For the uninitiated, Watchmen is a comic about superheroes, but as they might appear in real life. That means criminal violence, drugs, trauma, fear about nuclear weapons (it’s set during the Cold War after all) and the lot of it. It’s grittier and darker than you’d have thought with most superhero stories, at least, as they might have first appeared. I’m sure plenty of people today would be familiar with superhero media, for better or worse, and might even be familiar with it as a medium through which all kinds of stories are told. Much like cartoons, or anime, or video games, or whatever other kinds of media that are associated with particular tropes, comic books are used to tell all kinds of stories. You can use whatever medium you want to tell whatever kind of story you want. Real Steel and Big Fish are both stories about fatherhood, and they’re clearly really different.