Does "The Dark Knight Returns" Live Up To The Hype?
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Sometimes, there’s movies, songs, TV shows, and books that are so influential that it’s almost impossible to conceive how you’ve never consumed them, even after you’ve become aware of their contributions to popular culture. Despite being born in the mid eighties, I’ve only first played any Metroid game (the NES original, at least) a couple years ago. I’ve never seen so much of a single second of Rick and Morty.
And until just recently, I’ve never read Frank Miller’s classic comic book, The Dark Knight Returns.
Now, of course, I’m not ignorant of the work or its impact on the comic book industry. Before seeing the 30th anniversary edition at my local bookstore and picking it up, I knew what it was about and I knew broadly how it went. The older, broken down Bruce Wayne returning to the role of Batman, complete with the first ever female Robin. I knew that this was the origin of the Batman vs Superman battle that would have so many debates and iterations and inspirations over the next forty years. I knew that this was the definitive turning point in Batman’s shift from the campy and groovy kid-friendly hero of the 1950s and 1960s to the dark, brooding, and tragic figure that he is today. This was one of the comics that ushered in, for better or worse, the Dark Age of Comics.
But I’d never actually sat down and read it. From beginning to end. Cover to cover. All four issues.
The Dark Knight Returns is frequently cited as one of the greatest comics ever written. It was so popular that Christopher Nolan’s film trilogy invokes it at least in name, though this functions as a pretty good breakdown Miller’s work had on The Dark Knight trilogy. Zack Synder has been pretty open the fact that Miller’s work was an inspiration for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, to the point where it’s clear that the climactic hero vs hero showdown was the main inspiration for the film. Heck, had you not known, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that the film was a straight adaptation of the classic 1986 comic.
They really aren’t kidding when they refer to it as one of the greatest comics ever written. But is it really as good as everyone says? Is it overrated by people who really just like the fact that it helped move Batman away from the silliness of the Silver Age? Is it truly an epic masterpiece, or is it as bad as the excesses of the grimdark comics that copied it? Is its popularity something to be celebrated, or something that’s actually harmful?
I knew the broader beats of the story, its most celebrated moments. I knew the cultural relevance, and what it had done for the Batman mythos. But I had never actually read it. Never experienced it. And so the question remains:
Does The Dark Knight Returns live up to the hype?
ART
The art for this comic is ugly. Really ugly.
I love it.
The city of Gotham is ugly because it’s a city in decay. The people of Gotham are ugly because they are a people in decay.
In general, I don’t like this art style, but it fits so perfectly for the book that I can’t imagine the impact of what Frank Miller wanted coming across in any other way.
It’s cold and visceral. Misshapen. Gloomy. Dominated by palid blacks and blues and grays. Even its moments of brightness and color show a gaudiness to Gotham and its inhabitants.
It perfectly captures a city whose spirit is degrading at the spiritual level, whose people are becoming ugly and spiteful in character.
Even its “beautiful” imagery–of Batman and Robin leaping gracefully across the rooftops, of Superman lifting a tank in a manner not unlike that of the classic cover of Action Comics #1–has an element of wrongness to it. Characters are tall and gaunty, or are short and bug-eyed, or muscular in a way that satirizes rather than romanticizes strength. The world is twisted and misshapen, with only Carrie Kelley, the new Robin who is an innocent and driven 13 year old girl, being drawn in believable proportions….more or less.
And the Joker. The Joker looks the closest to a normal human in terms of design. In a world that’s gone mad, perhaps the Clown Prince of Crime is the sane one?
The line work is coarse and rough, as if all Miller’s tools had a rough or jagged edge to them. And it’s very appropriate. It really is one of those scenarios where “bad” art serves the setting well.
I would never want to see this become the norm for comics, or for my own work to be illustrated in this way, but I couldn’t imagine this work being drawn in any other style.
STYLE
Despite featuring one of the world’s most recognizable superheroes as the title character, The Dark Knight Returns is not really a superhero story. It’s a noir and political story.
For the most part, the comic is narrated by Batman in a film noir style. He highlights the ugliness of the world around him. A helicopter sputtering like a cranky old man. The fire in his every nerve ending as he keeps watch in a concealed position. He’s not the only one that gets narration. Jim Gordon, Robin, and Superman all get into the narration action, with Gordon’s just as beaten down by time and mental exhaustion as Batman’s is by physical exhaustion.
The action is narrated quite similarly. Despite being a visual medium, Miller doesn’t rely on flashy action scenes to tell his story. He writes his fight scenes like a novel rather than like a comic book. The fight scenes focus on Batman’s senses, both how he perceives the fight and how old and tired he feels, and you get the sense that his opponent in any given fight is his own broken down body.
Everyone raves about the fight against Superman, but for me, it’s the fights against the Mutant Leader that steal the show, especially the second one. Like I said, Miller writes his action as if writing a novel, focusing as much on the prose as the visuals. The big fight against the Mutant Leader is the pinnacle of this.
Taking about equal page time in this book are the talking heads. Much of the world-building is told through media pundits, news reports, panel debates, and opinion interviews on the street. It does a great job showing the collective heads in the sand of the people of Gotham City. You know the old saying about opinions. It holds true in Gotham media, apparently. People talk, but no one has anything substantive to say. From insane psycho-blather to denials of the severity of the danger in the city to political hand-wringing to a complete disinterest of the massive and immediate consequence of Cold War geopolitical activity, the news and opinion shows paint a picture of a world consumed in itself, one that appears to be losing its sanity as well as its moral compass.
Boy, does this seem relevant today.
The talking heads are a major contributing factor to one really negative aspect of the book, though. Scenes are layered over other scenes, with the talking heads talking about one topic or cycling through an interview and a debate while Batman and Robin discuss strategy for their upcoming mission, with the scenes switching mid-conversation. At one point, there were at least four scenes going on at once. This was probably done to give the scenes a sense of urgency, but only instead served to make everything more confusing. Not “confusing” in the same appropriate stylistic sense that the art is “ugly”, but “confusing” in “Hold on, I have to reread this page for the third time”. I think, at one point, you had Batman monologuing while Gordon had a conversation with someone else while the news anchors held a panel debate with three participants, each scene interrupting the other scene. There wasn’t anything urgent going on, either.
That’s the main problem with this book. This happens a lot.
Still, this is a very grounded book that doesn’t act like it’s part of the superhero genre. There’s no giant robot fights here.
STORY AND CHARACTERS
Ten years after the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin (which happened in the mainline comics two years after this book was published), Gotham City has become such a nightmarish plague of a city that Bruce Wayne returns as Batman, feeling an almost warrior spirit deep within him reawakened. Crime is at its all time high, people seem to be almost maliciously permissive of it if not willfully blind, and Commissioner Jim Gordon is forced into retirement by a weak city administration that cares more about political points and optics than the safety of its people. All this taking place during the Reagan Administration as the specter of the Cold War looms overhead.
The story is broken down over the course of four books. In the first book, Batman contends with the reemergence of Two Face. The second has him up against the Mutant Gang. The third has him fight the Joker. And the fourth is the grand epic finale that sees his legendary battle against Superman.
I don’t want to go too deep into any of it due to spoilers. Like I’d said, I knew some of what happens in this book, but not all the context. And even knowing what I did know didn’t stop the actual experience of reading the book to be hugely engaging. It truly is the journey, not the destination sometimes.
What I will say is that I found the second and fourth issues to be more engaging than the first and third. I found myself less interested with Batman’s battles against his classic Rogues (nothing against Joker and Two Face) than I did in how the city handled the Mutant crisis and the larger Cold War issues coming to a head. There was more build up placed on these elements over the course of the books and the ramification seemed to be more widespread, which I found more interesting.
As for the characters, Miller writes what was, at the time, an incredibly novel take on the characters. It’s pretty bog standard now, but the idea of Batman being a vengeance-seeking maniac who is more interested in inflicting pain on criminals than he is reforming Gotham was revolutionary in 1986. The character was no longer the goofy “deputized agent of the law” he was twenty years earlier, but this book was among the first to look at him for what he was, which was a traumatized child on an endless quest for revenge against a “demographic” of sorts he blamed for his parents’ murder.
Jim Gordon is clearly the battle weary warhorse not yet ready to go into the retirement that Bruce Wayne went into. There’s a shared theme about them regarding purpose and emptiness, soldiers in the battlefield vs empty shells in “civilian life”. I’ve heard of career soldiers returning home from a lifetime on the battlefield and not knowing how to live a fulfilling and meaningful life reintegrated in society, and that seems to be the case here. Gordon seems to be falling into the hole he had vowed never to fall into in The Killing Joke, more willing to pull and discharge his weapon and engage in what could be considered police brutality than to play completely by the book. He’s nowhere near as bad as Bruce, but it really feels like if you gave him a little more time and made the situation worse, he’d be waterboarding a liquor store thief for information.
Speaking of Alan Moore’s classic story, I believe this is one of the first stories to present the Joker as more than just one of Batman’s enemies. Even if he was Batman’s main villain before, the deeper connection and homoerotic subtext between the two start here, with one of Joker’s first lines in the story to be to call Batman “Darling”. I mention The Killing Joke because it’s really that story forms the basis of the connection between the two characters that still underpins their rivalry today. This is just more of the first time that Batman and the Joker had a relationship deeper than that of crimefighter and criminal.
Given Miller’s later work, I might just be reading too much into this and it might just be pure homophobia at play. I choose to believe otherwise, however, and that’s good enough for me.
Robin was really great. Carrie Kelley really shines as the story’s one pillar of innocence, slowly being tested but never truly lost to the corrupting force of Gotham. She’s smart, loyal, and good enough with tech to constantly impress Batman. Impulsive and reckless at first, she is enough of an outside-the-box thinker to do the Robin name justice. Plus, I think it’s funny that she’s constantly misgendered and that everyone thinks she’s a boy.
There’s too many more to go over, honestly. But Commissioner Ellen Yindel, Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, talking heads such as Lola the news host and Lana Lang, and the Man of Steel himself really round out the cast of this one.
MISCELLANEOUS
I’ve heard this book get accused of being fascist.
Even without Frank Miller’s really deep falling off post-9/11 with his raging against Occupy Wall Street and publishing a wildly Islamophobic comic that would have been a Batman comic had he been able to be as Islamophobic as he wanted to, it’s clear that Miller was always a little more than just a “libertarian” as he claimed.
The Dark Knight Returns is pretty fascist.
Batman is really hyper-masculine and the story goes out of its way to show that him brutalizing criminals is what Gotham needs. A medicine for its metaphorical sickness. At one point, he expresses disgust at the amount of civil rights people have, telling someone “sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy”. He relishes in the pain and suffering he causes to those at the other end of his fists. And it’s not just him. Gordon isn’t too far off, but still measured and collected. He constantly pulls (and fires) his gun as part of “the obvious thing to do” or “the only common sense thing to do”.
But the story constantly portrays them as right. Because the world around them has collapsed into insanity. Liberal archetypes run Gotham, with the bumbling mayor wanting to choose a police commissioner based on diversity, and for deciding to negotiate with the captured Mutant Gang Leader rather than actually take down the Mutants. The people who oppose Batman do so based on the words of smug bureaucrats far removed from the experiences of ordinary Gothamites and the ramblings of sandal-wearing grifter psychiatrists that can’t help but blame every problem in the world on Batman’s psychosexual social mind virus or whatever.
At the end of the day, it comes down to Great Man Theory. Batman is the Greatest Man, and Ellen Yindel’s character arc is that she has to realize that he’s “too big” for mere mortals like her to comprehend, that the madness and sacrifice is too big for anyone but him to take on. It’s only Batman that can revitalize Gotham’s spirit and lead its people. Batman and Gordon understand this. Robin comes to understand this. Superman doesn’t because he believes in social institutions and the will of the people, like the dumb idiotic liberals that run the asylum that is all levels of government and media, which is why he is a lapdog to the government (which is bad) rather than leading his own personal army of impressionable teenagers (which is good) like Batman. Remember that fascism isn’t simply about submission to the state, but that only a Great Man or a few Great Men are big, strong, and wise enough to run that state and it is they–not democratically created and elected institutions–that should be in control.
Funny how Batman’s biggest supporter in the media, Lana Lang, sounds like a stark raving lunatic, ranting on about how Batman represents the resurgence of the American fighting spirit. Sounds a lot like a Hitler speech.
But maybe it’s because this is pre-9/11 Frank Miller, but the story isn’t completely there yet with the fascism. It’s self-critical, and it recognizes some of the flaws of its own ideology. From the brutality of the Sons of the Batman to individuals such as the Batman supporter on TV who hopes he goes after the “homos” next, there is at least some critical discussion in the book as to how far a healthy society should allow a brutal vigilante who acts on his own whims to go. When Lana is asked a very reasonable question about civil rights and due process, she gives a rambling answer that sounds more like she’s screaming about the glorious civilizations of old or something (a hallmark of fascism) before being rightly called out for not answering the question.
What I’m saying is that this story may be fascist, but it’s not uncritically fascist. It understands its own shortcomings and at least tries to address and examine them. Considering how fascist literature and art tends to make up a wacky “This is the world that would exist if the Woke Radical Left were in charge” and then just send its one-dimensional characters on a fantasy murder power trip through their made up feminist communist dystopia, the crime-plagued nightmare of Gotham City feels honest and real, and the ramifications of Batman’s approach and Miller’s ideology seems to given a serious and critical examination even as wacky liberal caricatures run the city into the ground.
But it is fascist. What I’ve written barely even scratches the surface.
CONCLUSION
So, does The Dark Knight Returns live up to the hype?
Absolutely.
Sure, as I said, it might be a fascist story, or at least have strong fascist undertones. But what sets it apart from other fascist works is that it’s actually good. You see, Frank Miller is a professional comic book writer, not a professional right wing extremist using comics to sell his crazy ideology. He knows how to properly incorporate politics into his work.
And if he wants to put his ideology front and center of his work, then I support him doing so, even if it’s the polar opposite of what I stand for. I prefer creators who do that over those who play at “both sides centrism” because they’re too afraid of offending someone.
But at the end of the day, The Dark Knight Returns is good. Really good. A perfect storm of stylistically ugly art, and grounded approach to superheroes, and a more mature look at the Batman mythos’ characters and setting under the lens of then-current events that I can totally see influencing an entire generation of copycats and imitators.
Think what you will of him and later works such as Holy Terror, but I do believe that it’s stories like this that should be the legacy of Frank Miller.
You owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Dark Knight Returns and read it, even if you already know the story. I’d recommend The Dark Knight Returns The 30th Anniversary Edition as the definitive way to experience what may be one of the most important and influential comic books of all time.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!