Frank Miller
(with inking and colouring assistance by Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley)
Titan, 226 pages, hardback £29.99, paperback £10.99
Review by David Clark (1997)
For those who don’t know, around the same time that Alan Moore’s work in 2000 AD, Warrior and the British Marvel comics of the mid 1980s was redefining and updating the themes and ideas of the superhero comic strip, Frank Miller’s work in the US on Marvel’s Daredevil was equally groundbreaking, not just in terms of story but in terms of sheer storytelling. Miller’s vision reached, perhaps, its finest expression here in The Dark Knight Returns, in probably the first modern, or do I mean post-modern, ‘graphic novel’. Miller merged his control of multiple narrative and caricature (just look at his Reagan, it ought to be in the National Portrait Gallery) with a first rate script to produce a hugely influential SF noir graphic novel (it is a novel, unlike most comics, which are either graphic short stories or cartoons). And being a novel, unlike most comics, it reflects the attitudes, preoccupations and ideas of its author.
The Dark Knight Returns takes us forward in time to the end of a fifty-something Batman’s career, and perhaps it should indeed have been the end of Batman, at least in comics form. Not only does this final chapter read as well today as it did in 1986, but along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns stands as if it might have been the last word on superheroes; in some alternate, better universe, basking in the glow of a benevolent dictatorship of good taste, these were the last superhero comics issued. Instead, in this vale of tears, those books had the tragic consequence of revitalising the whole damn misbegotten genre. (Look, I read my share of superhero comics as a kid, but even then I preferred Sherlock Holmes.)
While Miller doesn’t go in for political correctness with The Dark Knight Returns, the book isn’t actually fascist, though it was certainly much criticised on its first appearance, particularly by the pompous Comics Journal. It didn’t help matters that the ghastly Oliver Stone drew on it as part-inspiration for Natural Born Killers; Stone greatly simplified things. The Dark Knight Returns is easier to follow while more complex, and Miller certainly takes a more compassionate approach to his characters.
What The Dark Knight Returns does have to answer for is the cruel kick-starting of the whole Batmania thing that continues to this day. The insubstantial Tim Burton’s inspiration came partly from this book (and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke and from Burton’s usual sources). That was fine on Batman Returns, (we’ll be kind, and forget the first film) but the third film was much more than enough. It just didn’t have to be this way. One can just picture a radically re-imagined Batman franchise (Batman is, after all, a remodelled version of a much more interesting character, The Shadow, costumed and simplified by the garish norms of 1940s American comics) continuing as a TV series. Back to that alternate universe. Still, at least we have this dark vision of a near-future Gotham, a book to buy, keep and re-read.