SOURCE: Phillips, Gene. “The Dark Knight Reborn.” Comics Journal, no. 114 (February 1987): 70-4.

[In the following review, Phillips argues that, despite its flaws, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is an entertaining work that clearly incorporates modern mythic orientations into its storyline.]

Frank Miller has referred to his project as his “Great American Super-hero story.” This four-part opus, whether or not it proves to be entertaining and meaningful to everyone, must at the very least be judged a milestone in the development of techniques for giving any sort of comics project the aesthetic and structural qualities of a novel, forcing the graphics to do triple-duty to make up for the medium's inherent restrictions on wordage. Because of its novel-like complexity, Dark Knight deserves to be assessed as a novel, which means, among other things, that two critical questions are foremost among those that should be addressed: Is Dark Knight Returns entertaining, and is it meaningful?

For this reviewer, the answer to the first question is a resounding affirmative. Entertainment of the most basic sort must be judged not by the quality of its philosophical insights, but by the ingenuity which the creator devotes to certain literary formulas and to the elements peculiar to each. In this area, Frank Miller's Dark Knight excels in a number of ways.

Ironically, the art may put off a number of comics fans who don't understand the difference between bad, inadequate drawing and drawing that deliberately exaggerates or de-emphasizes parts of the human body. Nevertheless, this is a remarkably compressed work; no panel space is wasted—every scene serves to build an integral part of the story, yet gives an unfeigned sense of naturalness to the unnatural proceedings.

My harshest criticism of Miller here is that I have never found his depiction of a muscular male form—even allowing for exaggeration—to be quite on the money. The Mutant Leader and sometimes Batman look at times like they have muscles in the wrong places. Other figures, however, are completely convincing, especially that of Robin, whose every pose suggests a youthful exuberance coupled with occasional uncertainty. Miller similarly shows unstinted facility with the varied range of human expressions, ranging from the calculatedly bland looks of TV news-people (who serve to advance the greatest portion of Dark Knight's expository scenes); to the distress in James Gordon's eyes as he thinks about the innumerable, dispiriting crimes he has been obliged to witness and their effect on the way people live; to the perverse, almost sexual glee in Abner's face as he tries to strangle Robin; to the uncharacteristic, ferally defensive expression on Superman's face as he cradles in his arms the supposedly dead Batman and snarls, “Don't touch him!” at the off-panel onlookers.

Some of the artistic touches are subtly symbolic: when Batman first returns, he wears his famous “New Look” costume, with a yellow circle about his Bat chest-emblem; as events in his life grow progressively darker, he “reverts” to the older, circle-less Bat-emblem, signifying perhaps a return to the primitive, socially unacceptable phase of the character as first depicted by Kane, Finger, and Robinson. On page 28 of Book II, Miller manages to imply that a dialogue took place between Reagan and Superman without showing either character; one merely sees the panel-eye increasingly moving toward a rippling American flag (symbolic of Reagan), with the red-and-white stripes gradually overlap (or seem to) with the red-and-yellow lines of Superman's S-emblem. Superman himself is frequently seen as a black, shadowy figure with red highlights, giving him a far more macabre, unreal appearance than ever before, while in Book IV the loss of his power reduces him almost to a skeleton, though he gradually “fills out” again as he absorbs solar energies from nearby plant-life. And the climactic battle between Batman and the Joker makes similar use of subtle symbolism. As they wage their combat across the fairgrounds, through a mirror-maze, and into a Tunnel of Love, Miller heightens the bizarre looks of the Joker by clothing him, not in his maroon garments, but in a white suit that emphasizes his ghastly pallor and green hair.

There are an assortment of other delightful moments (as well as some other glitches—does the Mutant Leader really manage to file his teeth so that they become longer than human teeth can be?), but space does not permit. Only one more point should be made: here, as never before, Miller is distinctively Miller, having synthesized all of his eclectic influences into a style uniquely his own. One can see in the art traces of Eisner, Moebius, Kane, Krigstein, Kirby, Sienkiewicz (a strong influence here, as witness the exaggerated musculature of Superman and Batman), and ever Garry Trudeau—but this is Miller, and no one else.

The dialogue is arrestingly crisp, rich in allusion, and uniquely suited to each character. Alfred's remarks, for instance, aside from adding to the humor, aid in portraying the character of a crotchety old man surviving on pure nastiness. James Gordon's inner monologues continually give one the picture of a man wise to the foibles of the world (and his own, as well), with too much compassion for his type of job, yet compassion with an edge of commitment that makes it impossible for him to do anything else. Carrie Kelley's California-influenced dialogue is a constant joy, laced as it is with implicit heavy sarcasms. Her lip-rap with two Mutants, p. 39, Book II, is a minor tour-de-force of invented “hip” dialogue.

For the Batman, Miller chooses a spare, grimly taut manner of speaking, which extends even to his moments of humor: in his interior monologues, his “voice” becomes incantatory, sometimes consciously invoking the spirit of a certain monstrous-seeming bat he encountered, prior to his parents' slaying—quite as it if were his god or his totem.

With so many adventure comics on the market, it becomes more and more difficult to do action scenarios which in and of themselves have any originality to them—but here, too, Miller excels. A few of the Batman-pounces-on-punks sequences become too drawn out for the worth of the material, but Book III is a particular standout, not only for Batman's battles with the Joker and police, but also for the moment when, in a Bat-wing-assisted flight from police, Robin's harness is broken by a bullet, and only a last-minute grasp on Batman's cape saves her from falling to her death. (The caption shows a marvelous gift for understatement on Miller's part: Batman thinks, “Cold waves lap Gotham harbor … like they have all the time in the world. …”)

Those characters whom Miller means to portray as full-fledged human beings (as opposed to caricatured figures) are largely satisfying, reminding one of Will Eisner's attempts to show slice-of-life episodes in the lives of ordinary human beings. (Miller's human beings, especially Margaret Corcoran and “Iron Man” Vasquez, are not fundamentally less developed than Eisner's, but they are in somewhat unnatural situations, unlike Eisner's.)

Regarding caricatured figures (generally all the politicians, and particularly the pop-psychologist Wolper and the TV newswoman Lola Chong), Richard McEnroe takes Miller to task in his Dark Knight review (Comics Journal #109) for having stifled the spirit of debate by making many of these figures ridiculous, rather than having their opposition to Batman based on rational attitudes. McEnroe overlooks one central character, new commissioner Ellen Yindell, whose initial opposition to Batman is quite rational (though not developed until #3, which McEnroe may not have read). Also, I believe he overlooks the humorous nature of the caricatures, which is not designed to simply put down types like the obnoxious psychiatrist and the nonagenarian president, but to exaggerate them in the time-honored tradition of the political cartoon. (Significantly, not only Batman-haters are lampooned: when Batman-supporter Lana Lang is asked how she condones a man who violates civil rights, she replies with a speech that does not answer the questions, as the interviewer immediately points out.)

One of the most exaggerated visual jokes is that when the nuclear missile is launched, Reagan gives his customarily cheery television address while attired in a radiation suit. Finally, on a different level of exaggeration, Miller gives Batman and his most significant opponents (the Joker and Superman) moments when they assert their otherworldly nature without compromising the need to give them a modicum of “real-life” characteristics (be it Batman's childhood love for the movie Zorro, the Joker's perverse affection for his old foe, or Superman's fixation on the planet Earth, which he addressed in the recovery sequence as “Mother.”)

Unless I've missed something, these comprise all the basic ingredients that make a far-better-than-average entertainment. (And this without even mentioning the superlative inks of Klaus Janson and the vivid, mood-setting colors of Lynn Varley!) But still, the questions arises—is it meaningful?

Central to any discussion of the issue pertinent to Dark Knight is an understanding of Batman himself as an entity who is in some respects beyond the ordinary level of mortal beings—an entity who represents what I would call “the supramundane.” This term is an intentionally-loose catch-all phrase that many be used to describe any element of a story that we commonly regard as “fantasy such as elves, aliens, time-warps, flying men, and men who can successfully fight crime in cape and longjohns. In such genres as fantasy, horror, science-fiction, and the super-hero adventure, it is taken for granted that something “supramundane” exists, and while many critics look upon this hypothesis as being contrary to the goals of “real” literature, I find that it is simply another form of fiction, differing from mimetic fiction in its goals but no less important in terms of literary potential. In Miller's point of view, then, he offers us the situation of “What would happen if the Batman actually existed?”—and proceeds from that hypothesis.

This is not to say that Miller neglects to deal with mundane reality. Obviously he must, in order to re-interpret a pulp-derived crime-fighter devised for an audience largely composed of children. Miller comments: “One thing that had to be done right away was that his methods had to become a lot harsher and he had to become a lot smarter.” In consequence, the Dark Knight could no longer be the childish fantasy of the hero who subdues countless enemies with roundhouse rights and a pure heart. In hand-to-hand encounters, the Dark Knight may deliberately choose to break an opponents leg, hip, or spine; he may use razor-edged Batarangs to bite into his enemies' flesh, or a tank-like Batmobile to decimate several Mutants with rubber-bullet machine-gun fire.

Yet, though Miller's Batman clearly does not subscribe to the doctrine of “minimum force,” he does kill in defense of one innocent, by blowing away a gunman in Book II (though the gunman is not seen dead), and it may be argued that many of his defensive actions might inadvertently have caused his death. (I, for one, was uncomfortable with a scene in Book IV, where Batman sabotages a roof to fall on the heads of a pursuing SWAT team.) Still, it should be noted that Batman's violent activities are always oriented toward the goal of protecting innocents. This is why, when asked whether Batman's crusade might be a delusion, Miller responds, “I don't see him as a psychotic; I see him as a hero.”

Miller goes to great effort to support his heroic interpretation in psychological terms. He sees Batman not as a man motivated by a ceaseless desire for revenge, as have some other creators, but “as a boy who had every bit of sense taken out of his life in one violent act, and has been forcing the world to make sense, to the extent that it can, ever since.” In other words, Bruce Wayne is not simply outraged by his own personal tragedy, but that such tragedies should befall anyone.

As a slight digression, I would say that the entire mythic situation of the death-of-the-hero's-parents has been oversimplified as a simple quest for revenge. If such were the case, Batman would hardly have any reason to continue fighting evil subsequent to finding his parents' killer, nor would any other serial hero. Rather, the death of the parents, however traumatic, forces the hero (often at a childhood phase, though not invariably) to grow up overnight, to take the responsibilities of adulthood in extreme fashion—not only in regard to avenging his parents, but also with respect to becoming himself a surrogate parent to the citizens of Gotham, protecting innocent children and punishing the guilty.

With regard to Robin especially, Batman becomes the essence of a surrogate parent. Though Carrie Kelley does not lose her parents as did Wayne and Dick Grayson, they are nebulous figures, “seen” only through their dialogue—and it is to the Batman, after he saves her, that she turns for a role model. Similarly, the Mutants, though depicted through most of the opus as zombie-like dregs, come to treat Batman as a lawgiving father-figure, while Book III particularly emphasizes Batman's role as a protector of the children who frequent the carnival.

The heroic aspect of Batman as a parental protector of innocents and spiritual “father” to his children is glibly over-simplified by Cindy Carr's review in the Village Voice Literary Supplement (excerpted in Journal #109). She parodies the book thusly: “Dammit. Someone has to stand up to the subhuman cretins who terrorize innocent law-abiding citizens.” Said review goes on to characterize the first two volumes as “neoconservative propaganda” and the Dark Knight as “Rambo in a cape.”

This is a significant criticism, not because it is true, but because it shows that Miller did not quite succeed in distinguishing his product from the trashy level of Rambo, though there are numerous subtleties to Dark Knight that Rambo and its ilk do not possess. It's hard to see how a critic could label the work “neoconservative,” insofar as Book I contains a panel juxtaposition in which a TV interviewer asks two men-on-the-street for their opinions on Batman and gets a favorable verdict from a conservative bigot who “hopes he goes after the homos next,” and an unfavorable verdict from a liberal hypocrite, who preaches reforming the socially disadvantaged but would “never live in the city. …”

The targets of Miller's satire include both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives. A prominent example of the latter is the aforementioned Reagan-in-the-radiation-suit incident. The liberals fear Batman because he threatens the “disadvantaged” with whom they identify, rightly or wrongly, while the conservatives hate him for not following their dictates. And even “innocent law-abiding citizens” take some shellacking, becoming maddened animals in the wake of the power failure and being brought into line only by Batman and several “subhuman cretins.”

Of course, the very concept of a vigilante summons up images of Nazi storm-troopers and the Ku Klux Klan, so knee-jerk negative reactions are to be expected. By seeming to identify Batman with such reactionary forces, by not clearly setting Batman apart, Miller has perhaps left himself open for such criticisms, thus obscuring the real essence of his thought—that is, to provoke debate of the issues, without allowing his personal authorial voice to intrude, by using Batman as a “wild card” who fits none of our standard categories. Because he has devoted his life to the “otherworldly purpose” of eradicating crime, he becomes “a mythological figure, something of a god on earth”—which is in perfect consonance with what I have termed the “supramundane,” an element or elements that defy conventional mundane reality. Miller elaborates: “In the early adventures of Superman and Batman, the super-hero was an unusual, often mystical element that focused and defined real world situations and issues in a way that was clearer and more direct than a simple recitation of the facts. … !! (“He's too big,” says Yindell of Batman, echoing similar words from Commissioner Gordon, stressing that Batman is “by his nature, above and beyond the rest of us.”) Thus Batman, due to the many preternatural, myth-like associations surrounding him, can hardly be reduced to “Rambo in a cape.”

Ultimately, Miller even subverts the traditional fantasy of the super-hero, though not the overall concept of heroism. One expects to see Batman battle the Joker, representative of unbridled chaos and death—but not to see the Dark Knight battle Superman, the latter symbolizing an oppressive, stupid order that may deserve to be overthrown. “Yes,” thinks Batman, mentally berating Superman, “you always says yes—to anyone with a badge … or a flag. …” To Batman, Superman has betrayed the potential they both had to change the world for the better, thus making it possible for a political clod like Ronald Reagan to play games with innocent lives. Indeed, when Batman almost defeats Superman, brutally kicking the Man of Steel in the face, he is in some respects lashing out against everyone who ever compromised with evil and stupidity, allowing the innocent to be harmed in order to protect the rights of the innocent-until-proved-guilty. For ordinary human beings, there is no alternative, and I do not think Miller means to suggest that vigilantes should run amuck, a la Bernard Goetz—he only means to use the supramundane figure of the Batman to place the situation in greater perspective.

On the negative side, however, it must be admitted that though a mythic dimension about the hero excuses him in part from being judged in ordinary terms, other features of the story are not exempt from the writer's law of common sense. Perhaps some of the events of the story can be excused as evolving under unusual circumstances—i.e., maybe one can believe that some Mutants, seeing the Batman beat the Leader, begin to worship the former instead, and maybe one can believe that Superman is able to arrange a showdown with Batman without any untimely interference from the army. But the myth-logic breaks down in one or two major areas: in Book III, it seems beyond any kind of logic that Batman—who is not, after all, a literal god—would plunge into the midst of well-armed police. (If all he wanted to do was enter the studio, why did he not do what he did in the same book later—don a disguise and gain entrance without fighting the police?) The answer is, of course, that Batman had to fight the police, thus becoming a rejected savior—but here the myth-logic has overwhelmed the real-life logic. And in Book IV, following the launching of the Soviet missile, one hears much about the missile's effects, but nothing else. With America helpless, why does Russia fail to annihilate its enemy? Or at least invade? Does Superman prevent them, or persuade them not to try? One never knows.

The most damaging flaw in the Dark Knight's structure is the denouement. The Mutants—Batman's initial adversaries, who ironically become his “Merry Men,” a new cadre of underground crime-fighters—are never given distinct personalities. They are like undifferentiated units of pure chaos, without any direction save to random violence, until Batman molds them to fit his designs. I have no difficulty with the basic idea of the ending, as it is the logical extrapolation of what an out-of-commission Batman might plausibly do. But I cannot believe that so righteous a hero would choose as his aides such mindless ciphers as the Sons of the Batman, who kill and maim criminals (and some innocents), and the jailbreaking Mutants, who murder several policemen, one quite violently. I understand, once again, the mythic logic—Miller even says that “Batman commits evil to fight evil”—but in real life, one cannot but doubt that such “subhuman cretins” could ever become larger-than-life heroes. Ironically, Miller's treatment of all the costumed (or formerly costumed) heroes—Bruce Wayne, Carrie Kelly, Clark Kent, Oliver Queen—gives each of them an outlook on life as individualistic as their personalities will permit. For each of them, the decision to fight crime, however impossible in real life, is a conscious reaction to their perceptions of their environments—not a matter of being swept along by a leader's charisma. Ideally, Miller might have made the ending work had he given us more background on the Mutants Batman chose as his helpers—something to let us believe that he did not simply select the most pliable types—but Miller misses the opportunity. For that matter, the ending is difficult to judge because Miller leaves vague the actual plans Batman has. Presumably, he does not mean to overthrow the government—though Oliver Queen seems to have been involved in sabotage directed against the U.S. (Book IV, page 33), and Batman does make the comment about “a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers”—but he also says “I'll stay quiet” so that Superman will never again be forced to fight him. My only deduction is that this implies a kind of Robin Hood-like set-up, in which Batman and his followers continue fighting corruption surreptitiously—but Miller never makes this clear.

In conclusion, I would say that the Dark Knight opus is both entertaining and meaningful, though in some ways the meaning is not pursued as rigorously as one might wish. Its flaws, like its ambitions, are not always small ones, but so many of its ambitions are positively realized that one tends to dismiss the failings. Some critics have chosen to focus purely on such failings and have ignored the depth of the Dark Knight's mythic orientations—which is rather like writing about W. B. Yeats without reference to that poet's myth-penchant. One can do it, all right—but one misses a hell of a lot.

If comics are ever to mature and join the ranks of “real” literature, it will become necessary for such works to have a mature attitude about the mythic underpinnings of literature, as is seen in the works of “real” literary figures, i.e., Yeats, Melville, Borges, Robbins (Tom, not Harold), and Calvino. And while it is true that literature may never take to its bosom works that simply build upon such crude, primitive myths as the early Batman, infusing them with as much meaning as they can bear—the existence of works like Miller's Dark Knight, Gerber's Howard the Duck, and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing are important steps for comic books. With their transitional help, comic books might someday forge literary myths capable of sharing the spotlight with Prospero, Michael Robartes, and the Great White Whale.