5 April, 2004
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley (224 pp, TPB, 1986)
This is Batman done extra-gritty. Well, maybe not so much gritty as like a sandblaster to the face. The plot summary is: Bruce Wayne is middle-aged and retired from the bat-gig, living in a world teetering on the edge of dystopia. Gotham City is overrun by a tribe of DiIulio-esque "super-predator" criminals (the Mutants), while a proxy (and then, not-so-proxy) war in Central America is heating up the Cold War to the point of nuclear conflagration. The President is an idiot former B-movie actor, the Mayor of Gotham an ineffectual fool, the public is disengaged, self-absorbed, and willfully ignorant of the dangers looming on the horizon. (Yup, it's the bad old days, the 1980s.) A series of events leads Bruce to take up the cowl again, leading him into direct and final conflict with old nemeses, the Mutants, city and federal authorities, and even Superman. At his side is Carrie Kelley, a thirteen-year-old girl who has elected herself the new Robin.
The book is well-written, albeit extremely bleak. It's very much a product of its time, and should be required reading for anybody who has a misplaced idealization of the Reagan Years. And lest anybody accuse me of excessive ideological bias, classic liberal types are presented as being as much a part of the problem as anybody else. It's the spirit of the times which is bleak and despairing, not the actions or behavior of any particular group. To Miller's credit, he doesn't make it 100% dark and depressing--such an approach tends to result in dull stories which put me to sleep. There are a few bright spots in Miller's dark world, such as the genuine affection Batman/Bruce Wayne and Robin/Carrie Kelley feel for each other, and the way groups of Gotham's citizens band together to help one another and put out the big fire during the final crisis.
The art by Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley is not what I'd call attractive, but it is appropriately rough and gritty, and makes very effective use of color (and the lack thereof) to make thematic points. One thing I noticed is that there are, on average, far more panels per page in this book than seems to be the case in more recent comics, and also that the panel layout is far less dynamic than what I'm used to (lots of uniformly-sized rectangular panels laid out in a regular grid). I don't know if this is typical for its time, or if it was a particular decision by the artists. I doesn't hurt the story any, it's just something I noticed.