Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
The population of the US was 240 million. It had never been higher. Total crimes for the country was 13.2 million. It had been exceeded only twice before, in 1980 and 1981. In 1986, that number was on an upward path that would only hit its peak in 1991 and would never be as low again until 1997. Violent crime, however, hit 1.489 million. It had never been that high before. Property crime hit 11.7 million. It had never been that high before. The numbers for forcible rape, aggravated assault, larceny-theft, and vehicle theft were also the highest numbers that had ever been recorded. If you don’t think that the absolute numbers tell an interesting enough story, it’s true that the rate per 100,000 inhabitants numbers are somewhat less stark but stand out nonetheless… the numbers are either higher than they’ve ever been, as high as they’ve been in years (1980 and 1981 are very, very bad years indeed) and all of the numbers are going up as part of an unmistakable trend and the numbers for New York tell the exact same story: things are bad and they are getting worse. And the only solutions that people had for these problems involved doubling down on things that hadn’t really demonstrated that they worked.
So it’s with that in mind that we look at the opening pages with a Bruce Wayne who, while driving a prototype racecar, we find musing about how, perhaps, dying in pursuit of winning a race would be a good death.
As the story goes on (and, indeed, this is a story you, yes you, should read), we see what happens when we find out that Batman is retired, that gangs have pretty much taken over the city of Gotham (the movie “Colors” didn’t come out until 1988), that Jason Todd is dead (Batman: A Death in the Family didn’t conclude until 1989), that Ronald Reagan is still president, and that Superman is the president’s lackey.
Batman comes out of retirement and, at that point, the story is as much about what Batman *MEANS* as what Batman *DOES*. Some of the talking heads in the book life arguments directly from the mid-80’s. This person argues that criminality is a response to society and, thus, society’s responsibility to clean up proactively rather than reactively. That person argues that society has proven incapable of even reacting to that which crime has evolved into. And it’s in the middle of this debate that we see a middle-aged Batman recriminate himself constantly as he beats the ever-living crap out of criminals.
And it’s in the middle of *THIS* debate that we see the USSR and the USA’s nuclear staredown involve a… well, not a blink… One side spitting into the face of the other while maintaining eye contact.
And, of course, we see how the President, and by extension Superman, responds when Batman decides that his way of dealing with the crime problem is more important than the debate of how society, specifically the police, should respond to the crime problem.
All in all, 1986 saw The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Maus (which surely deserves a category all its own rather than be saddled with these superhero stories), Daredevil’s Born Again storyline, Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, and John Byrne’s Man of Steel. I was talking to my dealer yesterday about 1986 in comics and he said that, after 1938, 1986 may be the most important year in comics.
I’d say that The Dark Knight Returns does more than its share of hard work for putting it there.
Now, of course, if you don’t have the time/inclination to read a graphic novel but are still intrigued by the story, there was a recent translation of this story to video form with only minor changes available. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1
But, lemme tell ya, in 1986? It was a corker.
I think it might be interesting to trace Frank Miller’s career from 86 to today, too. And watch his descend into paranoid fascist delusions going on and on and on.Report
I don’t know that his paranoid delusions are fascist, exactly. If his stories demonstrate anything, it’s severe distrust of institutions.
He puts his faith into Ãœbermenschen.Report
I don’t know, his interviews circa the movie adaptation of 300 suggest he’s definitely gone in the direction of ubermenschen dominated quasi-fascist iconography.Report
I’m thinking about: Sin City, Hard-Boiled, Holy Terror (holy crap, did he go nuts when he wrote this one… you can tell that it was originally a Batman story and then he was told “THERE IS NO F*#%ING WAY WE ARE PUBLISHING THIS!” and so he erased the ears and did a find/replace with the names and published it somewhere else), and Martha Warshington.
And, thinking back, 300 held politicians pretty much in contempt as well.
The dude has faults and they are legion. They do not, however, include deference to established authority.Report
I don’t necessarily think the fascism comes from deference to established authority so much as his desire to see some other form of authority erected by “chosen” people who are sufficiently badass/ruthless to get the job done. He’s voiced contempt for politics, mercy and “whining athenians” often enough, that you get the sense he’d love an authoritarian regime run by ubermenschen.Report
“Chosen” by whom?Report
Self-appointed, I suppose, or by virtue of their superior badassery.Report
What’s the term for violent meritocracy?
Surely it’s not fascism.Report
I think the violent, ultranationalistic, militaristic bit qualifies it for fascism, which is the closest to it, anyway.Report
Fascism requires nationalism, it seems to me. There may be a love of power here, but it is not mobilized in service of a myth of national supremacy.Report
Frank Miller does have the myth of supremacy thing down in spades. Especially in his more militaristic stuff.Report
Actually I think we should turn this discussion around. Fascism comes from one of the Marxist revisions that started around 1890 after it was noticed that people would fight for kings, nations, flags, mythical symbols, legends, and heroes, but not for things like paid vacations or seizing the means of production.
The elevation of mythic leaders, symbols, and national images was done very consciously, and it might be interesting to contemplate the extent to which they were emulating comic book themes and heroes which did resonate. This would directly raise the question of whether Miller’s stories seem Fascist, or whether Fascism stems from the same source as comic book heroism, causing coincidental parallels because they’re drawing on the same human tendencies to look for a self-confident hero who wins through force of will.Report
That’s an interesting way of putting it. Fascism evolves alongside the science of advertising — or what science can be applied to it, statistics especially. What motivates people? How would you know?
Old advertisements would simply tout the virtues of the product itself. But soon enough, advertising concentrated on lifestyle, almost an adjunct to what was being sold. Status symbols were very ancient but most were connotations of royalty, often commoners were prohibited by law from possessing them.
Fascism was all about modernity, the elevation of the common man to an Ãœbermensch.
Frank Miller makes no bones about his fascism. Deconstructing DKR, we see how he’s taken the Batman mythos and pushed it one step farther, into blank enmity with a state so effete it can’t protect itself from criminals but does see fit to outlaw the superheroes.
Batman is Milton’s Satan, a terribly misunderstood figure in his own mind.
Ich sage euch: man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. Ich sage euch: ihr habt noch Chaos in euch.
Wehe! Es kommt die Zeit, wo der Mensch keinen Stern mehr gebären wird. Wehe! Es kommt die Weit des verächtlichsten Menschen, der sich selber nicht mehr verachten kann.
Seht! Ich zeige euch den letzten Menschen.
I tell you: you must maintain chaos in yourselves to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Sadly, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to that star. Sadly, the age of the most despicable man is arriving, a man who is no longer capable of contempt for himself.
Look, I show you the last man.
-Nietzche, trans mine.Report
I guess I just don’t see the Ãœbermensch as Fascist.
The world has seen Fascists, after all.
The Ãœbermensch is in a different category for that reason alone.Report
Well, that’s true. Nietzche wasn’t really a fascist, though we’re hard-pressed to comb out his sister’s Nazi influences. It’s sorta like the relationship between the Bible and all the maniacs who’ve justified terrible things in its name.
Fascism is the worship of modernity, the incestuous child of Capitalism and the State. But it always seems to rely on a host of ginned-up archetypes: Himmler and Speer did that work for Hitler but Franco did it for himself, his ghoulish memorial to the Spanish Civil War at Valle de los CaÃdos.
Perhaps I was conflating too many thoughts at once. Batman really is a Miltonian Satan in DKR, not a fascist. But Frank Miller, ecch, there’s a whiff of sulphur about his flirtations with fascism.Report
Well, conflating thoughts on this subject is hard to avoid because the themes and images are so easily intertwined. Heck, Albert Speer probably could’ve designed the Justice League’s headquarters, and a large fraction of our superheroes are devoted to fighting social decay and evil human scum bent on profit and exploitation (awfully close to a lot of Nazi propaganda).Report
What made Superman so interesting in the 40s was the fact that he was deliberately subverting the mythical imagery elevation of the Nazis in the form of a very Jewish character. Evidently Hitler and Goepels really hated Supes for being the superior person that wasn’t Aryan.Report
That’s sort of the dynamic that drives the modern version of the Superman/Luthor relationship. Luthor is very Nietzchean, and expects Superman to be the Nietzchean Superman. He’s more or less the opposite, and therein lies the conflict.Report
Fascism isn’t about established authority, it’s about investing total power in a single Great Leader whose vision and power will lead a nation to glory. It’s very anti-institutional.Report
But in general I kind of think his descent into self-parody kind of mimics the same deal with movement conservatism in a way.Report
I’m not sure he was ever very far away from self-parody. It’s just back then he was novel enough that we didn’t realize how ridiculous he was.
I mean, DRK is just “Dirty Harry in a Batman suit beats up the X-men and Superman”Report
That’s a good point.Report
I would pay a lot of money to have Frank Miller and Mark Millar work on a comic book together, with the condition that they wrote alternating issues and were required to shoehorn their political convictions in at every turn.Report
Alan Moore and Frank Miller would be another interesting pair to force to work together. I cannot think of two comic book writers whose work is more politically opposed (though both have a curious belief in the power of violence as the solution to the world’s problems).Report
Oh, now you’ve got me drooling.
I suspect that they’d be able to agree to disagree long enough to write something that would be immanently quotable yet absolutely unfilmable.Report
I dunno, I think it’d be a waste. Anything subtle Moore would come up with would be bulldozed an issue later by Miller’s less than subtleness.Report
Millar seems to hate superheroes, comics in general, his family, and, most importantly, the people who read comics. If you pick up one of his stories, you’re one of the people he’s talking about.
Miller, on the other hand, sees the people who read comics as people who are thirsty for the lessons that he has to give. Those who are receptive to his sermons are rewarded, those who are not receptive are punished.
Miller has the sense to make his comics into storyboards suitable for movie pitches. Millar, by contrast, requires significant rewriting to make something marketable (though, I admit, Kick-Ass turned into a surprisingly moral movie given its surprisingly nihilistic roots).Report
I definitely got that feeling of contempt from Millar’s Authority run, so I could agree with that. Moore’s deconstruction in Watchmen was an act of love, I think, on some weird level. You got the feeling he just might care for, if not like, the sad, lonely souls he portrayed, from the Night Owl up to Dr. Manhattan. Hell, you even get the feeling he respected Rorshach, at least enough to give him an ending that was true to the character, and from what I understand he wrote Rorshach as a symbol of everything he despised in comic book vigilantes.
Moore and Millar may have both written deconstructions, but you can feel Millar’s hatred (incidentally, I would argue that the Authority in general and Millar’s run in particular is as offensive as anything Miller ever wrote).
Speaking of Rorshach, it occurs to me that he basically is a Frank Miller character. Even the overwrought narration works. He would fit pretty nicely in Sin City, as far as I can see. It might be that Moore is capable of encompassing Miller’s work in a way that Miller cannot reciprocate.Report
Moore is, bless him, crazy. He’s crazy enough to be honest when he’s telling a story. I seem to remember him saying something about how he kept being surprised by Rorschach.Report
“So it’s with that in mind that we look at the opening pages with a Bruce Wayne who, while driving a prototype racecar, we find musing about how, perhaps, dying in pursuit of winning a race would be a good death.”
The key part of that scene is Bruce deciding that dying in the crash is not good enough. I think Miller’s brilliance is never clearer. Denny O’Neil wrote a more noble Batman (closer than any other writer to the Dark Knight concept), Grant Morrison wrote a more intelligent Batman, but no one else has understood the internal drive of the character so well.Report
Or his version of the character, in any case. Miller’s batman is driven by rage. I much prefer versions of the character who are driven by sorrow.
Notice how in DKR, while batman might be compelling, the supporting cast is pretty bland. Angry Batman just doesn’t have good foils in his own supporting cast.Report
Yeah actually, other than the new Robin (who plays a new duaghter figure) and Superman (who essentially is the God he rails against) everyone else is either Batman’s opponent or is just wearily resigned to Batman’s position and attitude. As if they’ve long ago tired of arguing with him.Report
Batman as that troll. You can’t make him go away, he won’t stop spewing his mind on his obsession of the day, so you just…learn to ignore him.
Truly a heroic figure for the modern age. 🙂Report
“As that one internet troll” — you know, there’s always a guy. 🙂Report
Bats has still got it, even if he’s let himself go just a bit:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/04/us-britain-batman-idUSBRE9230EX20130304?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FoddlyEnoughNews+%28Reuters+Oddly+Enough%29Report
I don’t see Miller’s Batman as driven by rage. I can see how people interpret it that way, though.Report
“Or his version of the character, in any case. Miller’s batman is driven by rage.”
I don’t see Miller’s version being driven by rage, at least in the Dark Knight Returns. In fact, I think one of the most interesting aspects of Miller’s Batman is how much he’s driven by his own obsession to bring order to a fractured world – the initial rage he felt at his parents’ death has been supplanted by something more elemental.Report
I rarely have much to contribute, but Maus (and Maus II) were some of the most powerful books I read growing up.Report
Yeah, I am not a comic book guy, but think that it is really the only way to make that story approachable. In a lot of ways it’s like Bulgakov putting Satan in Moscow during the purges, it is the only way to make sense of it.Report
Jay, curious: How many superheroes do you think have a comic run/graphic novel that’s as integral for them as DKR is for the caped crusader?Report
Daredevil had “Born Again” (also Miller). Superman had “Death Of Superman” (but, honestly, we’re past that and have been past that since, oh, 9/11 or so).
We’re still not past Dark Knight Returns.
Hell, Peter Parker was killed in the Ultimate Universe and a new Spiderman, Miles Morales, is now web-slinging and that hasn’t proven to be half as integral to the Spiderman Mythology as DKR has proven to be. The Hulk has been revamped somewhat to demonstrate that it’s not The Hulk you need to worry about, it’s Bruce Banner… but there isn’t a single storyline that established that as much as Peter David having 12 years to bring his vision to the page.
And now I’m going down the rest of the big names. Captain America? The Truth was a really interesting storyline but everyone averted their eyes. The rest of the Avengers? The Flash? (Maybe Crisis on Infinite Earths…) Green Lantern? Wonder Woman? Fantastic Four?
None of them have stories that changed the way we think about them, really.Report
What about Civil War? That’s the one I can think of that comes closest for me.Report
I don’t know that we’ll still be talking about Civil War in 2017. The most interesting stuff that happened (Peter Parker revealing himself to the world) had the reset button pressed (One More Day is pretty much universally reviled) and such things as Captain America being shot have been demonstrated equally overcomable.
We won’t see Marvel living in the shadow of Civil War 10 years afterwards (other than jokes still being made about One More Day).Report
I think if it sticks, the Flashpoint/New 52 stuff will be pretty definitive for DC in ten years. For Civil War yeah, they’ve already undone a lot of it between One More Day and the Caps stuff. (Which is unfortunate, really, since Bucky as Caps was one of the best runs of Captain America I can recall ever reading)Report
While taking a shower, I remembered the X-Men.
They underwent a change since the 80’s and 90’s, kinda. The analogy used to be to racial minorities… Magneto as Malcolm X, Professor X as Martin Luther King Jr. and this is made somewhat more explicit in the first X-Men movie as Magneto massages the number tattoo on his arm as he listens to Congressmen give speeches about mutant registration. There has since been an evolution of sorts. Now the analogy is to gay rights and we saw that manifest in the 2nd X-Men movie (“have you tried *NOT* being a mutant?”).
So we’ve changed the way we think about the X-Men, but I don’t know when that happened.Report
“Injustice anywhere is a thread to justice everywhere.” –MLK
I think X-men has always drawn parallels to a variety of political struggles. Didn’t Genosha (Apartheid analog) and the Legacy Virus (AIDS analog) show up at about the same time?
Also is there anyone besides me who thinks that comparing Malcom X to a terrorist is a little bit unfair?Report
I think that it’s more the argument is that “Magneto has a point” than “Malcolm X is a terrorist”.Report
I thought X-Men: First Class, made this point particularly strongly.Report
Emerald Eclipse/Green Lantern Rebirth with Hal Jordan was a big thing for Green Lantern, and it’s still pretty integral to the character.
Winter Soldier for Captain American. The new 52 for Wonder Woman has been pretty substantial.
Crisis on Infinite Earths for The Flash.
For a lot of DC, I’d argue Kingdom Come was a big defining moment, especially for the Trinity, but YMMV.Report
Turning the Green Lantern sub-universe into the Skittles Lanterns was an earthquake for the characters involved and changed the direction of the stories… but I don’t think that they’ve fundamentally changed the way we think about Green Lantern.
Winter Soldier was an epic storyline but Joe Q relies a little too heavily on “The Republicans Win An Election == Kill Captain America/The Democrats Win An Election == Resurrect Captain America”. He’s essentially Episode I-IIIing the Winter Soldier storyline.Report
I was thinking more on the Hal Jordan going insane and wiping out the Corps, then Geoff Johns bringing in the reset button stuff. That did pretty much change the mythos a bit and gave us a new perspective on all the main Lanterns, IMO.Report
The reset button ruins that dynamic, for me. When you press reset, we no longer have to live with the changes we’ve made… which, effectively, means that we don’t have to change how we think about the characters.
See, for example, the Green Lantern movie. Or, now that I think about it, don’t see it.Report
The reset button ruins that dynamic, for me. When you press reset, we no longer have to live with the changes we’ve made… which, effectively, means that we don’t have to change how we think about the characters.
This, ultimately, is why I stopped collecting comic books.
Because neither Marvel nor DC can resist hitting the reset button. The inability to come up with new, actually interesting characters and let the old characters actually die and become part of the pantheon of myth got old.
I miss First.Report
Well, Kingdom Come (along with the Comics Crash and the near-implosion of Image) helped to bring the Dark Age to an end. It was probably the most influential period since for comics since 1986, and hasn’t really been equalled since.Report
Also I’m not entirely sure if DKR is really as influential as you say. It hasn’t aged well at all, and arguably Death in the Family has had a more lasting impact on Batman, as has perhaps Year One. The Dark Knight Strikes Back and All Star Batman & Robin have also kind of made that universe feel even more ridiculous than it already was.Report
They incorporated the heck out of it into the most recent Batman movie.
When they reboot Batman again in 2015 or thereabouts, we’ll see elements show up again in that movie as well.Report
I’m kinda hoping you’re wrong. Maybe a more Marvel-movieverse-esque take on Batman might be interesting.Report
Nob, I don’t think you can argue that DKR wasn’t influential. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it had a positive influence, mind you. But it had a pretty significant impact on the way people wrote batman for about two decades.Report
I think I let my antipathy toward Frank Miller get in my way of enjoying anything remotely authored by him. I fully admit I’m a biased observer here.Report
“None of them have stories that changed the way we think about them, really.”
Well, unless you count (as Movie Bob on the Escapist pointed out), that Wonder Woman was more or less ‘normal’ by the late Silver Age and Lynda Carter era, but her original incarnation and story lines were *really* out there.Report
Mike Grell’s The Longbow Hunters reengineered and repopularized The Green Arrow one year after DKR. It set the tone for GA for decades. Without TLH you don’t have CW’s modern incarnation, Arrow.Report
Dude, excellent point.Report
I would also like to point out that my dealer never seems interested in talking about comicsReport
You need to change dealers. The only thing my dealer loves talking about more than comic books is Football.Report
Lacking the ability to see you face when you replied, I can’t be sure you caught my “joke” playing off a more common use of “dealer.”Report