> While X-Men, for example, issue after issue had characters whine about how they could not justify killing without ever getting into the meat of the issue (des

> While X-Men, for example, issue after issue had characters whine about how they could not justify killing without ever getting into the meat of the issue (despite the occasional fantastic story line like Days of Future Past), here was a series where someone who had been presented as one of the heroes was prepared to go to that kind of length to re-make the world in a way he thought better. Where one of the "heroes" dies in the first issue, only to have his image ripped to pieces bit by bit. Where all of the heroes are deeply human and flawed, and not necessarily in ways that made you like them more for it. And the eventual-antagonist wasn't stopped at the last minute, with the countdown on a doomsday device at 1, and there was no great save. You're probably right, but as someone growing up in an objectively racist household, I can say with certainty that the X-Men titles had much more effect on my outlook than Watchmen ever will. Sure, they were really far from perfect, but I always found that Marvel never hesitated to touch real-world issues in a way that DC rarely did. Take Rachel Summers for instance. Introducing a teenage mutant with survivor's guilt, after being forced to track fellow mutants in the future, this was pretty grownup for a medium often dismissed as mindless entertainment. Of course, it had plenty of crappy moments too (how many times did Xavier regain and then lose the ability to walk?), but I'll always have fond memories of them. Not to say that Watchmen, Sandman or V for Vendetta are not masterpieces, because they are.