BillyBatson4360 wrote: In point of fact, Watchmen was not the first. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was out earlier. That was that mini-series/graphic novel that broke the ground of being "moody & noirish" and touched off a multitude of imitations.

And actually DKR came out after Claremont had already begun his moody deconstruction of the X-Men. Watchmen, DKR and the Mutant Massacre all came out the same year, so the writers couldn't have been directly influencing one another. There is no starting point for this sort of thing, and it's silly to even try to identify one.

But championing Watchmen for its tone is really missing the point of the book and what it achieved.