Why did superheroes become dark in the 1980s?

Though many of the superhero characters had been around for many years, decades even, the 1980s brought about a new school of thought when it came to the tone of the text and characterization. Comic story lines were products of the environment around them. With that being said, in the 1980s drugs, crime, and anything that can be classified as “dark” thrived. So all media outlets, especially comics, displayed such occurrences. The question can be raised: Was this digression into a darker text a bad thing or a good thing? Readers enjoyed the darker characterizations because it was a reinvention of the characters they grew up reading but with a new twist.