Bt that's the thing - it did. It took existing characters and powers, transposed them into new characters that were easily identifiable from their source and told the story using those chacters.

To be fair, if people don't want to argue that one, look at Marvelman. That took existing characters and rewrote their world (Literally!). I loved Marvelman but it totally changed everything that had gone before (While finding a plausable and satisfying method through which to do that, but nevertheless, it fundamentally changed what had been published before). Once you got past issue 16 I completely lost interest because I had read enough of that world and didn't feel interested in where it would go next.

Although I think the "grim and gritty" hype had just really started in the mid-90s. I don't think that Barr's/Wolfman's/Grant's Batman showed us a broken anti-hero. And there was also Collins directly after the Crisis who took inspirations from Dick Sprang. I don't think the tone in those stories was that different from the pre-Watchmen era. It took some time until Miller's and Moore's fan were old enough to write their own comics! On the other hand it was Danny O'Neil, writer of many of my favourite Batman stories, who drove the character more and more into the darker direction when he was the editor.

Didn't Frank Miller also claim that some famous writer came to him and told him that "he had ruined Batman"? I would love to know who that was!

Edited by Friedrich Thorben on 13 November 2009 at 8:31am

••

One of the things about previous "decades" of American superhero
comics is that they tended to be approximately that -- decades. Fads
and fancies rarely lasted more than a few years, ten at the most.
Batman's period of fighting aliens and wearing odd costumes and
undergoing strange physical transformations is a pretty good example. It
was just starting up when I "met" the character, circa 1957, and was
pretty much gone by the time the excitement of the TV series died down.
the early/mid sixties would see the arrival of Neal Adams, following fast
on the heels of a whole "new approach" for Batman.

But how long has this "grim and gritty" stuff being going on? I was
already hearing that phrase being tossed around when I entered the
business professionally, thirty five years ago. WATCHMEN and DARK
KNIGHT seemed to kick it all into high gear -- it became the only idea
anybody seemed to have -- and those were both more than twenty years
ago.

••

I'd be inclined to say WATCHMEN marked the beginning of the end of
SUPERHERO comics. The characters we see in the wake of WATCHMEN are
not very super, and rarely heroic.

As a kid I first met Daredevil as "The Swingin' Super-hero" but I bought Daredevil 159, Miller's 2nd issue but first to really take the character in a darker direction. It just poured over with noir and I didn't even know what that word was at the time but it seemed so real. New York came alive at night with Frank's illustrations... The same thing happened to me when I read O'neil and Adams Batman story "The Waiting Graves"... Even at 8 years old that was just awesome but I think in both those cases, Neal and Frank knew when to pull back and remember the audience at the time who was reading these things.

With the Watchmen etc... It was like being 5 years old and walking into a Crackhouse, with junkies, hookers and porn on the TV.

••

Absolutely! I resisted commenting in my previous post that one of the
chief reasons for the persistence of "grim and gritty" is that the readers
who like that kind of stuff 24/7 not only have come to dominate the
marketplace as it has dwindled, but also are in many cases the ones who
are placing the orders -- and, of course, the increasingly unimaginative
crew who are actually producing the books!

In Hollywood there is a saying -- "Nobody want's to be first, but
everybody wants to be second." In comics, it sometimes seems that
everybody wants to be second, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth,
and seventh, and eighth. . . . . . .

I like DKR as much as anybody else, but it's led to a philosopy among fans that Batman can literally beat anyone in any situation.

Let's look at how a fight between Superman and Batman would really go down:

Panel One--Superman and Batman square off.

Panel Two--A blur of motion.

Panel Three--Superman has to decide what to do with the body.