that was still recovering from being dismissed as children's entertainment used extraordinary talent to demonstrate what it could do.
The two that changed everything
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, published in 1986 and 1987, is the work most often cited as proving the artistic potential of superhero comics. It uses the conventions of the genre to examine power, violence and the relationship between heroes and the societies that create them.
The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, published in the same year, reimagined Batman as an ageing authoritarian and Superman as a government tool, and changed how both characters were interpreted for decades.
Both were created partly in response to the same moment in superhero publishing: a growing sense that the genre had conventions that had never been examined.
What came after
The era following Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns produced both genuine innovation and a misunderstanding of why those works succeeded. The misunderstanding was that the works succeeded because they were dark and violent; the reality was that they succeeded because they were thoughtful about darkness and violence, which is different.
The best superhero comics since then, Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, Tom King's Vision, Kelly Thompson's Ms Marvel run, have found different things to say rather than simply amplifying the tone of the 1986 watershed.
