There are certain books that dominate any conversation about the evolution of superhero comics. Mention the mid-1980s and the same landmarks inevitably appear.

Crisis on Infinite Earths. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Watchmen.

Each transformed superhero comics in its own way.

I’ve always thought of Crisis on Infinite Earths as a structural revolution, rebuilding an entire fictional universe from the ground up.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns feels like an aesthetic revolution, changing how superheroes looked, sounded, and were presented.

And Watchmen is, to me, a literary revolution, proving superhero comics could stand alongside serious literature.

Then there’s Squadron Supreme.

A twelve-issue Marvel series that rarely enters those conversations, despite arriving before The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

The more I learned about The Squadron Supreme, the more I began wondering if it represented a different kind of revolution altogether.

One that happened from within the system.

A revolution inside the machinery of mainstream superhero comics in 1985.

The shared universes. The monthly deadlines. The Comics Code. Editorial oversight. Spinner racks. Bright costumes. Familiar formulas. The expectation that, no matter what happened, superheroes would ultimately preserve the status quo.

Squadron Supreme didn’t reject that system.

It challenged it from within.

A Medium in Transition

The 1980s marked a turning point in comic book history.

For decades, superhero comics had largely operated within an understood formula. Heroes stopped villains. The world returned to normal. Next month, the adventure began again.

That formula didn’t disappear overnight, but by the early 1980s creators were beginning to push against its boundaries in different ways.

Alan Moore was proving with The Saga of the Swamp Thing that mainstream comics could be literary, atmospheric, and deeply philosophical.

Frank Miller was transforming Daredevil into a morally ambiguous crime drama.

Chris Claremont had turned The Uncanny X-Men into one of the medium’s richest examples of long-form character storytelling.

And outside the Big Two, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles demonstrated that independent creators could compete with Marvel and DC on their own terms.

Comics weren’t moving in a single direction. They were evolving in several at once.

Mark Gruenwald’s Different Perspective

1986 is the year many people point to as the moment superhero comics “grew up.” That’s understandable.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, both published that year, permanently changed how readers—and eventually critics—viewed superhero comics.

But Squadron Supreme arrived a year earlier.

In many ways, it was wrestling with some of the same ideas. What happens when superheroes are treated as real people? What responsibilities come with extraordinary power? What happens when those ideals collide with the messy realities of governing a society?

The difference wasn’t the questions.

It was the perspective.

Mark Gruenwald wasn’t an outsider arriving to reinvent superhero comics. He was one of the people keeping them running.

Before becoming one of Marvel’s most respected writers and editors, Gruenwald was a devoted fan who published a comics fanzine devoted to continuity and alternate realities. He eventually became one of Marvel’s foremost authorities on its shared universe, helping shape the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe while writing long, defining runs on Captain America, Iron Man, and later Quasar.

He wasn’t pushing against the superhero genre from the outside. He was one of its caretakers.

That’s what makes Squadron Supreme so fascinating.

When Gruenwald built an entire twelve-issue series around a single philosophical premise—If superheroes truly possess the power to solve humanity’s greatest problems…should they?—it wasn’t coming from someone trying to dismantle the genre. It was coming from someone who deeply believed in it.

Unlike Moore or Miller, Gruenwald wasn’t interested in exposing superheroes as fundamentally broken or stripping away the fantasy. He wanted to know whether those ideals could actually survive contact with reality.

If superheroes really are as noble as they claim to be…If they genuinely want to end war, poverty, disease, and crime…Wouldn’t they have a responsibility to try?

Hidden in Plain Sight

Another part of Squadron Supreme’s story may be that its greatest strength was also what kept it from becoming a cultural phenomenon.

It didn’t look revolutionary.

It wasn’t marketed as a prestige project or announced as the future of superhero comics.

It simply arrived.

On the spinner rack, Squadron Supreme looked like an ordinary Marvel comic. Bright costumes. Traditional panel layouts. Familiar house-style artwork. The Comics Code Authority seal in the corner.

Nothing about it suggested readers were picking up one of Marvel’s most ambitious philosophical stories. It looked like The West Coast Avengers. It looked like The Defenders. It looked like another monthly superhero team book.

By contrast, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen announced themselves almost immediately. Their formats, artwork, and presentation told readers they were experiencing something different before they ever turned the first page.

Squadron Supreme didn’t have that advantage.

It asked similarly uncomfortable questions while wearing the clothes of a traditional Marvel comic.

Maybe that was enough for many readers to overlook what it was trying to do. I know that’s why it took me nearly forty years to finally pick it up.

Why Read It Now?

Up until now, I’d never read Squadron Supreme.

And to be honest, I wasn’t sure I ever would.

But there was one thing I kept coming back to—one idea about the series that made me feel like I’d been overlooking something.

When modern superhero stories ask philosophical questions, they often arrive at the same destination. Heroes become corrupted by power. Gods become tyrants. The square-jawed idealist is revealed to be a hypocrite, a psychopath, or something even darker.

It’s become one of the defining conversations of the genre.

Even today, many superhero films, television series, and comics continue to explore just how violent, cynical, or depraved people with godlike abilities might become.

The premise of The Squadron Supreme feels different.

At least from everything I’ve learned about it, this doesn’t appear to be a story about exposing superheroes as frauds or monsters.

It’s about asking what happens when superheroes really do want to save everyone.

When they honestly believe they can.

And what happens when they try.

That feels like a very different place to begin.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be discussing each issue one at a time, exploring not only where Squadron Supreme belongs in comic book history, but what it was trying to say.

After nearly forty years, its central question still feels remarkably relevant.

And I think it’s finally time I found out how Mark Gruenwald chose to answer it.

The Squadron Supreme — Entry #1