cdm72's Full Review: Frank Miller, John Costanza, Lynn Varley, Klaus Ja...
Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns is the story about the death of a crime fighter, and the birth of a Hero.
In 1986, before going back to write the very first Batman story, Batman: Year One, Frank Miller gave the world what was, at that time, the last Batman story, The Dark Knight Returns. Set 10 years after the Batman made his last public appearance, The Dark Knight Returns would go on to be credited with changing the face of comic books forever.
Alan Moore writes in his introduction, "Whereas in novels and movies we have been presented with such concepts as the anti-hero or the classical hero reinterpreted in a contemporary manner, comic books have largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other. As the naivety of the characters and the absurdity of their situations become increasingly embarrassing and anachronistic to modern eyes, so does the problem become more compounded and intractable. Left floundering in the wake of other media, how are comic books to reinterpret their traditional icons so as to interest an audience growing progressively further away from them? Obviously the problem becomes one that can only be solved by people who understand the dilemma and, further to that, have an equal understanding of heroes and what makes them tick.
"Which brings me to Frank Miller, and to Dark Knight."
What Frank Miller did in 1986 wasn't just to write another in a long line of Batman stories, he was about to rewrite everything.
The Dark Knight Returns
In a world without heroes, literally (Green Lantern has taken off for outer space, Wonder Woman has returned to her own people the Amazons, Oliver Queen, AKA Green Arrow, is MIA, Superman has become a government ghost allowed to act as long as he makes no headlines, and Batman hasn't been seen or heard from in a decade), Gotham City is almost a wasteland of crime and shadows. A new gang called The Mutants is taking over the underworld. The police are nearly helpless against their might and savagery. Commissioner Gordon is days away from retiring. And millionaire Bruce Wayne is walking home from having a few drinks with his friend Jim Gordon when he's confronted by a couple of Mutants, right under the street lamp his own parents were murdered beneath 40 years earlier.
But before they kill him, one says, "I don't know, man, look at him. He's into it--"
And he was. The world had come down hard on the heroes a decade earlier, crying they were too violent, too free in their punishment of the criminals they apprehended. The world no longer wanted its heroes, so the heroes did the only thing they could think to do--they vanished. And now Bruce Wayne is wondering what he's got to live for.
Then one night he wakes from a sleepwalking episode to find himself standing in the batcave. The mustache he'd been sporting has been shaved off. Other signs lead him back to his chosen path. The Mark of Zorro is on television. This was the movie he'd just left that night with his parents, only minutes before they were killed. Then a bat crashes through his window, and Bruce sees his path once again, clear as crystal, and more difficult than ever. He's an old man now and he hasn't done anything like this in over ten years.
But the Mutants problem isn't going to go away on its own. So a legend rises from the ashes to set things right. But before he can, there's other problems to deal with. Harvey Dent, otherwise known as the criminal Two-Face has undergone plastic surgery to restore the half of his face that had been ruined, splitting his personality and creating the Two-Face persona in the first place. He seems cured. of his duality. Problem is, which personality survived the surgery? And then there's The Joker.
For the 10 years the Batman had been absent, The Joker had been in a near catatonic state. But as soon as he hears news of the Batman's return, his eyes focus, his lips form a grin, and he utters the words, "Batman. Darling."
The Dark Knight Triumphant
As if the reemergence of his two biggest rivals isn't enough, Batman's also got a new Robin to train, thirteen year old Carrie Kelley. When Batman confronts the leader of the Mutants, it's this new Robin who appears from nowhere to save his life and get him back to the batcave where Alfred can tend to his wounds. But at least the Mutants problem, for the moments, seems to be solved. Except now, with their leader beaten by Batman, the remaining members who weren't sent to jail have taken a new idol and become The Sons of the Batman. They're no longer dedicated to killing and mayhem. Now they punish the criminals, with extreme force. And all this on top of a brewing war in Corto Maltese, it's not just Gotham City that's about to explode in violence, but the entire world.
Hunt the Dark Knight
One of the things I admire most about Dark Knight Returns is that it isn't a story about Batman facing one particular villain. This isn't your straight story where the characters are introduced, the problem is set up, and the big fight scene comes at the end (there is a big fight scene, but it's not between who you'd expect). This is a story about one hero standing up against every single thing that has gone wrong in his world and saying "This is NOT the way things are going to continue." And then doing whatever has to be done to set it all right again. The Mutants want control of Gotham. Batman defeats them. The Sons of the Batman try to do good through force and Batman shows them that brute force is not enough without brains to match.
Another great thing about Dark Knight Returns is that we're not just focusing on Gotham City. This is really a story about the entire world and through Miller's use of television news broadcasts, we get to see how society views these heroes. The heroes were fine as long as they walked the straight and narrow and answered to the proper authorities. But when the world began to change, we expected our heroes to stay the same, which then made them less effective in the face of this new breed of villain.
"From the beginning, I knew" he thinks when about to face The Joker for the last time, "that there's nothing wrong with you . . . that I can't fix . . . with my hands." But the world didn't want that hero. They wanted the one who put his life on hold every time the whack job came up with a new plan to kill five hundred people. But once the hero stopped the villain, we expected him to do the right thing and keep the villains rights intact. In the world of Dark Knight Returns, these old ways don't work any longer and Batman, who'd wanted to take real action a long time ago, is finally standing up and saying he's going to treat the villains like they treat their victims.
The Dark Knight Falls
In putting together Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller had an excellent grasp of just what the world was becoming, both in the comics and outside them. As times grow tougher and tougher for the less-fortunate, the world at large is forced to become more and more politically correct for fear of accidentally offending one group or another. We want to take "One nation under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance for fear of offending non-Christians. But let's not give a thought to the millions of Christians who are offended by the thought of having those four words taken away from them.
In Frank Miller's Gotham City Batman's attempts to use force to end the siege on his city is seen as just another form of evil, one that needs to be stopped. Jim Gordon retires and is replaced by a new commissioner who makes it her first act on the job to issue an arrest warrant for Batman. Let's see, the man who stopped the gang that the Gotham City Police force couldn't stop, the man who ended the threat of Two-Face AND who put an end to The Joker's evil once and for all is now going to be arrested for not following orders. The laws were what kept him from doing as effective a job as he could have in the first place.
I'm not saying vigilantism is right; the chaos the Sons of the Batman cause in this story is proof that mob mentality can sometimes override any good intentions. I'm just saying Frank Miller was making a very good point about the world we were heading toward in 1986, and he made it like only he could.
A word on the art, I suppose: Dark Knight Returns was illustrated by Frank Miller and Klaus Jansen and anyone familiar with Miller's artwork knows he relies on a lot of shadow and blocky objects. Klaus Jansen is the opposite, with a lot of very thin lines and sparse panels. The two worked together brilliantly in bringing this dark, depressing world to life, with lots of dark corners and huge, intimidating structures, looming buildings and heroes so imposing you don't see how anyone cold ever hope to stand up against them.
It's been 17 years since Dark Knight Returns was first published and it still, to this day, stands up as one of the most important comics in the world. And in a world where few books are really looked upon as "important", the fact that one of the few that is is a comic book, well that just makes it even more spectacular. There are a number of collected editions of this story out there--I got mine in a leather-bound The Complete Frank Miller Batman edition about 12 years ago (and I got it signed by Frank Miller himself about 4 years ago)--so it should be no big problem for anyone who wants to see what real comics are about to find a copy and have their lives enlightened.
"It begins here--an army--to bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers . . . this will be a good life . . . good enough."
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