Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came out at roughly the same time and can be conceived as having roughly the opposite opinions on the dynamic between Superheroes and the State. Watchmen- written from some stripe of left-anarchist perspective- holds thats Superheroes would be at best ineffectual at addressing society's underlying systemic problems and at their worst would be directly, gleefully complicit in the institutional malfeasance that creates those problems. The Dark Knight Returns, written from a right-libertarian perspective, advances that in the face of institutional collapse in the face of apocalyptic nuclear war, the figure of The Superhero would be the last functioning institution as everything else goes belly up, the last guy around with the willpower and clarity of purpose to actually get anything done instead of grabbing the bag and running for the hills. In Watchmen the machinery of state doesn't give a shit about the Masks; in The Dark Knight Returns the machinery of state cannot suffer the Mask to live, because of how the Mask puts the lie to the legitimacy of that state just by virtue of continuing to be themselves when it hits the fan.
Despite the obvious political daylight between these positions, Alan Moore exhibits intense professional and artistic respect for what Frank Miller was going for with TDKR in his 1987 write-up for Twilight of the Superheroes; most specifically he praises the act of actually closing out the myth, and the aesthetic commitment to writing in a mythological register when writing the story of Batman's last stand. Here's Beowolf vs the Dragon, here's Robin Hood firing off an arrow to mark his burial site, and here's the Feds dropping the ten-ton hammer on Batman because they cannot suffer a great man to live. But what's equally interesting is how Twilight of the Superheroes proceeds to embrace TDKR's thesis about Superheroes as The Ones Holding The Line As We Fuck Everything Up and reframes it as a horror story from a left wing perspective.
The premise of TOTS isn't that the Capes launched a coup- it's that they just stuck around through the collapse of late stage capitalism, made themselves visible as the most consistent and unconditional source of support in times of crisis, and thus proceeded to personally form the core of emergent regional governments centered on where they happened to live. And in the process they basically recreate feudalism by accident and to some extent against their will. And now Batman's cast as the anarchist revolutionary out to depose of all gods and masters and restore power to the people. We were within spitting distance of Left-wing TDKR that that was nonetheless equally Weird About Women
