8 Creators Who Secretly Defined Your Favourite Heroes

6. Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, Steve Englehart Et Al. - Batman

No one needs reminding that Batman's history is a bit of a weird one. The Silver Age saw the character depart from the dark world of Gotham and engage in sci-fi hijinks. It was a perfectly acceptable and entertaining version of the character, but one wouldn't argue that it was definitive, no matter how much we all love Adam West and Burt Ward matching wits with Frank Gorshin's Riddler.

With Batman, the classic narrative is that the Caped Crusader didn't shake his Silver Age funk until Frank Miller came around and beat it out of the character with works like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, but that's not true. The actual truth is that the World's Greatest Detective was experiencing a quiet revolution in the seventies, courtesy of writers Dennis O'Neil and Steve Englehart, as well as artists Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers.

As he was with Green Arrow and later with the Question in the eighties, O'Neil proved instrumental in conjuring a version of Batman that could be called definitive. He introduced the character of Ra's al Ghul, reinstated the Joker as a homicidal maniac in Five Way Revenge, and returned the Dark Knight to his former glory as a dark spectre of vigilante justice - or as a "hairy chested love god", as Grant Morrison likes to call him.

O'Neil and Adams' seminal stint on the character would be followed up by one equally as important, with Englehart reinforcing the new status-quo in Strange Apparitions alongside Rogers. It's where the modern image of the character was born - a whole decade before most tend to think it was.