Art Spiegelman's Maus wins a Pulitizer Prize, the first ever comic to do so.
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After Alan Moore wrote Swamp Thing, Watchmen and the Killing Joke he submitted a proposal to DC for a new mini-series that would help revitalize their entire franchise. This proposal was called Twilight of the Superheroes (a pun on Nietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols" no doubt).
The best description of the miniseries that I could find came from Wikipedia.org: The story would feature a world ruled over by superheroic houses, in which the two most powerful, the House of Steel (presided over by Superman and Wonder Woman) and the House of Thunder (consisting of the Marvel family) are about to join forces through a political marriage between the children of the two families. Such a marriage would make the combined houses an unstoppable force and a potential danger to freedom, and as such certain characters set about a complex plot to prevent the marriage and free humanity from the power of the superheroes. By the climax of the story, elements from all across the universe and from up and down the timestream would be brought in. Unusually, the series would highlight many obscure and forgotten DC characters by putting them in important roles, and the lead character would be John Constantine, whose interaction with the superheroes of the DC Universe had up until then (and indeed since) been rather minor.
There have been claims that Moore's proposal was later used for Kingdom Come and as the basis of DC's hypertime. The fact that DC has filed cease and desist orders or straight out lawsuits against anyone who would show such information does help the accusation that this is true. Mark Waid and Alex Ross have both admitted that before they published Kingdom Come they read Moore's treatment and that any similarities are minor and coincidence.
When Marvel hit its 25th anniversary back in 1986, then Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter decided to start up a new comic imprint at Marvel called the New Universe. It was supposed to be a more realistic, "world outside your window" style of superhero storytelling. The line got a lot of advertising but the board of directors drastically cut Shooter's budget when it came time to actually hire creators. The line hit further snags when some characters were accused to be rip offs of preexisting characters (such as Starbrand being a poor man's Green Lantern). After Shooter was forced to take his leave of Marvel, Mark Gruenwald tried to revamp the line including allowing the complete destruction of Pittsburgh. Still, it was too little, too late and the line eventually ran out.