Sin City may be his artistic peak, but the Dark Knight Returns is what made Frank Miller a household name. In that his name was spoken even in houses that were lacking in longboxes and Six Billion Dollar Man dolls is testament to what he did with the Batman character, taking a pop cultural icon best known for the campy Adam West TV show and breaking him down into a hard, bitter old man who hates the world and everybody in it, who gets a kick out of enacting violence on the scum on the streets, a Bruce Wayne who had more in common with Travis Bickle than the billionaire playboy people were used to. The Dark Knight Returns showed us the caped crusader as we'd never seen him before. But just because you're doing something that nobody has done before means it's good, or worth paying attention to. You could take a dump in the centre of the Ritz dining hall, and it'd certainly be original, but you'd also spoil a lot of people's meals. As an older, sadder Bruce Wayne returns to clean up the streets of Gotham in a much more brutal fashion than before, even breaking the Batman's number one rule of not using guns (not for the first time, but still). Arguably, DKR isn't a Batman story. It's a fascist fantasy dressed up in Batman drag, as the gothic superhero instead becomes a gruff military general, drilling his new sidekick like a rookie soldier and turning the Batmobile into a friggin' tank. Like some of the other most overrated comics on this list, the Dark Knight Returns is also lacking in any tangible plot. It's just a series of vignettes showing off how messed up this future Batman is, leading up to a fight with Superman that seems more like fan service than anything, the predictably and self-consciously "cool" Frank Miller siding with his hero of that totally square Man of Steel, dude. Not that we can necessarily blame Miller for this, either, but the graphic novel did inspire years of terrible comic books where people imitated its grim and gritty style to try when trying to bite on its crossover, "mature" success. It's a striking comic, and done with some visual panache, but boy is it overrated. And if you want to string us up for that, well, that would be a good death. Good enough.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
