By the time you have your protagonist attempting to assassinate the Pope, you've sort of signaled that everything is on the table.
I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.
Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.