Dark Knight Strikes Again Plas Dark Knight Strikes Again Plas
Gotham is saved, the time to come finds hope, and the Dark Knight has returned. Just when the world is at its worst, it's time for the Dark Knight to strike once more.
In 2001, Frank Miller returned to DC Comics for a belated sequel to his highly influential Batman dystopia Dark Knight Returns
Comic book sequels are kind of historically disastrous. For every Secret Wars 2015 or Dark Victory
Consider everything that happened in the fourth dimension between The Night Knight Returns and The Dark 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 three sequels that flamed out. The Soviet Wedlock, 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 post-obit. Frank Miller gave Batman a new origin in Year I just to leave DC Comics for Hollywood and so Dark Horse for Sin City, Martha Washington, 300, and more. Nighttime Knight Returns and Watchmen had pushed mainstream superhero comics into the era of grim and gritty deconstruction, leading to the early on 90s speculator smash and subsequent catastrophic collapse. And both Curiosity and DC had narrowly avoided shuttering.
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Comic books and the globe they occupied were not the aforementioned, just The Night Knight Returns seemed to loom larger than it ever 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 most highly anticipated comic books of all time. Only anticipation and reality are two very different things.
Reception to The Night Knight Strikes Again was negative, to say the to the lowest degree, with the comic apace becoming infamous for being ane of the bully disappointments in the history of DC. But information technology was, financially, a hit, selling close to 200,000 copies of issue 1 and problems 2 and 3 staying at over 150,000 sold each, with a $seven.95 price tag for its large prestige format meaning that DK2 has made DC Comics around $5 million when including its collected reprints. When y'all put a name like Frank Miller together with a vision of Batman that's famous worldwide, you go a lot of money, especially in 2001 when Miller was nonetheless a respected and active author.
And this is why Dark Knight Strikes Once 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, speedily turning vast amounts of readers sour on Miller. Decades and several follow-ups later, and DKSA is still shorthand for comic book disaster. But why?
How does Miller endeavor to follow up i of Batman'southward most iconic stories? What is The Night Knight Strikes Over 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 Again, warts and all, in the ongoing Batman saga?
Returning to the Return
The Dark Knight Returns is about the residuum of hope and despair in a future dystopia, only it's also most Batman transcending humanity and becoming legend, moving from an old human who struggles to defeat a cleaved Two-Face up to a hero that can go toe to toe with Superman. So what tin can a sequel do to challenge the transcendent? Information technology must go larger than life in every aspect.
The time to come of The Dark Knight Returns is dystopic in a sort of "humanity's worst impulses go along" sort of way. Simply the futurity of Dark Knight Strikes Once again is a full-on police country, with the regime controlling every chemical element of the population. The president of the Usa is a hologram controlled by Lex Luthor, wars and invasions ravage the planet, superheroes proceed to be outlawed and snuffed out. And it'south this escalation of horrors that brings Batman out of hiding.
According to Miller, "When I did the showtime 1, I was very much rebelling against all the established stuff, like the old TV show. Just how lame all the stuff had go. This fourth dimension, I'grand finding that I'm playing around with DC's whole pantheon of characters and trying to show them off in ways that feature the joys behind them."
If Miller's original was a stiff centre finger to the forces that control the world, DK2 is all-out state of war confronting them every bit Batman gathers an anile Justice League to destroy Luthor and his forces. Simply what starts as a war for freedom violently devolves into nonsense equally Miller slams more and more plot developments down on the reader. Boom! Braniac attack. Blindside! Superman-Wonder Woman love child. Kersplat! New shapeshifting joker. Blammo! Superheroine rock band protest.
And at the center of this hopelessly shattered narrative lies a real world tragedy.
A few years before writing Strikes Again, Miller and then-wife Lynn Varley had moved dorsum to Hell'southward Kitchen in New York, and in the midst of writing his return to Batman, the September 11th terrorist attacks happened – the fume and death visible from Miller's home. While issues i and 2 came out in December 2001 and January 2002, all of outcome ane and some of consequence two had been written before September 11th.
Whatever Miller had originally planned was waylaid by his horror at the devastation. Instead, issue two diverges into an extended destruction of Metropolis equally Superman is rendered powerless to cease Braniac.
There's a striking double-page spread that directly 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, just it's all fabricated perfectly articulate as Superman and his daughter fly off, the smoldering urban center split up in half behind them. It'south ane of the few images in the entire series that Miller bothers to give a detailed background and connects to the real earth devastation.
Much similar Miller would cite being mugged in New York as the inspiration for his paranoid, ruthless approach to Daredevil and Batman in the '80s, 9/11 would break Miller in the 21st century. The author'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 simply disavowed past DC in 2006. So "Strikes Again" sees Miller in the midst of a personal political crisis, one that's pushed through a psychedelic lens of conspiracy, superheroism, and justice, all embodied in a gleefully violent Batman.
In Miller'south hands, Batman is a monomaniacal furious ball of moral rage, pushed to the brink from a globe the author sees as immoral in every style. And in a repeat of Returns, Bruce over again transcends his mortality, essentially asserting himself as beyond age by the stop. I don't know how or why, he just does.
Miller seeths beneath the surface of the comic, with Superman's at-home reason seen as the encapsulation of everything wrong with the mod hero. Nearly the end, Superman finally snaps, destroying multiple fighter jets and probably killing their pilots. But this isn't framed as the fall of The Human being of Steel, it's his ascension. Now, Batman condones killing, aiding Hawkman and Hawkgirl's son in murdering Lex Luthor. And as Superman becomes a furious god, a new religion forms around him, exalting a savior you tin can see and touch over one yous can't.
"Strikes Again" is a mess. I can't deny that. But I find information technology to be a fascinating mess. And a much meliorate experience when you lot immerse yourself in its madness instead of flipping through its pages. These panels hurt the eyes without adjustment. And while it'due south not as bad equally staring at the lord's day, information technology does help to let the pupils dialate accordingly.
DK2 is a pop art speedrace, hit the gas immediately and red-lining before the offset effect is over. Every installment is a mega-sized chunk of pages, but even with so much real manor, information technology seems similar there's never enough time for any of Miller'due south ideas. Major characters of Returns, like Gordon and Yindel, are given no more than a single console as the increasingly manic story vibrates with a billion screaming thoughts. By issue iii, the narrative is leaping tall buildings in a single bound, flashing back to forgotten moments and refusing to plant time or place.
Rage-filled rebels fire guns at unseen hordes as increasingly cartoonish talking heads gawk and groan like some sort of vocalism populi bobblehead from hell. Politicians, journalists, villains, soldiers, common people, artists – they're all caricatures here, designed to echo a strawman argument for Miller to ruthlessly mock and tear autonomously. And when the President is shown to be a hologram, the people just shrug and accept it. If in that location was ever a time to apply the term "sheeple," it's when describing Miller'south arroyo to the common man. And Batman is here to beat some awareness into them.
Actually, despite Batman being our titular character, he'southward probably the least important. Carrie Kelley is given much more to practise, acting out her mentor's plans while the various returning members of the Justice League like The Atom, Plastic Man, The Elongated Human being, Green Pointer, 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 Woman, becoming a parent to his daughter, and moving out of the government stooge role that Miller is often criticized for in Returns, are the given way more than page real estate than Batman, who acts as boob primary here. Batman is nearly entirely absent from the first outcome. His voiceover permeates information technology, showing usa his plans, but he doesn't appear until the very stop, once over again mercilessly beating Superman to a pulp. Batman is never incorrect in the pages of Strikes Again, so how can he have any sort of arc?
Anybody outside of Batman, and maybe Carrie, is a moron, piddling more than a chess slice moved almost by The Dark Knight. And no one suffers more in relation to Miller's ubermench antihero than a late villainous addition.
Miller's human relationship to Robin is … strange to say the to the lowest degree, and even downright hateful at its cadre. At the fourth dimension of Returns publishing, Jason Todd was all the same alive in the principal Batbooks and Batman's innuendo to Todd being dead predates that character's phone call-in mandated murder. Years afterwards DK2, Miller would team up with Jim Lee for All-Star Batman and Robin for the origin of Dick Grayson, with Miller making him a vehement little psycho whose grooming by Batman largely consists of exact abuse. I don't know if Miller intended for it to be more than that, All-Star never finished and no you can't make me do a video on it. Carrie Kelley's Robin helps Bruce motility by the mental and concrete roadblocks on his path dorsum to Batman, but she'due south become Catgirl by the time Strikes Again has started.
Returns never makes anything explicit, but it seems as if years of disillusionment and trauma have dissolved any 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 lite.
Throughout these pages, a new Joker begins murdering heroes, revealed at the end to exist Dick Grayson, seeking revenge against Batman for his abuse and firing years earlier. It's completely unnecessary and is quickly solved by a decapitation and some lava. But why should we care? Miller has washed nothing to give u.s.a. an emotional connection to annihilation in DK2 beyond a twist for twist's sake.
Who are these people? What are their relationships? Every grapheme's friendship, love, or hatred toward one some other is only established through u.s.a. knowing traditional status quo established by other comics.
Aslope its critique of political powers, Strikes Again also interrogrates our burgeoning relationship with applied science. The human-computer interface is taken to an extreme through a abiding barrage of data. A hologram president is the ultimate connection of political manipulation and technological corruption. Having a character like Braniac, covered in nodes and constantly changing shape, be the power behind Luthor'due south control takes the critique to another level. Layers and layers of engineering science manipulating the world at big. All the while, Varley uses burgeoning technology 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 late-stage Miller. Later his development in conjunction with inker Klaus Janson (who didn't return hither) and his push into the heavily inked noir of Sin City (gone completely psychedelic by the final installment of Hell and Dorsum), Miller moved into a much more thin line work with harsh geometric interpretations of the trunk. Here, Miller'south panels are almost entirely devoid of backgrounds as each grapheme 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 world in that original story was fabricated up of cold difficult concrete and dilapidated modernity.
What does the Gotham of Strikes Again look similar? I couldn't tell you. It doesn't exist. It's all just harsh colors and screaming heads. A howl of high tech horror that bears no semblance to the world we saw previously. And maybe that'south the fundamental to understanding this comic. This is non a true sequel to Returns. At that place'south petty here to connect the 2 outside of some returning characters. This is a different Frank Miller and a different nighttime future.
Miller's fine art works best in splash pages here, creating one large epitome for the biggest impact and sometimes breaking it upward with a scattering of pocket-size panels that give greater context. But it'south at it'southward worst when trying to create a truthful sequential arroyo to action or emotion. All the detail is lost. The context is missing. The movements and desires of characters are most impossible to parse at times equally there'southward no sense of pacing or menstruation from panel to console.
The coloring by Lynn Varley is a hypercolored garish explosion. Different Varley'southward coloring of Returns, which used gouache to provide a natural, textured feeling to a battered futurity, 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 nearly completely removing backgrounds, you become unmoored from any sense of setting or context. These are all characters afloat in an uncanny abyss.
In the midst of all this pop art excess, Miller tries to reassert the power of the superhero. Simply 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 behind returning to superheroes to write Strikes Again, Miller said, "Fifteen years away from it has given me a much unlike perspective. I'm much more than able to approach information technology like I'thou 7 years old than I used to be able to."
And in that location's something both fun and thickheaded about that approach. Seen i way, and you tin easily view the comic as a giddy throwback to the Silver Age, where heroes were bright and weird and the stakes had fiddling to do with reality. Seen some other, and yous face all the heavy real globe issues that Miller infuses his story with, colliding an immature approach with contempo tragedy.
There are loads of ridiculous moments throughout Strikes Again. But comics can be ridiculous and still work. It'due south all about establishing a world and tone and then working well inside it. If the entire world is ridiculous, so ridiculous things can happen and experience correct.
The problem with Strikes Once more is that it never quite understands how it'due south trying to operate. While Returns had elements of satire in how it portrayed the media and government, everything in DK2 is ridiculous to the point of unintentional cocky-parody.
Superman and Wonder Woman having all-important insta-pregnant MEGASEX highlights just how outlandish Miller is willing to get. Everything here is cranked up to its virtually extreme caricature. The greek chorus of talking caput 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's just that Miller's coarse geometric shapes lack whatsoever sort of human sensuality. Right fly controlling politicians are now all puppets in a sort of conspiracy theorist's ultimate fantasy. Batman is now the perfect man, always 10 steps ahead and never wrong in his assessment of the globe effectually him.
In Miller'southward 21st century optics, the globe is 1 large, ugly cesspool of corruption and it must, at all costs, being violently cleaned upwards. Is this righteous anger? Not actually. More like decades of pent up rage given life in a medium meant to inspire. Yet Miller would subsequently dismiss the effects of political ideology given life through art, saying "I don't know many people who get their politics out of comic books. The notion of doing that scares me nearly of the fourth dimension. I'm but throwing my stuff confronting a wall to encounter what happens. I don't call back annihilation I'grand doing could bear on things on such a broad basis. I don't think anybody doing fiction could."
Perchance that's partially truthful Frank, only art is the gateway into a greater worldview. Maybe no single comic has e'er changed a person's entire belief system, but information technology'south probable caused them to consider a different viewpoint. Given enough reinforcement, and their beliefs can change. Of form, whatsoever sort of beliefs Miller had well-nigh politics and fine art would be tossed out in the days of "Holy Terror" and a one man cartoon state of war on those he hated.
If DK2 left bad taste in your rima oris, don't read this book.
In response to "Holy Terror," Grant Morrison would after say, "Cheering on a fictional grapheme as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a corrupt indulgence when real terrorists are killing real people in the existent world. I'd be then much more than impressed if Frank Miller gave up all this graphic novel nonsense, joined the Regular army and, with a howl of undying hate, rushed headlong onto the front lines with the immature soldiers who are really risking life and limb 'vs.' Al Qaeda."
In the long, convoluted arc of the story, "Dark Knight Strikes Once more" is the reassertion of the superhero, bending back the totalitarian leanings of the world through sheer force of volition. What that means for each reader likely depends on how willing they are to wait past its fractured plot, strange sexualizations, homophobic tangents, and real globe paranoia.
For all its loopy political ideaology and mid-writing identity crisis, Strikes Again is actually a hopeful book. Ane that presents a global crisis of staggering proportions that collides decades of human being's worst impulses with the failings of our political system and believes that we can still pull ourselves out of the muck. It just may take lopping off your genetically modified shape shifting former ward's caput to do information technology.
Unlike and then many elements of Night Knight Returns, Strikes Once more has not entered the iconography of Batman. Whereas things like the tank Batmobile, the power armor, the Mutant gang, Carrie Kelley Robin, the brick shithouse of former Batman, and so many iconic panels that were created by Returns have been reinterpreted by other comics, movies, and tv shows, the inventions of Strikes Again have bounced off popular civilization and take never really been reclaimed. Its immediate rejection gave it no chance to permeate the larger culture. And you lot know what? Thats ok.
It would be another most 15 years until the globe of DKR would have a full-fledged sequel in Night Knight Three: The Master Race, co-written by Miller and Brian Azzarello. While some elements of Strikes Again influence part 3, like Superman and his daughter, the entry largely ignores it.
But what could you actually practise to extend DK2's world?
The Dark Knight Strikes Again is a work of pure anarchy. Anarchy in content as superheroes encompass their outlaw nature to topple the surreptitious rulers of the world. Anarchy in form every bit Miller and Varley throw away whatever traditional structure in favor of pure idea brought to life on the folio. The result is a sloppy, strange, insulting, captivating, disruptive, brilliant, and braindead, all at once.
And despite some changes in political idealogy and fine art in the decades since, The Dark Knight Strikes Again was the death of Frank Miller'south career.
https://www.denofgeek.com/comics/frank-miller-returns-to-batman-and-the-nighttime-knight-universe/
http://world wide web.metabunker.dk/?p=2595
https://song.media/geeks/the-dark-knight-strikes-again-not-a-flop
https://www.avclub.com/frank-miller-1798208243
https://www.comicsbeat.com/the-lives-and-expiry-of-jason-todd-an-oral-history-of-the-2d-robin-and-a-expiry-in-the-family/
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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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