Miracleman
Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis · Warrior, 1982 onwards (later Eclipse Comics)
Marvelman began life in 1954 as a British stand-in for Captain Marvel, whose American reprints had dried up, and spent the next decade shouting a magic word and punching things with the uncomplicated cheer of a man who has never read a newspaper. Alan Moore's 1982 revival in Warrior asked what would really happen if a middle-aged freelance reporter remembered he was a god. The answer is not cheerful. Somewhere in there he also had to be renamed Miracleman, after a rather larger company with "Marvel" on its letterhead made its feelings known.
This is the book that taught superhero comics to think, several years before Watchmen got the credit. It deals with power, secret government programmes, childbirth (drawn with an honesty that startled readers used to capes) and, in its later chapters, a battle over London so violent that it remains one of the most disturbing things the genre has produced. The rights saga that kept it out of print for decades is a novel in itself; happily, it is now available again, with Neil Gaiman's continuation following on.
