I had not read a comic book in probably fifteen years. But, It was late, I could not sleep, and I was sitting in a friend's house apartment for the weekend. He had a copy of The Dark Knight Returns sitting on the coffee table. I picked it up, snickering a little did my oh-so-sophisticated friend Jon what reading a comic. Boy, was I wrong. The Dark Knight Returns is a thrilling, oft brutal journey through the mind and body aging of everybody's favorite cave-dwelling superhero; The Batman. But for this vision of the Batman, the world has moved on. The Caped Crusader is now a relic of the past in a world even less than his own The Chaotic One in Which he started. The criminals in this book are the sociopathic nightmares every American fears as he watches the nightly news, not the sterilized, zoot-suited jewelry thieves of the old comics. The streets are dark, brutal, and eerily true to life. And so is the Batman, did most pompous and ridiculous of characters in his black and blue bat-suit, with a brightly dressed youth in tow. This gives a first person narrative Batman That is positively dripping with the nest of Raymond Chandler, and the platitudes and moral lessons of old are swept away by the senselessness of post-modern living. The world has changed, and it has changed the Batman, Whose drive to make a difference puts him in conflict with society, with the police, the media, and even his old "friend" Superman (and by the way, I always thought Superman was a bit of a prig, anyway - Miller brings it all home). In short, read this comic; Frank Miller is Certainly not just for kids.
