Credits:
Written &
Pencilled by Frank Miller
Inks by Frank Miller
and Klaus Janson
Colors and Effects by
Lynn Varley
<I>This should
be agony- -
I should be a mass of
aching bone and muscle,
Broken, spent, unable
to move.
And were I an older
man, I surely would.
But I’m a man of
thirty - - of twenty again.
The rain on my chest
is a baptism.
And I am born again.</>
This was the moment, ladies and gentlemen, that was it, freeze it and remember it: 1985, <I>The Dark Knight Returns,</I> page 26 of Chapter 1. That was the moment that the most re-interpreted character in comics history sprang from the mind of Frank Miller as a full-blown post-modern legend, bathed in lightning and rain, and changed the face of American comics forever. After all that came over a decade of hit-and-miss “revamps” sending characters through all sorts of psychological twists in an effort to update them. Scores of imitators hit the boards and it seemed only Spiderman avoided sounding like Phillip Marlowe.
Frank Miller’s
<I>Dark Knight</I> started a revolution, but let’s go back and
pretend we don’t know about that. You can now find the whole 4-issue series in
trade paperback, the ideal way to read it, and if you’ve never read it or
haven’t read it in awhile, do. The thing just won’t stop being brilliant.
What was it about
<I>Dark Knight?</I> Batman (called “The Batman” for a long time
then, I recall) had been a “serious” character for nearly fifteen years by
then; people like Denny O’Neil and Jim Aparo had already made him grim, gritty
an brooding, so much so that Batman was a favorite joke among other more
light-hearted titles. Batman was already a downer.
But in <I>Dark
Knight</I>, Miller went a step further and brought his story to mythic
levels. The time is about twenty years in the future, and Bruce Wayne is a
despairing man on the brink of insanity. A heat and crime wave is baking the
City of
Miller did the
unthinkable and brought literary techniques to his comics. He dispensed with
thought balloons in favor of captions giving first-person narration, careful to
make sure every scene had a single viewpoint. Batman speaks in a gruff private
eye voice laced with dark humor (after the Batmobile, a tank-like dreadnought,
fires up a young army of gang members, he tells us, “Rubber bullets. Honest.”)
Everything is still
fresh, all these years later: the talking heads on TV debating the merit of
having a Batman, the psychopathic Joker going stark-raving mad as the Batman sets
out to destroy him. The psychic agony of Harvey Dent, Two-Face. The vengeful
wrath of the one-armed Oliver Queen, former Green Arrow, who went underground
when the government outlawed superheroes.
And consider the
single most frightening character in the whole series: Superman, a benevolent
alien who pledges fealty to the
Frank Miller’s
<I>Dark Knight</I> treads an unbelievably thin line between camp
and affection, respecting its genre even as it stretches it. I can’t believe
it’s now been, what, nearly sixteen years? After <I>Dark
Knight</I>, the first post-modern comic, the medium looked entirely
different. If you don’t remember, find out why.