Superhuman Man Resembles Joker the Dark Knight Strikes Again
Gotham is saved, the time to come finds hope, and the Dark Knight has returned. But when the world is at its worst, it's fourth dimension for the Dark Knight to strike again.
In 2001, Frank Miller returned to DC Comics for a belated sequel to his highly influential Batman dystopia Dark Knight Returns
Comic volume sequels are kind of historically disastrous. For every Secret Wars 2015 or Dark Victory
Consider everything that happened in the time between The Night Knight Returns and The Nighttime Knight Strikes Again, both in comic books and the larger world around them.
Tim Burton and Michael Keaton turned Batman into a blockbuster, which was followed by iii sequels that flamed out. The Soviet Spousal relationship, a major factor in the political tensions of DKR, collapsed. Ronald Reagan, lampooned in those aforementioned pages, had left the presidential function, with three more presidents post-obit. Frank Miller gave Batman a new origin in Year I merely to exit DC Comics for Hollywood then Dark Horse for Sin Metropolis, Martha Washington, 300, and more. Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen had pushed mainstream superhero comics into the era of grim and gritty deconstruction, leading to the early 90s speculator blast and subsequent catastrophic plummet. And both Curiosity and DC had narrowly avoided shuttering.
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Comic books and the world they occupied were non the aforementioned, but The Dark Knight Returns seemed to loom larger than information technology always had over the manufacture. And when Miller signed a deal with DC to render to the story that helped change comics, DK2 became one of the near highly anticipated comic books of all time. But anticipation and reality are two very different things.
Reception to The Dark Knight Strikes Again was negative, to say the least, with the comic speedily becoming infamous for being one of the great disappointments in the history of DC. But information technology was, financially, a hit, selling close to 200,000 copies of issue one and bug 2 and iii staying at over 150,000 sold each, with a $vii.95 price tag for its large prestige format meaning that DK2 has made DC Comics around $v meg when including its collected reprints. When you put a name like Frank Miller together with a vision of Batman that's famous worldwide, you become a lot of money, especially in 2001 when Miller was still a respected and active author.
And this is why Dark Knight Strikes Again is infamous in the world of comic books. This is not a series that no one cared about. It was hotly predictable and widely read, quickly turning vast amounts of readers sour on Miller. Decades and several follow-ups later, and DKSA is nevertheless shorthand for comic book disaster. But why?
How does Miller try to follow upwards one of Batman's nigh iconic stories? What is The Dark Knight Strikes Again really trying to say? How does this belated sequel fit into the larger story of Frank Miller? And what is the legacy of The Dark Knight Strikes Once more, warts and all, in the ongoing Batman saga?
Returning to the Return
The Dark Knight Returns is near the balance of promise and despair in a futurity dystopia, but it's also nearly Batman transcending humanity and becoming legend, moving from an former man who struggles to defeat a broken Ii-Confront to a hero that can go toe to toe with Superman. So what tin can a sequel do to challenge the transcendent? It must get larger than life in every aspect.
The time to come of The Dark Knight Returns is dystopic in a sort of "humanity'due south worst impulses continue" sort of fashion. Only the futurity of Nighttime Knight Strikes Again is a full-on police state, with the government controlling every element of the population. The president of the United states of america is a hologram controlled by Lex Luthor, wars and invasions ravage the planet, superheroes continue to be outlawed and snuffed out. And information technology'south this escalation of horrors that brings Batman out of hiding.
According to Miller, "When I did the first 1, I was very much rebelling against all the established stuff, like the one-time Telly show. Just how lame all the stuff had get. This fourth dimension, I'm finding that I'k playing around with DC'due south whole pantheon of characters and trying to prove them off in means that feature the joys behind them."
If Miller's original was a stiff middle finger to the forces that control the world, DK2 is all-out state of war confronting them as Batman gathers an aged Justice League to destroy Luthor and his forces. But what starts every bit a war for liberty violently devolves into nonsense every bit Miller slams more and more than plot developments down on the reader. Smash! Braniac assault. Bang! Superman-Wonder Woman love child. Kersplat! New shapeshifting joker. Blammo! Superheroine rock ring protest.
And at the eye of this hopelessly shattered narrative lies a real world tragedy.
A few years earlier writing Strikes Again, Miller and and then-wife Lynn Varley had moved back to Hell's Kitchen in New York, and in the midst of writing his return to Batman, the September 11th terrorist attacks happened – the fume and expiry visible from Miller's habitation. While issues 1 and ii came out in December 2001 and January 2002, all of issue 1 and some of effect two had been written before September 11th.
Whatever Miller had originally planned was waylaid by his horror at the devastation. Instead, consequence 2 diverges into an extended destruction of Metropolis equally Superman is rendered powerless to terminate Braniac.
There's a hitting double-folio spread that straight evokes the aftermath of 9/11 in issue 3 of DK2, published in July of 2002. The rubble of Urban center echoes first responders in search of survivors in New York, but information technology's all fabricated perfectly clear as Superman and his girl wing off, the smoldering city split up in half behind them. It's i of the few images in the unabridged serial that Miller bothers to give a detailed groundwork and connects to the real earth destruction.
Much similar Miller would cite beingness mugged in New York every bit the inspiration for his paranoid, ruthless approach to Daredevil and Batman in the '80s, ix/eleven would break Miller in the 21st century. The author's Libertarianism, frequently on brandish in his individualist Batman, would morph into the hard right fly Islamaphobic viewpoint of "Holy Terror," originally planned to be a Batman comic but disavowed by DC in 2006. So "Strikes Once more" sees Miller in the midst of a personal political crunch, one that'south pushed through a psychedelic lens of conspiracy, superheroism, and justice, all embodied in a gleefully tearing Batman.
In Miller'due south hands, Batman is a monomaniacal furious ball of moral rage, pushed to the brink from a earth the writer sees equally immoral in every way. And in a repeat of Returns, Bruce once once more transcends his mortality, substantially asserting himself equally beyond age by the end. I don't know how or why, he just does.
Miller seeths below the surface of the comic, with Superman's calm reason seen as the encapsulation of everything wrong with the modern hero. Near the stop, Superman finally snaps, destroying multiple fighter jets and probably killing their pilots. But this isn't framed as the fall of The Man of Steel, it's his rising. Now, Batman condones killing, aiding Hawkman and Hawkgirl's son in murdering Lex Luthor. And equally Superman becomes a furious god, a new faith forms around him, exalting a savior you tin run into and touch on over ane you lot can't.
"Strikes Once more" is a mess. I tin can't deny that. But I find it to be a fascinating mess. And a much improve experience when you immerse yourself in its madness instead of flipping through its pages. These panels hurt the eyes without adjustment. And while information technology's non every bit bad as staring at the sun, it does assist to allow the pupils dialate appropriately.
DK2 is a pop art speedrace, hitting the gas immediately and scarlet-lining before the first event is over. Every installment is a mega-sized chunk of pages, only fifty-fifty with so much existent estate, it seems like in that location's never enough time for whatever of Miller's ideas. Major characters of Returns, like Gordon and Yindel, are given no more a unmarried console equally the increasingly manic story vibrates with a billion screaming thoughts. Past issue iii, the narrative is leaping tall buildings in a single bound, flashing back to forgotten moments and refusing to found time or place.
Rage-filled rebels fire guns at unseen hordes equally increasingly cartoonish talking heads gawk and groan like some sort of phonation populi bobblehead from hell. Politicians, journalists, villains, soldiers, common people, artists – they're all caricatures here, designed to repeat a strawman argument for Miller to ruthlessly mock and tear apart. And when the President is shown to be a hologram, the people just shrug and accept it. If there was ever a time to employ the term "sheeple," it's when describing Miller's arroyo to the common homo. And Batman is hither to beat some sensation into them.
Actually, despite Batman being our titular character, he's probably the least important. Carrie Kelley is given much more to practice, acting out her mentor's plans while the diverse returning members of the Justice League like The Atom, Plastic Homo, The Elongated Man, Greenish Pointer, Light-green Lantern, and more than take up the fight. But if this is anyone'southward story, it's actually Superman's. His romance with Wonder Adult female, condign a parent to his daughter, and moving out of the government stooge part that Miller is often criticized for in Returns, are the given style more than folio existent estate than Batman, who acts as puppet chief here. Batman is about entirely absent from the commencement issue. His voiceover permeates it, showing usa his plans, but he doesn't appear until the very end, in one case once more mercilessly chirapsia Superman to a pulp. Batman is never wrong in the pages of Strikes Again, so how tin can he have any sort of arc?
Everyone exterior of Batman, and possibly Carrie, is a moron, little more than a chess piece moved most by The Night Knight. And no ane suffers more than in relation to Miller's ubermench antihero than a belatedly villainous addition.
Miller's human relationship to Robin is … strange to say the to the lowest degree, and fifty-fifty downright hateful at its core. At the fourth dimension of Returns publishing, Jason Todd was still alive in the chief Batbooks and Batman's allusion to Todd beingness dead predates that character's call-in mandated murder. Years after DK2, Miller would team upwards with Jim Lee for All-Star Batman and Robin for the origin of Dick Grayson, with Miller making him a violent little psycho whose training by Batman largely consists of exact corruption. I don't know if Miller intended for it to exist more than that, All-Star never finished and no yous tin't brand me do a video on it. Carrie Kelley's Robin helps Bruce move past the mental and physical roadblocks on his path back to Batman, just she'south become Catgirl past the time Strikes Again has started.
Returns never makes annihilation explicit, just it seems equally if years of disillusionment and trauma have dissolved whatever semblance of the Bat Family unit. Where is Dick Grayson? It doesn't matter initially. But in Strikes Again, the fate of Robin is critical, and it paints the dynamic of this duo in a terrible light.
Throughout these pages, a new Joker begins murdering heroes, revealed at the end to be Dick Grayson, seeking revenge confronting Batman for his corruption and firing years before. It's completely unnecessary and is chop-chop solved past a decapitation and some lava. But why should we intendance? Miller has done zip to give us an emotional connection to anything in DK2 beyond a twist for twist'southward sake.
Who are these people? What are their relationships? Every character's friendship, love, or hatred toward one another is only established through us knowing traditional status quo established by other comics.
Alongside its critique of political powers, Strikes Again also interrogrates our burgeoning human relationship with technology. The man-computer interface is taken to an extreme through a constant barrage of data. A hologram president is the ultimate connectedness of political manipulation and technological abuse. Having a graphic symbol similar Braniac, covered in nodes and constantly irresolute shape, exist the power behind Luthor's control takes the critique to some other level. Layers and layers of technology manipulating the globe at large. All the while, Varley uses burgeoning engineering to haphazardly slam layer afterward layer of Photoshop color downwards on the page, colliding Miller's frenetic inks with a swirl of digital color.
And speaking of the art, DK2 is full-fledged belatedly-stage Miller. After his evolution in conjunction with inker Klaus Janson (who didn't return here) and his push into the heavily inked noir of Sin Urban center (gone completely psychedelic past the final installment of Hell and Back), Miller moved into a much more than sparse line work with harsh geometric interpretations of the trunk. Here, Miller's panels are virtually entirely devoid of backgrounds as each character floats through the void. The Gotham of Night Knight Returns is famous for being a case for a more grounded, gritty realism in superhero stories. Miller, Janson, and Varley's earth in that original story was fabricated up of common cold difficult concrete and battered modernity.
What does the Gotham of Strikes Once again look similar? I couldn't tell you lot. It doesn't be. It'south all just harsh colors and screaming heads. A howl of high tech horror that bears no semblance to the world nosotros saw previously. And maybe that'due south the fundamental to agreement this comic. This is not a truthful sequel to Returns. At that place'due south little here to connect the ii outside of some returning characters. This is a different Frank Miller and a different dark future.
Miller's art works all-time in splash pages here, creating one large image for the biggest impact and sometimes breaking it up with a scattering of small panels that give greater context. But it's at it'southward worst when trying to create a true sequential arroyo to action or emotion. All the particular is lost. The context is missing. The movements and desires of characters are nigh impossible to parse at times equally there'south no sense of pacing or catamenia from panel to panel.
The coloring by Lynn Varley is a hypercolored garish explosion. Unlike Varley's coloring of Returns, which used gouache to provide a natural, textured feeling to a dilapidated future, Varley adopts an early Photoshop coloring here. The result is something harshly unnatural, filled with pinwheels of rainbow colors and at times heavily pixelated. When combined with Miller nearly completely removing backgrounds, y'all go unmoored from whatsoever sense of setting or context. These are all characters adrift in an uncanny completeness.
In the midst of all this pop art excess, Miller tries to reassert the power of the superhero. But much is lost in both the messiness of an unfocused story and the years that recontextualized it in Miller'south career.
The Dark Knight Falls
When reflecting on his drive backside returning to superheroes to write Strikes Once more, Miller said, "Fifteen years away from information technology has given me a much different perspective. I'g much more able to arroyo it like I'm seven years quondam than I used to exist able to."
And in that location's something both fun and thickheaded about that approach. Seen one manner, and you can easily view the comic as a silly throwback to the Argent Age, where heroes were vivid and weird and the stakes had little to do with reality. Seen another, and you face all the heavy existent world bug that Miller infuses his story with, colliding an immature arroyo with recent tragedy.
There are loads of ridiculous moments throughout Strikes Again. Only comics tin be ridiculous and still work. It'south all virtually establishing a world and tone and and then working well within information technology. If the entire world is ridiculous, so ridiculous things tin can happen and feel right.
The problem with Strikes Again is that it never quite understands how it'south trying to operate. While Returns had elements of satire in how information technology portrayed the media and government, everything in DK2 is ridiculous to the point of unintentional self-parody.
Superman and Wonder Woman having globe-shaking insta-pregnant MEGASEX highlights simply how outlandish Miller is willing to go. Everything here is cranked up to its most extreme extravaganza. The greek chorus of talking head reporters are slammed into any scene at random, with highly sexualized women giving the news in the nude. In fact, every woman, even 16-year-old Carrie Kelley, is sexualized, it'southward just that Miller'southward coarse geometric shapes lack any sort of homo sensuality. Right fly controlling politicians are now all puppets in a sort of conspiracy theorist'south ultimate fantasy. Batman is at present the perfect man, always 10 steps alee and never wrong in his cess of the world around him.
In Miller'due south 21st century optics, the world is one large, ugly cesspool of abuse and it must, at all costs, being violently cleaned up. Is this righteous anger? Not actually. More similar decades of pent up rage given life in a medium meant to inspire. Yet Miller would later dismiss the effects of political credo given life through fine art, saying "I don't know many people who go their politics out of comic books. The notion of doing that scares me most of the time. I'm just throwing my stuff against a wall to see what happens. I don't think anything I'm doing could affect things on such a broad basis. I don't retrieve everyone doing fiction could."
Maybe that's partially truthful Frank, but fine art is the gateway into a greater worldview. Possibly no single comic has ever changed a person's entire belief arrangement, but it's probable caused them to consider a different viewpoint. Given enough reinforcement, and their behavior can alter. Of form, any sort of behavior Miller had about politics and art would be tossed out in the days of "Holy Terror" and a one man drawing war on those he hated.
If DK2 left bad taste in your mouth, don't read this book.
In response to "Holy Terror," Grant Morrison would later say, "Auspicious on a fictional character as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a decadent indulgence when real terrorists are killing existent people in the existent world. I'd exist so much more impressed if Frank Miller gave upwards all this graphic novel nonsense, joined the Army and, with a howl of undying detest, rushed headlong onto the front lines with the immature soldiers who are actually risking life and limb 'vs.' Al Qaeda."
In the long, convoluted arc of the story, "Dark Knight Strikes Once again" is the reassertion of the superhero, bending dorsum the totalitarian leanings of the world through sheer force of will. What that means for each reader likely depends on how willing they are to look by its fractured plot, foreign sexualizations, homophobic tangents, and existent globe paranoia.
For all its loopy political ideaology and mid-writing identity crunch, Strikes Once more is actually a hopeful book. One that presents a global crunch of staggering proportions that collides decades of man's worst impulses with the failings of our political system and believes that nosotros can nonetheless pull ourselves out of the muck. It only may have lopping off your genetically modified shape shifting erstwhile ward's caput to do information technology.
Different and then many elements of Dark Knight Returns, Strikes Again has not entered the iconography of Batman. Whereas things similar the tank Batmobile, the power armor, the Mutant gang, Carrie Kelley Robin, the brick shithouse of erstwhile Batman, and then many iconic panels that were created past Returns have been reinterpreted by other comics, movies, and telly shows, the inventions of Strikes Over again have bounced off popular civilisation and take never actually been reclaimed. Its immediate rejection gave it no chance to permeate the larger culture. And you know what? Thats ok.
Information technology would be some other near xv years until the world of DKR would take a full-fledged sequel in Dark Knight III: The Chief Race, co-written past Miller and Brian Azzarello. While some elements of Strikes Again influence role iii, similar Superman and his daughter, the entry largely ignores it.
Only what could yous really do to extend DK2'due south world?
The Nighttime Knight Strikes Over again is a work of pure chaos. Anarchy in content as superheroes cover their outlaw nature to topple the secret rulers of the world. Anarchy in grade equally Miller and Varley throw abroad whatever traditional structure in favor of pure thought brought to life on the page. The result is a sloppy, strange, insulting, captivating, confusing, brilliant, and braindead, all at once.
And despite some changes in political idealogy and art in the decades since, The Dark Knight Strikes Again was the expiry of Frank Miller's career.
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Source: https://www.comicbookherald.com/understanding-the-dark-knight-strikes-again-frank-millers-self-destructive-magnum-opus/
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