The fact that he’s speaking with us mere hours before he’s scheduled to start signing copies of The Dark Knight III: The Master Race - the second sequel to his '86 original, following 2001’s poorly received The Dark Knight Strikes Again - is proof positive that DC has, by now, fully embraced the Dark Knight brand. And all these interpretations are right! You can bounce Batman from floor to ceiling and off every wall, and you can’t break him.”Įven as Batman’s persona has continued to morph within the main DC Universe, Miller’s version has never really gone away. “Batman is part of popular mythology like Robin Hood, and he’s open to different interpretations by different people at different times. The fact that Batman had already been through so many guises over the decades reassured Miller that Gotham’s champion could survive the transformation into the Dark Knight, a version of the character the writer fashioned out of the stories of street-level vigilantism and effects of urban decay that the writer witnessed firsthand as a New Yorker in the '80s. It represented a firm break from Batman’s various iterations as the smiling Caped Crusader who fought colorful villains during the comic industry’s Golden Age in the ‘40s, Adam West’s campy crimefighter on the mid-'60s Batman TV show and even the grim, shadow-cloaked detective who patrolled Gotham’s streets under the careful watch of writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams in the '70s.įrank Miller with Robert Rodriguez at Comic-Con in 2014 (Photo by Tonya Wise/Invision/AP)
At the time, though, Miller’s vision of an older, angrier Batman emerging from retirement to bring law and order back to a Gotham City awash in crime pushed the character into darker terrain than previously explored in his nearly 50-year career to that point. Given the comic’s almost instantaneous success, DC’s initial reaction to The Dark Knight Returns seems unfathomable in hindsight. Eventually, they relented and let me slip through with my little story. I had to argue with them to let me do this version of Batman. “They hated it,” the celebrated writer-artist tells Yahoo Movies. But Miller recalls a very different reaction to his gritty Batman tale within the halls of DC Comics in the weeks preceding the release of the first issue in February 1986.
Heading into its 30th birthday, Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns, is preserved in stone on the Mount Rushmore of modern mainstream comic books, right alongside Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Chris Claremont’s Days of Future Past arc in the X-Men books.
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