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Rating:  -
I loathe Frank Miller, as much as I do Bill O'Reilly or Micheal Moore for their political and social ignorance/arrogance, but his book Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was a master piece. Miller brought Batman back from the shadows and into public admiration, creating the Batman we have today. A little rough around the edges, but still the detective relying on his intelligence to make up for a human body. Miller captures that Batman I love. I don't like larger than life superheroes like Superman and the book was in a large part about that.
Rating: -
I was blown away by how riveted i was by this Graphic novel. i went into it with a little knowledge of the story due to a co-worker who pretty much told me the story word for word at one point or another. once i actually went out to buy this and read it for myself, i was blown away by the art first off. Frank Miller has a great ability in getting his story across in pictures. the dialogue is a bonus, and what a bonus it was. you could take away either elements of this book and still have a great story come across. the scene in which he is "holding" one of the punks from the side of the building is one of my all time favorite sequences in any novel. a must read for any Graphic Novel fan or Batman fan.
Rating: -
This book is great to put it simply. This is one of those books where you can't help but say, "I will just read a little more." and before you know it you have finished it. I read this book in two days (I'm not saying it is short, it is just that good). The story is complex and the villains are as awesome as ever. If you like Batman read this book. If you don't like Batman then your a jerk but you should read the book anyway and learn to love Batman.
Rating:  -
Well, I loved the Batman movies and cartoons growing up in the 90's, and I loved Nolan's films, so I decided I'd get the "essential" Batman stories. Of those, this piece was consistently rated top five on the lists I found on the internet. It's a cool premise, but it gets really muddy, really fast. I couldn't really keep track of what was going on, and when Superman showed up I almost gave up. That's because A. I hate Superman, B. I don't have enough knowledge of comics to understand why Superman would give a shiiit about Gotham, and C. Superman's introduction into this story was a really weird turn that lasted until the last page and rendered the premise moot (Batman's been retired for 10 years, he's an old dude, and he is struggling to return to protecting Gotham... yet by the end he's fist fighting SUPERMAN pretty damn comfortably.)
Also, like most people my age (early 20s) I have no respect for or interest in Robin. In this story a 13-year-old girl wants to be Robin and within a panel or two, Batman's basically like "Meh, why the hell not?"... I just figured there'd be more to it. Harvey Dent has an interesting part of the story that fizzles extremely quickly especially compared to that weird Superman plot line... Harvey Dent gets a few panels and Superman gets half the story?
None of these complaints are really a big deal, it was a pretty cool story I guess. I think if you keep in mind that it's an alternate universe in the future, and you really absorb it the first time you read it, it stands to be more enjoyable when you re-read it.
Rating:  -
When college English departments finally catch on in about 25 years they will learn what most serious writers and artists and thinkers have already intuited: whatever is was that happened in America in the 1980's was best reflected in the lowest and most "populist" forms of cultural narrative, specifically, the comic book. Fiction writing after the 60's became cloistered postmodern wankery, and except for a few brilliant minds (David Foster Wallace) and writers (Martin Amis) who could transcend academia and speak to a larger audience, I feel like high-level literature lost its ability to seriously reflect an American culture who's level of discourse was at any rate deeply deteriorating. Hollywood basically lost all connection to reality after the 1970's, and I don't think I need to describe what had happened to the state of popular music by the 80's (incidentally, what is up with the 80's revival: it wasn't any good the first time around - why would it suddenly become so the second?). One could make the claim that music videos were equally as informative and reflective of the time, but being performance based, non-linear and usually non-narrative driven, videos could only deliver a partial and somewhat fractured reflection of the culture, at best.
Comics were a different story. First of all - virtually nobody read them. So there were no rules and more importantly, no expectations. Second, comics weren't (and really still aren't) considered "serious" - a derogatory designation that I would argue actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the creators: again, no pressure. No expectation. Nobody was looking. Nobody was paying attention: like a festering basement that nobody wanted to clean, comics were soaking up all of the cast off detritus and muck and sewage of the 1980's, and the comic writers were turning it all into images and words and stories. A medium that had roots in childhood innocence, comics were uniquely positioned (one might say fated) to track and address the theme of innocence corrupted, cast off, or maybe more signally: long, long gone. Sun had become shadow, newness had become noir, and cautious idealism a caustic memory. Welcome to the Reagan 80's.
Enter Frank Miller's The Dark Knight returns. In it, we find a Bruce Wayne who is older, creakier, lonelier...and not at all at peace. Having forsaken the role of Batman after the death of a close friend (Robin), Wayne is trying to get used to growing older in a world he no longer recognizes and will no longer permit himself to change, or to even want to change. He is turning away - hitting out, moving on. Except, of course, he can never really move on: his obsessions are too deep and his identity too tied to the hero he has created. And when the course of events demands that a hero save Gotham once again, he finds himself unable to resist a final reckoning with his old allies and antagonists.
I'm not going to list the attributes that make this piece of pop entertainment such a disturbing and wonderful experience. It is good enough on its own terms to need no additional hype or priming. On a technical level it is a real stunner - the imagery is appropriately grotesque, the mis en scene adroitly used, the dialogue wonderfully hard boiled and almost poetic. But what strikes me looking at it now is its sureness of vision, spooky prescience, and psychological extremism. Miller not only creates a Gotham to rival Tim Burton's (a hellish place of almost Biblical levels of sickness and damnation) but predicts the future rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a political actor (true) and even offers a take on the Joker that will make you re-think whether Ledger's performance was the last word on the character (hint: think Thin White Duke era Bowie).
I apologize for pontificating at such length, and really have managed to say nothing that readers of this tome won't be able to come away with on their own time. But suffice it to say: this is an awesome performance, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the Tim Burton Batman (1989) or even the recent re-makes.
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