The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade A Review

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Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello combine to create the The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade, the prequel to Miller’s acclaimed series The Dark Knight Returns. In this gritty and dark tale, Batman exists as an aging hero looking to get out of the game. Like in The Dark Knight Returns, he recognizes that age is getting to him and that Father Time wins every time. Starting with the incarceration of The Joker and ending with an ambiguous shot of the villain’s haunting face, the authors portray a world beyond hope. Millionaires are lured into giving up their fortunes for Poison Ivy’s love and Batman’s heir apparent Jason seems to operate under an alternate moral code than his trainer.

In the end, this is a story about morals. If the Joker can convince fellow criminal convicts to rip their eyes out and consume their fingers, do we care? Do we sense the moral fracture afoot or do we move on and ignore the cruel truth of crime? In terms of Batman, can Bruce Wayne give up his crawling through the night much like his lady love Selina Kyle has done? If so, will Jason work out, or will his lack of a code and subsequent inability to embrace the fine line between becoming a hero that everyone loves or a villain that everyone hates do him in? Drawn with gaps, left with holes of ambiguity, one feels the pain, cringes, and the authors leave you wanting, waiting for that moment when Bruce says enough, looking for the fate of Jason and Joker alike.

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns A review

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Frank Miller’s iconic graphic novel, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns confronts an aged Bruce Wayne living a life of excess and long retired from living a double life as Batman. Yet Gotham has once again descended into darkness and despair. Such a world seeps through each and every page of this comic, revealing a gritty, dark, and cringe worthy universe. Miller paints the picture of the millionaire in retirement, but not the reclusive hidden pair of eyes found in Christopher Nolan’s movie trilogy, but that of a socially active man in a world that is suddenly starting to crumble around him.

Starting with Bruce seeking thrills through racing cars. Miller displays a Gotham City free of the super-villains (the Joker has been sitting silently for years in Arkham), but besieged by the rise of a mutant gang bent on causing mischief just because. It is ultimately this gang and the impending retirement of Commissioner Gordon due to age that lure Batman out of his ten-year retirement. Suddenly the city is no longer free, life is now full of risk, and Wayne cannot sit back on his haunches, especially when a rehabilitated Harvey Dent, compete with a surgically repaired face, strikes out and returns to the life of crime. Despite every dollar he could spare, Wayne could not turn Dent back, could not rehabilitate the man. He feels like a failure, and more now than ever, this failure shoves Wayne back into the fire.

Having paid for Dent’s rehab, Bruce cannot allow the man to run amuck and reek carnage. Thus he dawns the mask, notes his age, his slowed reflexes, the increased pain. Everything used to be so easy, but now, aged yet strong, lumbering yet graceful, Batman becomes the controversy of the city and soon the new police commissioner. In a plot arc that forces Batman to confront the mutant crime leader multiple times, to admit the failure of his Dent project, and to duel Joker, Wayne ultimately must confront himself. No longer can he lead a double life, his retirement proved this fact, but no longer can he Bruce Wayne. Batman has and is his calling, a vocation of danger, a temporal position for which he must find a successor.

But what makes this graphic novel great comes in the political satire as well. Written in the mid 1980’s, Miller explores the cold war and the effects of nuclear war. America is the great hope of the world, but only as long as Superman is in the fold, a position the icon struggles to hold in a world that doesn’t seem to want the superheroes it needs.