The Dark Knight returns
by Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Lynn Varley · first published 1986
36% recommend64% neutral
"Together with inker Klaus Janson and colorist Lynn Varley, writer/artist Frank Miller completely reinvents the legend of Batman in his saga of a near-future Gotham City gone to rot, ten years after the Dark Knight's retirement. This masterpiece of modern comics storytelling, BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, brings to vivid life a dark world and an even darker man. The Dark Knight returns in a blaze of fury, taking on a whole new generation of criminals and matching their level of violence. He is soon joined by a new Robin--a girl named Carrie Kelley, who proves to be just as invaluable as her
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I'm sort of in the same boat with Frank Miller. I really liked The Dark Knight Returns because I thought it was a great deconstruction that showed the dark side of vigilantism and power fantasies visual references to Birth of a Nation and all that. I was pretty of disappointed when I found…
on “The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them (2016)” ↗Yes, thank you. His modern interpretation is, I think, fascinating. While I think Kingdom Come is the best treatment of this theme, I actually think Frank Miller got it perfectly in Dark Knight Returns: "Twenty million die by fire... if I am weak..."
on “"Watchmen" As a Primer on Mental Disorder” ↗I liked Dark Knight Returns quite a bit and I've read it a few times but every time I get to the part with the woman with swastikas tattooed on her boobs I can't help but wonder what the point of that was. Strikes Back was bad.…
on “The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them (2016)” ↗…"The Hitchhikers Guide" served that purpose. Same with some of the later Harry Potter books. And Bill Bryson's "A Brief History of Nearly Everything". I also re-read the comics "Kingdom Come" and "The Dark Knight Returns" on a regular basis.
on “Why reading a book 100 times is a great idea” ↗Yes, it's supposedly inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which are both excellent books. However, the letter shapes of those two books are closer to each other than they are to Comic Sans. It seems the font creator relied more on his intuition of how comic…
on “Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career” ↗That scene in The Dark Knight is adapted from a storyline in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. If I recall the original, Batman's retirement makes people sufficiently nervous that a gangs of young kids dress like him and do their own crime fighting. The original Batman has to clean up after them…
on “How to become Batman” ↗…superhero comics as not childish enough. And I think the latter point is fair but it's just the cyclical nature of the medium. In the late '80s comic books grew up and got all serious with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and other works that deconstructed the genre. And the early '90s had an unrelated trend where heroes had to be all gritty and edgy, overly-muscular and toting tons of ammunition pouches and automatic…
on “The Superhero Industry Hates Children (2019)” ↗…Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 and the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using "graphic novel" as a category in book stores in 2001." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel…
on “In France, Comic Books Are Serious Business” ↗…we on the front page for a few of our lists). I go there, and hopefully quickly find something I hadn't heard of. But, during this process, I find that 'Batman: Year One' is ranked above 'Batman: The Dark Knight Returns'. I think that's obviously wrong, so I create my own list to rank the Batman comics I have read, putting TDKR on top and adding another Batman comic that wasn't even on the list. So in our mind, the…
on “Our startup (Seekler: community-built lists to help you find new stuff) goes beta. Feedback please?” ↗…will ever reboot the concept of reboots to make future reboots all pleasant and optimistic. This already happened with comic books- after the grittiness of deconstruction in the '80s with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, etc., there was a trend of reconstruction comics that hearkened a return to the heroic Golden Age.
on “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.” ↗…feeling perfectly for me. A lot of the music in Watchmen was what I listened to in the 80's when I was feeling in melancholic mood... (And since I brought up comics, there's of course Frank Millers "The Dark Knight Returns") A lot of the light-hearted music and movies from the 80's feel like shallow veneer over that darker undercurrent.
on “We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995)” ↗…talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense. > So I had an idea to make a comic-style text and started looking at Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, graphic novels where the hand lettering was like a typeface... Instead, I looked at various letters and tried to mimic them on screen. There were no sketches or studies – it was just me drawing with…
on “Comic Mono” ↗And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.
on “Are We Idiocracy Yet?” ↗