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...
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/
