Now don't get us wrong, Frank Miller's magnum opus The Dark Knight Returns is undoubtedly a confirmed part of the comic book canon, a staggering achievement historically and in practice for the field of sequential art, and superheroes specifically. But it's not a Batman comic. The wizened, bitter and slightly kinky elder masked vigilante who gets dragged out of retirement in a near-future city that's been ravaged by police corruption, crime and bored teens alike is not the Caped Crusader we grew up with - but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It does rather preclude Miller from being listed amongst the best creators ever to work on Batman, however. Like we just said, Batman is an icon. He's a hero driven by childhood trauma and an intense sense of right and wrong, trying to fix a fundamentally broken world. He's stubborn, he's altruistic, he's sympathetic, he's iconic. He's not a sad middle-aged man who fights crime because he gets a sick thrill out of breaking the spine of a SWAT team member, who only returns to crime fighting because he's bored with racing Formula 1 cars and he needs something else to get the blood pumping. The Dark Knight Returns is a great deconstruction of various superhero archetypes, and an interesting exploration of a lot of the hidden assumptions, prejudices and fetishes that a grist for the mill of the genre, and yet tend to be ignored. You could have told the story, really, with any character - the rogues gallery could be swapped out for almost any other, or the whole cast replaced with original characters. It's a stunning comic book, but it is in no way a true Batman story. All-Star Batman And Robin, meanwhile...