From darkness to light

The Dark Knight Returns — again

By Douglas Wolk

Half a Life The Dark Knight Strikes Again’s issue one hit the streets Dec. 3, issue two will land Jan. 14, issue three on Feb. 25.

GRAY MATTER: DK2 is a few shades lighter than its bleak predecessor.

Cartoonist Frank Miller’s most famous work, The Dark Knight Returns, is about a long-disappeared hero (Batman) returning to his old stomping ground. More than 15 years after Dark Knight revolutionized comics, Miller’s done more or less the same thing: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (DC Comics), a.k.a. DK2, the first issue of which was released a few weeks ago, is his first Batman story since then. It’s a return that once seemed impossible.

The Dark Knight Returns upended almost every superhero cliché around, and extrapolated adult psychological complexity from 45 years of kids’ stories. Miller treated Batman as a sort of benign psychopath: a man driven by his parents’ murder to dress up like a bat, fight crime with his fists, enlist children into his private war, and demand that no one ever die. Dark Knight’s mood was dark and brutal, its jokes were blacker than black, and its artwork was like almost nothing ever seen before in mainstream comics: stylized and crinkled, full of tiny, eccentric lines that earlier comics’ printing techniques wouldn’t have been able to handle. (Miller was one of the first American cartoonists to demand high-quality paper stock and printing, and he got it.) If the original Dark Knight seems almost normal today, it’s because (along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ contemporaneous Watchmen) it set the tone for the wave of “grim and gritty” superhero comics that’s still going on. (There’s a small nod to Watchmen in the first issue of DK2: a cameo appearance by an obscure character who was the inspiration for Watchmen’s Rorschach, paraphrasing a line of Nietzsche that Moore quoted in that book.)

DK2 is more or less the original miniseries’ antithesis: a trip from darkness into light, with big, bold illustrations in place of Returns’s claustrophobic grid, and deliciously garish computer coloring by Miller’s longtime partner Lynn Varley. Originally rumored to be a 48-page one-shot, it’s evolved into three issues of 80 pages apiece. “I always think it’s going to take fewer pages than it does,” Miller jokes. “I finally gave myself a bunch of swinging room.”

Set a few dozen years in the future (and three years after The Dark Knight Returns), DK2 is very much a story about 2001, even more than Miller knew. Parts of his future dystopia with a happy face were co-opted by reality between the story’s creation and its publication — daily news broadcasts with naked anchorwomen now exist on the Web, for instance. And in one scene of the first issue, “National Security Enforcement director Bill Prick” is talking to grown-up reporter Jimmy Olsen about a theft from a bio-research lab: “Evidence suggests that this was the work of agents from a rogue nation . . . No, Olsen, I will not tell you what evidence.” Note that Miller finished the issue early this summer.

The appearance of DK2 also comes as something of a surprise: Miller was one of the more outspoken advocates of the creators’ rights movement in comics, which insisted that cartoonists should own their work outright, and he’s spent most of the past 15 years working on his own successful projects, notably Sin City and The 300. Why the return to someone else’s sandbox? “I try to never say never,” Miller says. “I wanted to do another Batman comic, and you don’t do that without asking DC. And I do love the superheroes. I think the best thing I could’ve done was stay away from them for 15 years.”

He’s returned with a vision of the heroic ideal much gentler than the first Dark Knight’s; where Superman was a semi-fascist tool of The Man in Returns, for instance, he appears in DK2 as an aging warrior torn between his conflicting responsibilities, and sadly resigned to moral gray areas. Most of all, DK2 is fun, in a way Miller has rarely let his work be before. “When I did the original Dark Knight,” he says, “I hadn’t strayed very far from superheroes, and in some ways I was rebelling against them — wanting to take it into darker, more adult territory. Then I went on to projects where I had absolute liberty. Now I want to see what really works about superheroes, and, I guess, play more to the fantastic. That is, what I like about the Atom is that he gets small. I don’t care about his childhood. It’s become a kind of test for me to see if I can make adults feel like 8-year-olds.”