Joker the Dark Knight Strikes Again
Gotham is saved, the future finds promise, and the Dark Knight has returned. But when the world is at its worst, it's fourth dimension for the Nighttime 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 Dark Knight Returns and The Night Knight Strikes Again, both in comic books and the larger earth around them.
Tim Burton and Michael Keaton turned Batman into a blockbuster, which was followed past three 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 office, with three more presidents following. Frank Miller gave Batman a new origin in Year One simply to exit DC Comics for Hollywood so Night Horse for Sin Urban center, 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 nail and subsequent catastrophic collapse. And both Marvel and DC had narrowly avoided shuttering.
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Comic books and the world they occupied were non the same, merely The Nighttime Knight Returns seemed to loom larger than it ever had over the industry. And when Miller signed a deal with DC to render to the story that helped change comics, DK2 became ane of the most highly anticipated comic books of all time. But anticipation and reality are two very different things.
Reception to The Dark Knight Strikes Once more was negative, to say the to the lowest degree, with the comic quickly condign infamous for being one of the great disappointments in the history of DC. Simply it was, financially, a hit, selling close to 200,000 copies of issue 1 and issues ii and three staying at over 150,000 sold each, with a $7.95 cost tag for its large prestige format meaning that DK2 has made DC Comics around $5 one thousand thousand when including its collected reprints. When you put a proper name like Frank Miller together with a vision of Batman that's famous worldwide, y'all get a lot of money, especially in 2001 when Miller was withal 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 anticipated and widely read, quickly turning vast amounts of readers sour on Miller. Decades and several follow-ups later, and DKSA is still shorthand for comic book disaster. Merely why?
How does Miller try to follow up one of Batman's most 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 Nighttime Knight Strikes Again, warts and all, in the ongoing Batman saga?
Returning to the Return
The Dark Knight Returns is nigh the residue of hope and despair in a time to come dystopia, but it's also virtually Batman transcending humanity and becoming legend, moving from an old man who struggles to defeat a broken 2-Face to a hero that can go toe to toe with Superman. So what can a sequel do to claiming the transcendent? It must become larger than life in every aspect.
The futurity of The Nighttime Knight Returns is dystopic in a sort of "humanity'southward worst impulses continue" sort of style. But the future of Dark Knight Strikes Once more is a full-on law country, with the government controlling every element of the population. The president of the US is a hologram controlled past Lex Luthor, wars and invasions ravage the planet, superheroes continue to be outlawed and snuffed out. And information technology's this escalation of horrors that brings Batman out of hiding.
According to Miller, "When I did the first ane, I was very much rebelling against all the established stuff, like the old Goggle box show. Only how lame all the stuff had become. This time, I'thousand finding that I'm playing effectually with DC'southward whole pantheon of characters and trying to testify them off in ways that feature the joys backside them."
If Miller's original was a potent middle finger to the forces that control the earth, DK2 is all-out war against them as Batman gathers an aged Justice League to destroy Luthor and his forces. But what starts as a war for freedom violently devolves into nonsense as Miller slams more and more plot developments downward on the reader. Boom! Braniac assail. Blindside! Superman-Wonder Woman love child. Kersplat! New shapeshifting joker. Blammo! Superheroine rock band protest.
And at the eye of this hopelessly shattered narrative lies a real world tragedy.
A few years before writing Strikes Again, Miller and so-married woman Lynn Varley had moved back to Hell'southward Kitchen in New York, and in the midst of writing his render to Batman, the September 11th terrorist attacks happened – the smoke and death visible from Miller's dwelling. While issues i and 2 came out in December 2001 and January 2002, all of issue 1 and some of upshot 2 had been written before September 11th.
Any Miller had originally planned was waylaid by his horror at the destruction. Instead, issue ii diverges into an extended destruction of Metropolis as Superman is rendered powerless to end Braniac.
There's a striking double-page spread that direct evokes the aftermath of nine/11 in outcome 3 of DK2, published in July of 2002. The rubble of Urban center echoes first responders in search of survivors in New York, but it's all made perfectly clear as Superman and his daughter fly off, the smoldering city divide in half behind them. It's one of the few images in the unabridged serial that Miller bothers to give a detailed groundwork and connects to the existent world devastation.
Much similar Miller would cite being mugged in New York every bit the inspiration for his paranoid, ruthless approach to Daredevil and Batman in the '80s, 9/11 would suspension Miller in the 21st century. The writer's Libertarianism, often on display in his individualist Batman, would morph into the hard right fly Islamaphobic viewpoint of "Holy Terror," originally planned to be a Batman comic merely disavowed by DC in 2006. So "Strikes Again" sees Miller in the midst of a personal political crisis, i that'south pushed through a psychedelic lens of conspiracy, superheroism, and justice, all embodied in a gleefully vehement Batman.
In Miller'due south hands, Batman is a monomaniacal furious ball of moral rage, pushed to the brink from a world the writer sees as immoral in every mode. And in a repeat of Returns, Bruce one time again transcends his bloodshed, essentially asserting himself as beyond historic period past the terminate. I don't know how or why, he just does.
Miller seeths beneath the surface of the comic, with Superman's calm reason seen equally the encapsulation of everything wrong with the modernistic hero. Near the end, 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 ascension. At present, Batman condones killing, aiding Hawkman and Hawkgirl's son in murdering Lex Luthor. And every bit Superman becomes a furious god, a new religion forms around him, exalting a savior you can see and touch over one you can't.
"Strikes Again" is a mess. I tin't deny that. Just I find it to be a fascinating mess. And a much improve experience when yous immerse yourself in its madness instead of flipping through its pages. These panels hurt the eyes without adjustment. And while it's non as bad as staring at the sun, it does help to allow the pupils dialate appropriately.
DK2 is a popular fine art speedrace, hitting the gas immediately and blood-red-lining before the beginning consequence is over. Every installment is a mega-sized chunk of pages, but even with and so much existent estate, it seems like in that location's never enough time for any of Miller's ideas. Major characters of Returns, like Gordon and Yindel, are given no more a single console equally the increasingly manic story vibrates with a billion screaming thoughts. Past issue 3, the narrative is leaping alpine buildings in a single bound, flashing dorsum to forgotten moments and refusing to establish time or identify.
Rage-filled rebels burn down guns at unseen hordes as increasingly cartoonish talking heads gawk and groan like some sort of voice populi bobblehead from hell. Politicians, journalists, villains, soldiers, common people, artists – they're all caricatures hither, designed to repeat a strawman argument for Miller to ruthlessly mock and tear apart. And when the President is shown to exist a hologram, the people but shrug and accept it. If there was ever a time to use the term "sheeple," information technology's when describing Miller's arroyo to the common man. And Batman is here to beat some sensation into them.
Actually, despite Batman being our titular character, he'due south probably the least of import. Carrie Kelley is given much more to practise, acting out her mentor'south plans while the diverse returning members of the Justice League similar The Atom, Plastic Human, The Elongated Human, Greenish Pointer, Green Lantern, and more take up the fight. Just if this is anyone'due south story, it's actually Superman's. His romance with Wonder Woman, becoming a parent to his daughter, and moving out of the government stooge part that Miller is frequently criticized for in Returns, are the given way more folio real estate than Batman, who acts equally puppet master here. Batman is almost entirely absent from the get-go issue. His voiceover permeates information technology, showing us his plans, merely he doesn't appear until the very end, in one case over again mercilessly chirapsia Superman to a lurid. Batman is never incorrect in the pages of Strikes Again, and then how tin can he have whatever sort of arc?
Anybody exterior of Batman, and maybe Carrie, is a moron, footling more a chess piece moved most by The Dark Knight. And no one suffers more in relation to Miller'southward ubermench antihero than a late villainous improver.
Miller'due south relationship to Robin is … strange to say the to the lowest degree, and even downright mean at its core. At the time of Returns publishing, Jason Todd was still alive in the main Batbooks and Batman's allusion to Todd existence expressionless predates that character's phone call-in mandated murder. Years later on DK2, Miller would squad up with Jim Lee for All-Star Batman and Robin for the origin of Dick Grayson, with Miller making him a violent lilliputian psycho whose grooming past Batman largely consists of verbal abuse. I don't know if Miller intended for it to exist more than that, All-Star never finished and no yous tin't make me do a video on it. Carrie Kelley'south Robin helps Bruce movement past the mental and physical roadblocks on his path back to Batman, but she's become Catgirl past the time Strikes Again has started.
Returns never makes annihilation explicit, but information technology seems as if years of disillusionment and trauma have dissolved any semblance of the Bat Family. Where is Dick Grayson? Information technology 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 calorie-free.
Throughout these pages, a new Joker begins murdering heroes, revealed at the stop to be Dick Grayson, seeking revenge against Batman for his corruption and firing years before. It's completely unnecessary and is speedily solved by a decapitation and some lava. But why should nosotros care? Miller has done nothing to give us an emotional connection to anything in DK2 beyond a twist for twist's 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 condition quo established by other comics.
Alongside its critique of political powers, Strikes Again also interrogrates our burgeoning relationship with technology. The human-computer interface is taken to an extreme through a abiding barrage of information. A hologram president is the ultimate connexion of political manipulation and technological abuse. Having a character like Braniac, covered in nodes and constantly changing shape, be the power behind Luthor'south command takes the critique to another level. Layers and layers of technology manipulating the earth at large. All the while, Varley uses burgeoning engineering science to haphazardly slam layer later layer of Photoshop color down on the page, colliding Miller's frenetic inks with a swirl of digital color.
And speaking of the art, DK2 is full-fledged late-phase Miller. After his evolution in conjunction with inker Klaus Janson (who didn't render here) and his push button into the heavily inked noir of Sin City (gone completely psychedelic past the final installment of Hell and Back), Miller moved into a much more thin line work with harsh geometric interpretations of the trunk. Here, Miller's panels are about entirely devoid of backgrounds as each character floats through the void. The Gotham of Dark Knight Returns is famous for being a instance for a more than grounded, gritty realism in superhero stories. Miller, Janson, and Varley'south world in that original story was made upward of cold hard physical and dilapidated modernity.
What does the Gotham of Strikes Once again look similar? I couldn't tell you. Information technology doesn't exist. It'southward 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's the key to understanding this comic. This is not a truthful sequel to Returns. There's piddling hither to connect the ii exterior of some returning characters. This is a unlike Frank Miller and a dissimilar nighttime future.
Miller's art works best in splash pages hither, creating ane large image for the biggest bear upon and sometimes breaking information technology up with a handful of small panels that give greater context. But information technology's at it's worst when trying to create a truthful sequential approach to action or emotion. All the detail is lost. The context is missing. The movements and desires of characters are about incommunicable to parse at times as at that place's no sense of pacing or flow from panel to panel.
The coloring by Lynn Varley is a hypercolored garish explosion. Unlike Varley'due south coloring of Returns, which used gouache to provide a natural, textured feeling to a dilapidated future, Varley adopts an early Photoshop coloring hither. The result is something harshly unnatural, filled with pinwheels of rainbow colors and at times heavily pixelated. When combined with Miller almost completely removing backgrounds, you become unmoored from whatever sense of setting or context. These are all characters adrift in an uncanny abyss.
In the midst of all this pop fine art excess, Miller tries to reassert the ability of the superhero. Just much is lost in both the messiness of an unfocused story and the years that recontextualized it in Miller's career.
The Dark Knight Falls
When reflecting on his drive backside returning to superheroes to write Strikes Again, Miller said, "15 years away from it has given me a much dissimilar perspective. I'k much more able to approach it similar I'm 7 years sometime than I used to be able to."
And in that location's something both fun and thickheaded about that arroyo. Seen one way, and you can easily view the comic every bit a silly throwback to the Silver Age, where heroes were bright and weird and the stakes had little to do with reality. Seen another, and you lot face up all the heavy existent globe bug that Miller infuses his story with, colliding an immature approach with recent tragedy.
There are loads of ridiculous moments throughout Strikes Again. But comics can be ridiculous and still work. It's all about establishing a globe and tone and then working well inside it. If the entire world is ridiculous, then ridiculous things tin can happen and feel right.
The problem with Strikes Again is that information technology never quite understands how information technology's trying to operate. While Returns had elements of satire in how it portrayed the media and regime, everything in DK2 is ridiculous to the point of unintentional self-parody.
Superman and Wonder Adult female having earth-shaking insta-meaning MEGASEX highlights simply how outlandish Miller is willing to become. Everything here is cranked up to its virtually extreme extravaganza. The greek chorus of talking caput reporters are slammed into whatsoever scene at random, with highly sexualized women giving the news in the nude. In fact, every adult female, even sixteen-twelvemonth-old Carrie Kelley, is sexualized, it's just that Miller's coarse geometric shapes lack whatever sort of man sensuality. Right wing controlling politicians are now all puppets in a sort of conspiracy theorist's ultimate fantasy. Batman is at present the perfect man, e'er x steps ahead and never incorrect in his cess of the earth around him.
In Miller's 21st century eyes, the earth is one big, ugly cesspool of abuse and it must, at all costs, being violently cleaned upwardly. Is this righteous anger? Not really. More than like decades of pent upward rage given life in a medium meant to inspire. Nonetheless Miller would later dismiss the furnishings of political ideology given life through fine art, proverb "I don't know many people who become their politics out of comic books. The notion of doing that scares me most of the time. I'1000 just throwing my stuff against a wall to see what happens. I don't think anything I'm doing could touch things on such a wide basis. I don't call back anybody doing fiction could."
Perchance that's partially true Frank, but art is the gateway into a greater worldview. Maybe no single comic has ever changed a person's entire belief organization, just it'south likely acquired them to consider a different viewpoint. Given plenty reinforcement, and their beliefs tin change. Of class, any sort of beliefs Miller had nigh politics and fine art would be tossed out in the days of "Holy Terror" and a 1 homo drawing war on those he hated.
If DK2 left bad gustatory modality in your rima oris, don't read this book.
In response to "Holy Terror," Grant Morrison would later say, "Cheering on a fictional character as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a decadent indulgence when existent terrorists are killing existent people in the real world. I'd be then much more impressed if Frank Miller gave up all this graphic novel nonsense, joined the Army and, with a howl of undying hate, rushed headlong onto the forepart lines with the young soldiers who are actually risking life and limb 'vs.' Al Qaeda."
In the long, convoluted arc of the story, "Nighttime Knight Strikes Again" is the reassertion of the superhero, bending back the totalitarian leanings of the world through sheer forcefulness of will. What that means for each reader likely depends on how willing they are to look past its fractured plot, strange sexualizations, homophobic tangents, and real world paranoia.
For all its loopy political ideaology and mid-writing identity crisis, Strikes Again 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 tin notwithstanding pull ourselves out of the muck. It just may take lopping off your genetically modified shape shifting former ward's head to exercise it.
Unlike so many elements of Dark Knight Returns, Strikes Again has non entered the iconography of Batman. Whereas things like the tank Batmobile, the power armor, the Mutant gang, Carrie Kelley Robin, the brick shithouse of old Batman, and so many iconic panels that were created past Returns have been reinterpreted by other comics, movies, and television receiver shows, the inventions of Strikes Once more have bounced off popular culture and have never actually been reclaimed. Its firsthand rejection gave information technology no run a risk to permeate the larger culture. And you know what? Thats ok.
It would be another nearly 15 years until the globe of DKR would have a total-fledged sequel in Dark Knight III: The Master Race, co-written by Miller and Brian Azzarello. While some elements of Strikes Again influence part iii, like Superman and his girl, the entry largely ignores it.
Just what could you lot really do to extend DK2's world?
The Dark Knight Strikes Again is a work of pure anarchy. Chaos in content as superheroes embrace their outlaw nature to topple the secret rulers of the earth. Anarchy in form as Miller and Varley throw abroad whatsoever traditional structure in favor of pure thought brought to life on the page. The result is a sloppy, foreign, 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 death of Frank Miller's career.
https://www.denofgeek.com/comics/frank-miller-returns-to-batman-and-the-nighttime-knight-universe/
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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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