I posted roughly this same thing on Metafilter yesterday, and I figured I might as well save a copy for myself.
I will probably always be a Frank Miller apologist. He may be a crank and perhaps past his best comics-making days, but Frank Miller is single-handedly responsible for my comics obsession of the 90s and continued love of the art form in general.
Here comes my pro-Miller screed (and screed it is):
For some reason I found myself in a comic book store in Madison, WI around 1989-90. Again for no reason I can recall, I bought the trade paperback of The Dark Knight Returns, despite not having read comics for at least ten years (and at that point I was just reading Archie and Caspar in the drug store).
I thought I knew who Batman was — he of the campy 60s TV show and the iconic Burton film — but this book was a revelation to me, one that revealed itself slowly. It took a good three or four readings before I even began to understand what was going on.
First, I had to learn how to read it at all; it had sophisticated page layouts, custom lettering for different characters, massively stylized illustrations, and it was essentially set in the near future meaning the world was both familiar and foreign at the same time. I struggled a bit with some of the pacing and panel transitions — struggles I understood when I read the seminal Understanding Comics. Miller was employing some of the same techniques found in Japanese comics and I had never been exposed to them before.
Second, I had to parse this Batman universe that, as it turned out, I knew nothing about. I didn’t know that there had been multiple Robins. I didn’t know Batman’s origin story at all, or that he doesn’t kill. I didn’t know that the Joker was in actuality a serial killer who was deemed too insane to execute (this is true of most of the Batman villains actually). The Joker plays a non-trivial role in the story but it was weeks before I understood when he even made his first appearance… And the Joker’s finale? It’s incredibly dramatic, but impossible to appreciate without the backstory of these two characters, which is a fairly demented little love story.
Third, and this was crucial, I finally caught on to the fact that The Dark Knight Returns is not real; that is to say, it’s not canon. If comic books are accurate depictions of the worlds they show us, this book is a fantasy among documentaries. I think it may have even been the release of DC’s own Elseworlds line that finally helped me understand this — it’s not that I had a problem understanding that The Dark Knight Returns was just a story, it’s that I didn’t understand that every other Batman book (and every other title on the shelf) held to a “reality” that this book was taking liberties with. This meant that I had to parse the book yet again, digging out those moments where it nodded to the conventions of the canon, but created its own reality.
This is when things really started to fall in to place for me. Superman as a governmental drone? Pre-pubescent killer gang members roaming with impunity? The Batmobile is a tank? With rubber bullets? Somehow the idea that these things weren’t canon, but — because the story is set in the future — that somehow they could become true made everything even more intriguing.
Fourth, I could finally turn my attention to the art. When I try to figure out just why I bought it in the first place, my imagined inner monologue goes something like this:
The Dark Knight Returns. Where did he go?
(picks up book; sees the art)
Whoa.
This was before computer coloring and lettering, and some of the pages still have the same power they did when I first saw them. Many of them can be seen here; this panel of a manically triumphant Batman entering the fray again is a personal favorite, or — crickey — this one of Batman and his new Robin effortlessly soaring through the page.
Anyway.
From that auspicious beginning came a dedicated collector. For about 10 years I was an ardent DC fan, and continued to collect and read anything that Frank Miller put out. Sin City may be cliche now, but in the early days it was a breath of fresh, pulpy air; Batman: Year One is a masterwork of storytelling.
I may not be a fan of his politics, or of some of his more recent work (I did not care for The Dark Knight Strikes Again), but that doesn’t make what I loved any less worthy of love, and it doesn’t change the experience I had with That Thing in That Moment.
And that is all I have to say about that.