Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" Turns 40

If you weren't in middle school by 1986 or 1987, I don't care what you think about Frank Miller's four-issue series, The Dark Knight Returns.  Sorry, young reader!     

There was context to when the comic came out, an understanding of what was changing in media and culture and comics, and if you grew up on comics in the wake of Dark Knight Returns, it's like trying to tell people Revolver isn't a breakthrough album after all, or that Citizen Kane doesn't matter (which the internet is always more than happy to do, and seem quite foolish in the process).

I don't do this often - generally I'm a "hey, like what you like, but here's my opinion" guy.  But sometimes The Kids(tm) are just wrong, and I don't think you had to be there at the time - you can just have a reasonable knowledge of recent history, comics history and have read a book somewhere along the line.  And so, in this case, when I have seen 10,000 bad takes by bad take-havers, here is mine.

Mainstream superhero comics have some key years.*  

• 1934 saw the publication of Famous Funnies, which collected newspaper strips into a single publication and created the concept of the comic book 
• 1938 saw Action Comics #1 published and the arrival of Superman into an already wildly diverse narrative field
• 1956 ushered in the Silver Age with the arrival of Barry Allen as The Flash
• 1962-63 saw the arrival of Stan Lee's Marvel comics, the resuscitated Timely Comics, now with the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and what we'd come to think of as The Avengers
• 1986 bore witness to The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and for good or ill, Crisis on Infinite Earths.  And those two first things broke what had been the prevailing sentiment about comic books for the culture-at-large.
• and then everything else happened, but we don't have time for that.  Let's just say Karen Berger should have songs written about her, and it's a crime she's not carried around Comic-Cons on a gold sedan chair.

I didn't read The Dark Knight Returns until 1987 when I took some birthday or Christmas money and went to Austin Books.  I was 12ish.  

At the time, I was frustrated as I could have bought the original, fancy hardcover edition off the shelf, but hadn't wanted to spend all of my money in one place that trip to the store.  And when I went back, the collection was gone, of course.  It was a while later when I was back at the shop that I picked up the trade paperback, which DC kind of rushed to print, and even then, I think my copy was not a first printing.

I was aware from my comics buying that the DCU was a weird, often-times dark place.  But was still a world of fantasy that worked as comics worked at the time.  The cosmos reset itself at the end of most stories and "the illusion of change" ruled the day.  Batman was eternally 29, Robin 16ish.  The Joker would escape Arkham and, after a scheme that would get him socked by Batman, go back - it didn't matter what kind of story it was, dark or light. 

To my dismay, Batman was 55, Dick was gone and Jason was dead - showing real things had finally happened to Batman.  

Some of the writing from the era preceding The Dark Knight Returns is really good, but it was the comparison between a good weekly TV show and going to the movies when the series arrived.  An apt comparison could be: Star Trek the TV show versus Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.  Everything was familiar but very different in execution and intention.  

Miller, Janson and Varley's styles were crude and ugly and eschewed the illustrative style (blessed be the names Jim Aparo and Neil Adams) in favor of the expressiveness of cartooning.  The inherent sexiness of body builder men hanging around in funny outfits with swimsuit models in cat ears and capes was out the window.  Batman was a hulking figure, larger than life, with a tiny Carrie Kelley by his side.  

The Batmobile had been retrofitted into a tank - the sleek car changed to suit the need as Gotham fell further and further into decay.  Idiot youths, slaves to street fashion, ruling from the shadows.  People were executed by flying Cabbage Patch Dolls en masse on Late Night with David Letterman.

The mood fit the The End is Nigh undercurrent of a world where every morning could be your last if someone in a control room somewhere mistook a flock of geese for a B-52 and started a launch sequence.  Power brokers played games out of our line of sight, and the effects were splashed across glossy magazine covers and headlines, and the fastest you knew was if something was on the evening news (this was before CNN was blasting news at us 24/7).

On the page, Miller and Moore exploded the use of editorial captions, thought bubbles and word balloons as we'd come to understand comic book language.  With shifting perspective, Miller gave characters blocks of inner monologue in those caption boxes, a novelistic approach.  We didn't get a characters' thoughts confined to the moment - we were given a peek inside the perspective and mind of the characters as the action unfolded.  Context and character voices became vivid.

The dialogue in those boxes was the stuff of noir, of pulp writers - not the flowery prose of the sci-fi fans who had traditionally held the reins.  We weren't trying to impress anyone with our vocabulary, we were cutting to the quick with a few well chosen words used like a scalpel.

If Watchmen followed a clockwork grid of panels, The Dark Knight Returns was a mish-mash with no rules, changing scenes, invading pages with panels of commentary via man-on-the-street interviews, a satire of media and our ideas about superheroes vis-a-vis what the world would likely really think.

That Batman exists in a world where the truth is nigh-impossible to tease out among the voices - and that may be why he doesn't care what anyone else thinks when saving lives is the end-game - seems reasonable.

And, of course, the comic asked the question in terms that were less soaked in decades of the fan-to-creator pipeline that took the notion of Batman and superheroes at face value.  Miler asked: what sort of person becomes Batman and all that entails?  What does it mean to be a person who dresses up in a cape and mask and pummels those he thinks will escape the law?  What does he think of the law?  How would a world react to something like Batman initially?  And how would they react to his return?  And all that stood for?

Batman returns into a world where Superman isn't a stooge, he's hopelessly compromised by his role in the world.  Green Arrow had to become an outlaw on the lam.  Diana.  Barry.  Hal.  All gone.

While Batman had been back to his "dark knight" roots since writers in the 1970's tried to break from the hold of the TV show, in monthly comics he was still a guy who worked with police, who was a public figure with trust - people knew who he was and weren't afraid - if they weren't criminals.  But Miller's Batman was something else.  The cops would shoot.  And only the old ones would remember how Batman worked and when it was okay to look the other way and let him clean up the mess.

In almost simultaneous windows, The Dark Knight Returns and RoboCop understood the zeitgeist of media and talking heads - of smiling news-faces reporting extraordinary and horrific events and then cutting to commercial, having to remain just chipper enough to get you back.  (Maybe no secret how Miller was given a chance to write the first draft of RoboCop 3).

Miller was a decade ahead - or paved the path for what was to come, seeing the Sunday talk-shows dedicated to an issue - and why not Batman?, or how they'd bring on experts in a Nightline era.  He extrapolated, allowing the media to become both a Greek chorus and a way to show the expanse and scope as more people weighed in and Batman became political.  Bruce Wayne's decision to return to the cowl has global implications in a society that has rolled over and is letting the bastards win. 

What happens when someone doesn't stick to the agenda?

That a superhero story would dare play around with suggestions of a White House with a senile president with a dark streak, would go nuts with the insane media landscape all over the pages, and let DC heroes live in a world made both numb and reactionary through people's lack of belief in a better world (and the absolutely damning portrait of the never-seen hippie parents of Carrie Kelley), in just four short issues?

At the time, when I was twelve, this book felt more like a talisman than a comic.  

These panels *probably* shouldn't have landed with me as hard as they did

If Watchmen (which I wouldn't read for four more years) was an exercise in formalism and provided a novelistic expanse of a superhero story to have a beginning, middle and end - it became a symphony of sorts  Dark Knight Returns was the revolutionary punk album that changed what people were listening to and drove them to seek out more.  

And that had some effects, good and bad.

Some folks came for the Rated-R, post-Charles Bronson bone crunching version of Batman that listened to no one and won the day.  That take appealed to a rugged individualism that dwells deep in the psyche - and the echoes of this take, a sort of extreme version of the "loose cannon cop", have been far-reaching in comics of the past 4 decades.  Others interpreted the comic as Batman showing he was special because he was *better( than everyone else, doing the unthinkable and beating up Superman.  This seems to inform most of the online discussion and made Batman insanely boring for long stretches, and is part of why I've lost interest in Batman comics the past decade as DC can't seem to stay away from this notion.

I don't know what Miller's intentions were.  I didn't read comics press then or now, I know what my take-away's were.  The core of Batman was a question of will and mild psychoses, yes.  But I got that the world was large, and complicated, and some things bigger than yourself - and things are worth fighting for will happen against endless opinions and chattering voices.  I got the idea that Batman as an idea can be bigger than a mere cape and cowl on a detective or martial artist, and to be the still in the maelstrom.  I got the media satire, and a Gotham that spoke more to the world outside of comics than the one within most.  It wasn't just a comic about itself, it was commenting on our moment - and maybe all moments.

Over the years, it's shocked me how some of The Dark Knight Returns has been borrowed from, often in the clumsiest of ways, and sometimes in ways more elegant.  

The artistic experimentation of Dark Knight Returns has *rarely* seen the light of day again, and even Miller's own sequel gave in to the 3-5 panels per page approach that crept in.  The cramped, claustrophobic notion of page design as narrative function seems a bit forgotten in favor of the kewl.

But it's also been a surprise how we've been unable to replicate what the comics of 1986 were *trying*.  I don't expect it every year, but that DC and Marvel have seemingly eschewed swinging for the fences like this has been a disappointment.  Even some of their greatest achievements since have still refused to reflect the world outside the page in ways that can, at times, be frustrating.  It felt like a quantum leap forward in asking comics readers to consider comics being about something other than themselves, and in the past 15 years, we've run back to that safe world.  

Imagining a superhero comic that has a caricature of the President as cutting as our Reagan clone (and if you were there at the time, it's pretty good) has been kind of impossible for decades.  We mustn't upset anyone lest some talking head on cable news make it a story for the night (ironic!).

We don't talk about international politics without someone losing their minds, and we don't even really criticize the *highly* satirizable cable news, social media wonks and pundits, nor idiots making Facebook Reels in the front seats of their cars (why do people do that? and why do other people watch them?).  They may *use* the idea of showing them, but satire is... dead.

But for The Youths... especially those who love to come online and say "I read.  Meh."  All I can think is that they're unable to get the context, history and impact of the comic that influenced the next four decades and wish to return to their safe, insular comics that pose at bad-ass-dom.  And I have no patience for you.  It doesn't mean you have to *like* The Dark Knight Returns, but you have to understand what it was in the moment, and that you're reading comics today in no small part because that comic existed. 

Today, I know some of the dislike is that Miller's Batman is not in alignment with the social norms portions of the The Youth think everything should fit, both current and retroactively (boy have I got bad news for you kids).  That it doesn't immediately reflect back to them some of the ethos of the very-online is a challenge, sure.  I'm not particularly sorry about their feelings on this.  Miller's Batman was a 55-year-old out of step with the modern world and was never intended to exist to cheerlead specific social issues of the day.  And when I see that approach, I just kind of enjoy knowing those folks are basically just one of the nattering man-on-the-street interviews, one among many.    

For many in Gen-X, it was the gateway comic to hand friends (Batman: Year One was a good one, too).   In a real, financial sense, that comic repositioned Batman, along with a very popular movie in 1989, as a character who appeared in 3-4 books per month to showing up in half of DC's current output, created toylines, etc...  You do not get the Nolan movies without this comic (and Year One).  For good or ill, you absolutely don't get the Snyder movies - all of them.

But it was also a comic about ethos and ethics, and if I have a real disappointment, it's that DC has rarely sought to dig into their characters (outside of Vertigo in its heyday) to understand who their characters really are in the same way Miller was able to do in four, slim comics.

I won't get too much into what followed with Miller - I have no idea how he's doing now, but he seems to have disavowed a lot of his own post-2000 work now that he's sober.  Pretty wild.  I was fine with Dark Knight Strikes Again - which is better than you remember, but still a pretty big falling off.  I made it two issues into the third series and bailed.  

If any time needed a kick in the ass the way Miller tried to shake things up in 1986, it sure seems like now.  Maybe the Absolute series are that.  I don't know.  I'd have to ask The Youths(tm).  

 

*No, I am not going to detail every incident in comics here