The year 1986 also marked the advent of another groundbreaking graphic novel, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It combines dense graphic storytelling with extended textual passages. Although it is not solely concerned with mystery, it has the solving of one crime and the prevention of another one at its center, as it tries to answer the question of what would happen if superheroes really existed. In contrast to the dark and realistic world of Watchmen, Moore also wrote a limited, twelve-issue series titled Top Ten (1999-2001), illustrated by Gene Ha. Reissued in two volumes and supplemented with an additional volume in 2005, Top Ten is a police procedural set in the futuristic city of Neopolis, in which everybody has superpowers. Moore also turned to literary sources in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000, 2003), a two-volume collected graphic novel illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, in which a team made up of literary figures from the Victorian age takes on Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty; Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu; and Martian invaders inspired by H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). The team comprises H. Rider Haggard’s Alan Quatermain; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde; Wells’s Invisible Man; Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. In 2002, Moore’s story was adapted to the screen in a big-budget Hollywood film, in which Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer was added to the team to give the story an American character. Together with fellow British visionary writers Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison, Moore has been a major influence in the American comic book and graphic novel scene.

Apart from its stable of traditional superheroes, DC Comics also provided an outlet for alternative style comics with the Vertigo imprint that it launched in 1993. Aimed at more mature readers, Vertigo books feature many variations on the graphic mystery novel. Vertigo’s longest ongoing series, with many collected story arcs and an original graphic novel, is Hellblazer, which was launched in 1988 and which has been written and drawn by many different people. The central character in the series, John Constantine, is a kind of hard-boiled magician and con man who is often reluctantly drawn into solving supernatural crimes.

Brian Azzarello’s One Hundred Bullets (1999-   ) series, drawn by Eduardo Rizzo, contains an ongoing story with collected story arcs and a distinct noir style that explores the possibility of committing murder without repercussions. Its central character, Agent Graves, offers people a chance to enact vengeance on their enemies by giving each of them a briefcase containing a gun and one hundred bullets that are untraceable. Other Vertigo publications include Grant Morrison’s original graphic novel The Mystery Play (1994). Illustrated by J. J. Muth, it is an allegorical story with fully painted art about a murder that occurs during a mystery play being acted on stage. The actor portraying God is killed, with the actor portraying Satan a prime suspect.

Neil Gaiman’s The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Mr. Punch (1995), illustrated by Dave McKean, is a complex story intertwining the narrator’s memoirs with the traditional story of the Mr. Punch puppet theater, both of which contain murder mysteries.

Mystery stories often figure into war comics. For example, in Brian Azzarello’s original graphic novel Sgt. Rock Between Hell and a Hard Place (2003), illustrated by Joe Kubert, the title character—a long-time DC Comics character—solves a murder mystery duirng the midst of fighting in the Ardennes during World War II. The style is reminiscent of hard-boiled and crime noir mysteries.

Marvel Comics also has a line of books about superpowered crime fighters, such as the Punisher, Daredevil, and others. However, its characters do not focus as much on detection as Batman does. Vigilantism is the predominant theme, and Marvel stories tend to be more like thrillers than mysteries. Like DC, Marvel has also launched its own imprint for more mature readers: Icon Comics. This line also offers graphic mystery books. For example, Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers series (2000-    ), illustrated by Michael Avon Oeving, offers a new variation on the police procedural by using policemen who investigate crimes in the superhuman, or “powers,” world.

Supernatural mysteries are an important part of graphic mystery publishing, especially in books released by independent publishers. A popular series of collected graphic novels that focus on supernatural mysteries in a gothic style is Hellboy (1993-    ), written and drawn by Mike Mignola. Mignola draws on such literary sources as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft and on folklore from around the world. Hellboy, his protagonist, is a demon from hell who investigates supernatural crimes for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BRDP). These crimes typically involve evil Nazi scientists, witches, goblins, and even the Russian monk Grigori Rasputin. The most successful independent comic book series yet published, Hellboy was adapted to the screen in 2004, with Ron Pearlman playing the title character.

Neil Gaiman’s Murder Mysteries (2002), illustrated by P. Craig Russell, mixes metaphysics and realism. Its story tries to explain the motivations for crime on a metaphysical level as preordained by a higher being, while using traditional crime fiction plot elements. Alan Moore’s metaphysical thriller The Courtyard (2003), illustrated in black and white by Jacen Burrows and offering a concrete literary intertext, is a tale of a police investigator combating drug dealers. He ends up becoming a killer himself after he is exposed to a drug that consists of ancient words that open the world to godlike beings fashioned after the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.