Once again, the Ninth Art editorial board has been at the booze in the name of journalism. This month, the team turns its attention to two of the industry's most revered works, WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Please note that this article includes discussion of major plot points from both works.

ANTONY JOHNSTON: Alan Moore has said in the past that he was surprised by the resurgence of superheroes in the early 90s, because he felt that WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS had pretty much killed the concept of the superhero and exposed it for how ridiculous it all was. Frank Miller expressed similar sentiments. Some people have said WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT progressed the superhero to the next level, and Moore and Miller have said they never intended to do that. They intended to show how ridiculous superheroes are.

ALASDAIR WATSON: I don't think Miller can really say he meant to show how ridiculous superheroes are. For all that DARK KNIGHT is an excellent story and an excellent capstone to Batman, it's still a superhero story. The centrepiece of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is the closing fight between Superman versus Batman, showing that Batman's great goal was to beat Superman.

JOHNSTON: I never really took that to be the heart of the series. For me, what sums up DARK KNIGHT would be the sequence at the start where Bruce Wayne is feeling impotent, and the sequence at the end where its revealed that he hasn't really beaten Superman, but has tricked him. He's beaten him through trickery rather than through brute force.

WATSON: The thing for me about it is that Batman proves to Superman in a manner that Superman cannot dispute that Batman has been the better and more powerful of the two all along.

JOHNSTON: But he also timed that suicide pill perfectly so he wouldn't have to show whether or not he actually could kill Superman.

WATSON: I get the sense that Batman could easily have gone on to kill Superman, but chose not to. But either way, the point is, this scene is not the end of superheroes. This is not beyond superheroes. These are very much superhero comics.

ANDREW WHEELER: And I think I would agree with that. Fifteen years on from both WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT, what they have emerged as is exemplars of the form, not capstones on it. WATCHMEN is science fiction as much as it is superheroes, and I don't think it destroys anything.

JOHNSTON: It does depend on how you define the form. It's not necessarily an exemplar of the form, because it ends, and if all superhero fiction were written like WATCHMEN, there would be no continuing series.

WHEELER: But that would be an evolution of the form, not an end to superheroes. What we had in WATCHMEN was a demonstration that superheroes can be done a different way, and that was just breaking conventions, not throwing them out. I think what Moore was really surprised at was not that superheroes had a revival, but that crap comics continued to be published. And in thinking that, he was as naïve as someone thinking that, after Shakespeare, all plays would be good.

JOHNSTON: I think Moore's obviously realised that wasn't true, because he's gone on to produce more superhero comics himself - albeit, by the standards of the norm, extremely good superhero comics.

WHEELER: Well, not all extremely good, let's be fair. His SUPREME stuff was not exemplary.

WATSON: And we will conveniently paint over SPAWN at this point.

WHEELER: His America's Best Comics stuff is generally good, yeah, but he has gone back to superheroes between WATCHMEN and ABC, and it's not been gorgeously glossy stuff that had people talking.

JOHNSTON: But Moore has said that what he was doing there was attempting to imitate what was popular at the time.

WHEELER: Well, that's a nice get-out, isn't it?

WATSON: If he turns up at our door, peering through our letterbox...

JOHNSTON: I find it hard to believe anyone who could write something as accomplished as WATCHMEN and the many other things he wrote before things like SUPREME, could write something as bad as SPAWN: BLOODFEUD by accident.

WHEELER: Let's not speak of SPAWN: BLOODFEUD by name. We shouldn't fool ourselves that every word Alan Moore writes is gold. ABC... everything outside of TOMORROW STORIES is good or above average. It's not all great. He's not leading the pack with all these comics. Either PROMETHEA or TOP TEN is arguably ABC's best comic - I personally prefer TOP TEN, because it has a stronger narrative.

WATSON: TOP TEN is his strongest conventional work. With PROMETHEA it's obvious he's abandoned the narrative. In terms of the form, PROMETHEA is the better book.

JOHNSTON: I don't think anything can say Moore is doing bad work, it's just a question of whether some of it is to your taste or you regard some of it as better than other works.

WHEELER: When ABC started, people said, 'This is Moore phoning it in, this is Moore paying the bills and keeping his name in circulation', but then I don't see that works like PROMETHEA don't deserve to be racked alongside V FOR VENDETTA and FROM HELL. TOP TEN may be more mainstream, but it's a very strong work, and one that I could revisit gladly, over and over.

JOHNSTON: It is packed with craft, which, fifteen years on, is what I appreciate most about WATCHMEN. I actually think it's a very good comic to give to a young person who is just becoming politically aware, because it shocked the hell out of me when I was 16, 17. The actual story made me go 'wow' and have really deep thoughts, man. Now, when I look at it, it's a bit trite in places. But I do notice upon rereading it that there is a lot of ambiguity in the end. The only way in which [the villain] Veidt's plan succeeds is from Veidt's point of view. There is no actual correlation from the outside world, saying, 'We will never have wars again'.

WATSON: To be fair, what's suggested by the very end is that actually it did work, and then Rorschach's diaries resurfaced.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, but that's not dealt with, and a lot of people criticise that, and that's not fair because that's not the point of the book.

WHEELER: What it perhaps isn't visionary enough to cover is the fact that, as we now know, when the world changes forever and beyond all recognition, it actually reverts back to normal quite quickly. Actually, at the end of this book, nothing has changed. The book doesn't work on that level if you place it in the context of the real world, which it's surely where it's meant to be, absurdities aside.

'For all that DARK KNIGHT is an excellent story, it's still a superhero story.' JOHNSTON: But regardless of whether the politics still stands up to an adult mind, the craft of WATCHMEN I still read and re-read.

WATSON: WATCHMEN was one of the first comics you could apply words like leitmotif to.

JOHNSTON: Yeah. It's one of the few things, along with V FOR VENDETTA, that I can read and re-read constantly. Where the art and writing are so synergistic, and the craft is so incredibly well developed.

WHEELER: What you can say about WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and what people get blindsided by, is that they are works of literature. Within the canon of comics, they are genuine works of literature and deserve to be judged as such. That doesn't mean you have to like them. Everyone seems to, but that's because...

WATSON: Because there aren't very many works of literature in comics. And they're all by about the same four authors.

WHEELER: Yeah. It's as if you're betraying the form if you don't kneel down at the altar of these works, but the time has come for their reappraisal.

JOHNSTON: Not every English professor loves Thomas Hardy.

WHEELER: Exactly.

JOHNSTON: I despise Thomas Hardy.

WATSON: But you're not an English professor.

WHEELER: Some of Shakespeare's plays are a bit shoddy. His endings are usually atrocious.

JOHNSTON: You can appreciate their craft and you can judge them of their time, without actually necessarily liking them. Now, I do still like WATCHMEN, as it happens.

WHEELER: I like WATCHMEN more than I like DARK KNIGHT, and neither of them is probably in my personal top ten.

JOHNSTON: WATCHMEN would probably be in mine. I don't know about DARK KNIGHT.

'WATCHMEN is a bit trite in places, but I can still appreciate the craft.' WATSON: DARK KNIGHT is an immensely important work and there's no way around that, in the respect of being the first comic to put an ending on a superhero comic, and for that, in terms of importance to the medium, that's more complicated to judge. You can only really judge what's important in hindsight, and the only works of importance we have enough hindsight on are those two.

JOHNSTON: DARK KNIGHT has had a legacy, but if you re-read it now, the main thing you appreciate it for is the craft and energy. Miller was obviously very excited by the story he was telling. You can feel his enthusiasm coming off the page. It's difficult to put down once you start reading it. But the story itself is not all that good.

WHEELER: With DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, which we've admittedly only seen one issue of so far, I do feel Frank Miller has pissed in his own wine cellar. People will start going back to DARK KNIGHT and saying, oh god, those clichés were here as well. I think he's cheapened his work. It's been mentioned that STRIKES AGAIN dilutes the ending, and I think that's absolutely right. I think it was a mistake to go back and do a sequel to 'the end of Batman'. In fact, saying that out loud, it's self-evident, really. And I think he's cheapened the original book. DARK KNIGHT RETURNS will get reassessed, and there's now a shadow over it. It'll be easier to put that book down, now. WATCHMEN, well, there's never been a sequel.

WATSON: And, oddly enough, I don't think there ever will be.

JOHNSTON: Which I'm very happy about. I like the fact that WATCHMEN, almost uniquely within mainstream comics, has no sequel.

WHEELER: True, I can't think of any other superheroes book that was allowed to finish without being revisited.

WATSON: Not any successful superhero book, anyway.

WHEELER: Yeah. If it's successful, they're bound to do a sequel. If it fails, who cares? Although the character will probably end up in a Kurt Busiek or Roger Stern comic somewhere down the line.

JOHNSTON: And outside of Superman and Batman, WATCHMEN is probably DC's most successful series.

WATSON: It still shifts something like 10,000 units a year.

WHEELER: Even KINGDOM COME and EARTH X, DC and Marvel's big universe-capping stories, both had sequels. They're not capable of letting it lie.

WATSON: Which is a shame. Much as there was a mixed response to KINGDOM COME, it was pretty clearly Waid's attempt to do for the entire DC universe what Miller had done for Batman. And I quite enjoyed it. It was fun. It didn't need to be prestige format, and they handled the trading badly.

JOHNSTON: I've never read it, but I have read THE KINGDOM, the appalling sequel. That was bad. And the ironic thing is, I've got so little interest in reading KINGDOM COME. It just doesn't have the cachet of something like WATCHMEN.

WATSON: KINGDOM COME is very pretty. Alex Ross's art generally leaves me cold, but it was the perfect use of his talents. There's a darker edge to his art, and he lends himself very well to big revelations-style art. He'll never be an action artist, and I don't think he'll ever be a strong superhero artist.

WHEELER: All those fat men can't run very quickly. One thing I'd like to give a nod to, in terms of comics that try to give an end to superheroes, or twist the format, is Chris Claremont's DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, that's an example of an ending being imposed on the ongoing stream of a comic. It gave it something to work towards, and gave the book a new cause. I think that worked.

WATSON: And that was before DARK KNIGHT. But looking back, re-evaluating what happened to it, it was a big cock up. Claremont cocked it up himself during his own run.

JOHNSTON: Has DAYS OF FUTURE PAST been re-evaluated since then?

WHEELER: It's been revisited several times. "Days of Future Present", "Days of Future Yet To Come", "Days of Future Tense". Over time, all the houses of cards fall down.

JOHNSTON: Obviously WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT did manage to start the whole horrible grim and gritty trend in superheroes, so they had a very lasting impression.

'With STRIKES AGAIN, I think Miller has cheapened the original book.' WATSON: That was the problem, almost. WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT could get away with grim 'n gritty because of what they were trying to do.

JOHNSTON: Dare I say that WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT were actually the punks of comics.

WHEELER: Is that a musical reference, Mr Johnston?

JOHNSTON: It may be.

WHEELER: How unlike you.

JOHNSTON: In that, they were attempting to show that what had gone before was boring, safe and useless, but what came out of it was dark, grim 'n gritty imitators.

WATSON: They got a bunch of goths!

JOHNSTON: Yeah. And then, what happened was a resurgence of...

WHEELER: Pop?

JOHNSTON: Pop. And the only way they could do that was with irony and post-modernism. You see that in both music and comics.

WATSON: So in this analogy, who was The Smiths?

WHEELER: Neil Gaiman?

JOHNSTON: Probably. Or Pete Milligan, possibly.

WATSON: No, let's tar Neil Gaiman with that brush.

JOHNSTON: The only way that even people like Moore can address the golden age of superheroes now is with irony and post-modernism. The most successful pop bands of the last few years, who have embraced unadulterated joy-filled pop, have been the ones who have done it with a knowing wink, like the Spice Girls.

WHEELER: So Grant Morrison is the Spice Girls of comics?

JOHNSTON: Do you know, I think he might take that as a compliment. I think that analogy stands up.

WHEELER: It seems to, with this much alcohol inside us. We'll try it again in the cold light of day, but for now...

JOHNSTON: WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The punk books of comics, sadly doomed to the same fate.

Wheeler, Johnston and Watson are the Ninth Art editorial board.

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