The Dark Knight Returns, reviewed
GNA contributor Barry Harter returns with a review of one of history’s quintessential graphic novel experiences, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
Read on for the complete review.
The Dark Knight Returns dawned on comic bookdom like Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor - without warning, with nothing ever the same again.
It’s a story that came along at the right time, during Reagan era politics, fanning the flames of Cold War mentality with political rhetoric, written with clenched fists pounding keys in a tick-down rhythm to the Doomsday Clock. Dialogue and characters chew the scenery with a square-jawed barrage of literary staccato bereft of any traditional poetic requiem in Miller’s staccato machine gun bursts with devastating effect.
In four prestige editions, author and artist Frank Miller solidified Bat-Man’s mythos, his characters stygian and defiant in their chiseled lines, sharp and thick delineating a real Gotham. Bruce Wayne/Batman is a dinosaur in a tar pit of political correctness - his beliefs belong to the era that originally spawned him. The story reflects an unforgiving and unflinching society indoctrinated by Madison Avenue propaganda and the new electronic messiahs reporting nightly at 6 p.m., 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. with sermons reaffirming the message of Revelations.
As the cast has matured chronologically, so have the themes with all the icons sacrificed to the betterment of the story. The public is jaded and jaundiced by betrayal of the ideals championed by the government’s secret weapon. Truth, justice and the American way are preserved in secrecy evidenced in a wink by the cherubic-cheeked man in charge.
Taking the noir genre by the short hairs, Miller dredged up a rogues gallery of Bat-Man’s most (in)famous villains who give evidence as to how the justice system has been perverted. Both Two-Face and the Joker move through the shadows of the reader’s mind leaving death and devastation in their wake.
Taken as a whole, Dark Knight Returns is the obvious second stepping stone toward Miller’s eventual masterpiece Sin City - more reflective and defeatist than his run on Daredevil, but not as violent or nihilistic as Hard Boiled.
If this were Bat-Man’s last story, it would be “a good death” - a tale you wish you could read again for the first time, but no less enjoyable the 100th.
Five out of five knuckles.
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