1986 was an exciting year to be a comic book fan.

It was the pinnacle of a creative renaissance, unprecedented in any medium, that started with the rise of direct market comic book shops and culminated in positive, mainstream media attention for comics projects as diverse as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.

The audience for comics wanted a more sophisticated product.

The comic book specialty shops that started appearing in the 1970s made that clear. Numerous small publishers sprang up to meet that demand, forcing the “big two,” DC and Marvel, to up their game or risk fading into irrelevance. By 1986 readers were spoiled for choice, with hundreds of comics aimed at teen and adult readers to choose from. Marvel was an absolute behemoth, publishing everything from superheroes to toy and movie tie-ins to comics for small children and adults in equal measure. DC was a little slower to catch up, but made up for lost time by publishing two of the most talked-about books of the 1980s, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

The comics scene was bursting with a rare combination of financial success and raw creativity.

It was all so thrilling and new, and it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the wide range of comics from the Greatest Year in Comics History…