39 Years Later, Alan Moore's Forgotten Watchmen Successor Remains DC's Biggest Mistake

Published Sep 21, 2026, 11:58 PM EDT

Kolt Day is a tenured freelancer who has brought invigorating and provocative takes to Screen Rant and ComicBook, alongside loads of writing experience in other realms. Outside of media journalism, Kolt loves music production and philosophy (particularly Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault). 

In 1987, Alan Moore was riding the success of the impenetrable Watchmen, and his unrealized pitch to DC Comics would become one of the publisher's most significant missteps to date.

Long before Watchmen, during his days working on V for Vendetta and the concurrent Captain Britain saga, Moore was already establishing his overarching issues with superhero comics and trying to implement his ideas of what they should be—and broadcast his criticisms of what they shouldn't be.

Enter the Twilight of the Superheroes pitch some years later: a controversial concept which would push against the confines of what was considered even remotely acceptable for a superhero strip. Left undeveloped by DC and then circulated for years online by comics fanatics, this pitch would finally receive an official publication through DC's 2020 DC Through the '80s: The End of Eras. Though what often circulates now is still the unpolished pitch put forward by Moore, the idea remains one of DC's biggest missed opportunities—and by extension, one of DC's biggest mistakes.

Twilight Of The Superheroes Was Moore's Answer To A Changing World

Twilight of the Superheroes would have been a colossal and fairly dark crossover with the overarching intention of creating a storyline that could show a finite end to the mythos of the superhero itself. Using lofty language, like calling it a "spectacular and epic finale to the whole essential superhero dream", Moore directly cites mythology and the concept of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, in what is essentially a total crossover of the DC Universe's heroes, from cornerstones like Superman to obscure selections like Plastic Man and Blackhawk.

Just like Ragnarök served to kill the gods, Twilight would center on the political machinations of a world dominated by superhero clans, which eventually culminates in a brutal all-out war:

The world of Twilight is not a world where the superheroes have deliberately taken over, but one where they have inherited the Earth almost by default as various social institutions started to crumble in the face of accelerating social change, leaving the superheroes in the often unwilling position of being a sort of new royalty.

It sounds especially grim, but Moore's political sensibilities actually make the plan make perfect sense:

What I want to show is a world which, having lived through the terrors of the fifties through the early nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon[... ,] has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future [and] be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud[.]

It's here where the goal becomes clear. Moore had spent a while early in the pitch framing superheroes (and the recent Crisis on Infinite Earth's existence) as an answer to a desire for stability, and then would frame that stability in terms of reaction to social changes in the '80s, like the advent of neoliberal policy around the world, and the looming nuclear doom of the Cold War.

Moore's mission is to write a story about agency: how the comfort of annihilation is found in throwing away the possibility of a future one might be responsible for creating.

The story is framed by Hellblazer's John Constantine, who, through time-travel mechanics, writes a letter to his younger self informing him of the future cataclysm. Its beautiful ending sees the younger Constantine divert the future by refusing to get to know the woman who he otherwise would have fallen in love with and married in the Twilight storyline. In turn, it elegantly turns something heartbreaking into something strangely motivating: a responsibility for the future.

Twilight Of The Superheroes Could Have Been Bigger Than Watchmen

Twilight of the Superheroes, were it to be written, had the bones to become an even more renowned story than Watchmen. It could even have become one of DC's best comics ever. Granted, Twilight in its pitch form is far from perfect—it's practically at an embryonic stage of development, and there are plenty of rough edges. Its heroes are decisively not good people by very explicit design, and Moore sometimes takes this to the level of shock value.

But the core idea is ingenious: superheroes bear the burden of the cultural weight they've inherited, in every sense. Power is inherited in every sense of the word, too. In fact, what makes Twilight particularly ingenious is that every seemingly mundane word to describe superheroes takes on multiple meanings. Many heroes of old live outside the system of ruling clans in destitution, disempowered despite their literal superpowers remaining.

Many readers criticize it as being excessively grim or edgy, but Moore had an interesting rationale behind his unusually dark decisions:

I want to show a future in which everything from the family structure to the economy is decentralizing into an entirely new form that, while it might ultimately be better suited to survival in the changed conditions of life [...], is a constant and incomprehensible state of flux and chaos for those living through it[.]

The people of our world find themselves going through an upheavel more abstract and bizarre but every bit as violent, and as their institutions crumble in the face of the wave of social change, they find themselves clinging to the various superhero clans who represent their only anchor of stability in this rapidly altering world.

This, from the paragraph right before Moore begins describing the various clans ("Houses"), characters, and plot outline, dovetails perfectly with Moore's aforementioned early considerations on how the superhero as a myth serves as an anchor for stability; the only difference in Twilight's case is that it's a world where superheroes really exist. While Twilight can take some unsavory turns, it's reasonable to think that when actually written, and with editorial oversight, the story could have been colossal.

In the same sense Watchmen is beloved for being a deconstruction of the superhero as a person, Twilight serves as a deconstruction of the superhero as a myth—and of all the cultural power that myth had accumulated. Where Watchmen took the superhero character in its sights, Twilight instead would have taken the cultural need for superheroes in the first place.

Twilight served as the ultimate love letter to superheroes: its effort to close off the superhero myth is simultaneously an elevation of comic books from mere commercial phenomena to the immortal level of ancient mythology. Twilight of the Superheroes is a cosmic-scale crossover that uses critique and the willingness to turn comics on their head in order to effect Alan Moore's bold (and important) ideas; DC Comics not greenlighting it is one of the biggest missed opportunities comics has ever seen.