Did Comics Become Mature in the '80s--or Just Pseudomature?

A long time ago I decided to try and make way through the history of superhero comics in the systematic way I went through the history of prose science fiction--familiarizing myself with as many of the classics as I could, reading the history and other associated works, getting a picture of how it developed, and what was going on in it now. I did not stick with the endeavor as long as I did my readings in science fiction. Still, I did get to see a lot of the terrain, and that included the works of Alan Moore, in which I found, and still find, much to admire--enough so that I read with interest the recent interview he gave the Guardian (which seems to have been reported on in other outlets, including Entertainment Weekly and Variety).

For me what was most worthwhile about it was his discussion of the idea that comics "grew up" in the '80s, with which his work had much to do. His answer to that was "no, comics hadn't grown up . . . it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way."

Moore admitted to the existence of honorable exceptions--a "few titles that were more adult than people were used to," and I think the best of his work counts among that. Recalling Watchmen I still respect the technical sophistication, the cultural and historical literacy, the "sociological imagination," the critical perspective that went into it as he asked and answered the question of what superheroes would have been like if they had existed in a world like the one we know, and in turn, how the world would have been different for their existence.

But looking back at that comic I also find myself thinking that this is the kind of question that one can explore profitably for only so long--because it is so much a subversion of the genre rather than a plausible foundation for some new phase of it, and too demanding for any but the most serious and skilled practitioners of the medium to bother with usefully. (And that the actual appearance of such work, however brilliant it may be, likely a sign that a genre is becoming inward-looking and decadent, unlikely to produce much that is really new.) The unsurprising result is that while I think one can call Watchmen an "adult" comic, a mature work, the rest of what we have had since that time has generally been pseudo-adult, pseudo-mature posturing and edginess that for all the "darkness" and the blood and the rest takes us nowhere and shows us nothing. Indeed, Moore himself seemed to be satirizing this turn a quarter of a century ago in his later comics, like his less well-known Judgment Day (1997), where a young Marcus Langston, coming into possession of a magical book with the power to alter reality, "rewrote" the story of his life--and as he got older, kept rewriting, with the result that the world passed "from a golden age to a silver age, and finally a dark age" that was a "bad action movie of meaningless mayhem" dominated by heroes who have degenerated into psychopaths, simply to gratify his own darker impulses.

And thus has it been in the films made from the comics too with the more recent iterations of Batman, with Marvel's allegedly socially relevant films, with that monument to tiresomely pseudo-mature, smugly edgelord superhero filmmaking, Deadpool, with the retrograde results Moore described even where the films were not blatantly political. The ever-worthwhile Peter Biskind, looking at the last of these, thought him "so far beyond the pale that it would be fair to say that he’s the first alt-right superhero." In 2022 that seems no trivial thing.