And what do social outcasts read? Comic books, that’s exactly right. We’re a hated and mocked breed, but anyone who read them in this era was about to have their reading material finally “legitimatized.” A new breed of writers was revolutionizing the medium, removing the redundant and intelligence-insulting wordiness that plagued comics at the point and replacing it with more concise and more adult language as well letting the art tell the story. And chief among them were two men, each from one side of the Atlantic: Alan Moore and Frank Miller.

**spoilers after the jump**

Probably the second most-lauded comic of all time after Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns is arguably the more important of the two. Watchmen created a universe all its own and thus could make its own rules, but Frank Miller had to work with one of the classic comic book heroes and a world of established heroes, villains, and psyches. Along with Alan Moore’s masterpiece, it delved into the deeper psychology of heroes- particularly their reactions- when they become obsolete. For all the heroism comics are supposed to depict, Moore and Miller realized that anyone who put on a costume, circumvented the law, and beat the piss out of gangbangers and the occasional mastermind was just as crazy and sociopathic, if not more so, than the scum they fought against. However, unlike Moore, Miller retains a small level of the euphoria that heroes bring.

The Dark Knight Returns examines Bruce Wayne years after he hangs up his cape and cowl, and his sudden reemergence when he can no longer tolerate the waste into which Gotham has degenerated. Without crime-fighting to keep him busy, Wayne has devolved into a shiftless, alcohol-abusing recluse who drinks to forget the demons, never fully understanding that the more he drinks, the more demons he looses. Chief of his woes is his self-blame over the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd (this idea came years before he was officially killed due to an infamous reader’s poll) and his estrangement from the first Robin, Dick Grayson. The image of a dead Robin’s costume hanging forever behind Bruce’s shoulder in the Batcave has become on of the most iconic images in Batman’s nearly 70-year history.

This shrine can't be good for morale.

Alfred, always a source of post-battle quips, has turned into a crotchety old man who endlessly derides Bruce for becoming a pathetic, lonely booze-hound. Wayne expresses a hatred for Dick for abandoning him, but his hate is transparent; Bruce clearly misses Dick (oh for a better phrase…), and his fixation on Grayson leaving probably doesn’t do much to dispel the concept of Batman’s homosexuality.

As Wayne falls further and further into his own disrepair, so does Gotham. A new gang, called the Mutants, is rapidly gaining members and soon the streets look like some futuristic version of A Clockwork Orange as hi-tech kids roam the streets looking for trouble. People can’t go out at night for fear of theft, rape, and murder, and Gotham’s never looked worse.

Finally, Bruce can take no more of his own slow death and Gotham’s descent, so he breaks out the old suit and crams his new beer gut into the rubber and starts taking out the trash once more. At this point the comic seems like a love letter to midlife crises; it shows that a middle-aged man can still be a hero. However, in Miller’s hands, it becomes something much more.

Batman’s return spurs Gotham into action alright, but not quite in a forward direction. The gang leader (seemingly an actual mutant with claws for hands and a decidedly animalistic look) immediately challenges Batman to a fight, which Batman, in his insecure middle age, hastily agrees to. The young freak easily defeats Bruce, who must rely on a new Robin (this time a 13 year old girl named Carrie) to save him from death.

Adding insult to injury, the media wastes no time hosting pundit debates over the importance and legality of Batman, perhaps as Miller’s jab against the rise of punditry in the 80s. Their constant demonizing of Bats–not to mention the beating he took at the hands claws of the Mutant Leader–prevents his return from being the catalyst Gotham needs to reform. Eventually Batman defeats the gang leader and finds himself the de facto new leader in the eyes of the impressionable children who make up the Mutants.

Most disturbing of all, Batman’s reemergence brings The Joker out of his catatonic state and turns him back into a killer. When a psychiatrist brings what he believes to be a reformed Joker onto David Letterman in an attempt to bolster his career and to discredit Batman, The Joker kills the entire audience with his trademark laughing gas. The Joker has always been Batman’s greatest foe, and Miller suggests that his existence-and indeed the existence of all of the Dark Knight’s greatest foes- is at least indirectly the result of Batman himself. The Caped Crusader has always been a bit of an ambiguous character, often treading the line between vigilante and outright criminal, and Miller only blurs the line further by pointing out the symbiotic relationship between him and his enemies (this idea would find its way into The Dark Knight years later).

Knowing that the Joker must be taken down, Batman chases him through a county fair before finally trapping his arch nemesis. In a move that has become something of a recurring action in future Batman comics, Batman beats The Joker to the point of near-death, and must overcome his blind rage in order not to become a murderer. But The Joker isn’t going to give up that easily, and he snaps his own neck, implicating Batman in murder and making things even more difficult for our aging hero.

Now, I’ve always found the established comics rule that a hero can’t kill to be a little silly; I mean, he can cause obscene amounts of collateral damage, beat the crap out of baddies, but if he were to finally rid the world of true evil, that would corrupt him? However, Miller takes my smarmy thoughts and dashes them to the ground. The Joker is surely evil, most likely the most evil being in Batman and surely one of the all-time most sadistic characters in comics, DC or otherwise. Batman captures him again and again, only for the Joker to effortlessly escape and commit more atrocities; killing him is at this point a civic duty rather than a moral quandary. However, as the Joker tries to push his foe over his line in the sand, Batman’s refusal to cross that line despite everything his nemesis has put him through is a gesture of true heroism and commitment.

The most unexpected plot twist, however, is the severing of ties between Batman and Superman. The two had been allies pretty much since the start, but Miller evidently grew tired of the most powerful man in the world and the greatest detective in the world effortlessly solving crimes. In Miller’s universe, Superman is one of the few heroes who never retired from crime fighting, and that is only because he has found himself a tool of the US government. Kal-El originally a symbol of America’s superiority, strength, hope, and code of honor, becomes more corrupted the more visible the government’s corruption becomes. Miller turns him from the beacon of hope into a metaphor for America’s shame in the post-Nixon, post-Vietnam years.

Superman is sent to dispatch a nuclear missile fired towards the US by the Soviets. However, the bomb is a new prototype that creates instant nuclear winter, blotting out the sun, Superman’s source of power. Besides almost killing Kent, it also sends out an EMP blast that knocks out the nation’s electricity, sending the major cities into a frenzy.

Batman is quick to act; using his trove of gang converts, he stops rioting and looting and gets needed supplies into the city and into the hands of those who need them. For the first time, we can see Batman’s, positive effect on Gotham in real time. Soon, Gotham, which had degenerated in the 10 years of Bruce’s retirement, becomes the safest, cleanest city in America.

The single greatest panel in comic book history.

Of course, nothing ever stays easy. The government, embarrassed by how well Batman has cleaned up Gotham and how they’ve yet to get a handle on anything other than their own asses, decides to bring Batman in as a criminal in order to sate their own jealousy and resentment. And whom do they send? Supes, of course. But it turns out Batman has thought of a contingency plan for this years ago, and dons a special suit and gives a bitter, one-armed Green Arrow a kryptonite arrow to help him.

What follows is the single most mind-blowing series of awesome I’ve yet read in comics, the first major fight between flagship heroes. Even more satisfyingly, Batman beats the ever-loving piss out of Superman. It’s probably a good idea that I wasn’t Miller’s editor or the editor of DC comics, because I would have insisted that Frank change the name of the issue from “The Dark Knight Falls” to “Hell Fucking Yes!” I admit to never having been a big fan of Superman and outgrew watching Supes cartoons when I was about six. I always found him boring; I mean, how much tension can you mine out of a man who so easily trounces whatever robots Lex Luthor sends after him? His blind idealism surely seemed patriotic in his pre-war conception, but these days smacks of naïveté.

Eventually Batman bests Supes, but suffers a heart attack soon after. The miniseries closes at a faked funeral for Bruce Wayne, now unmasked as the Batman. As an aged Selina Kyle berates Superman for killing Wayne, Clark hears Bruce’s heart begin to beat and leaves satisfied. Deep in the ruins of the Batcave (Bruce had Alfred destroy it and Wayne Manor to keep people from turning into a perverse Graceland), Batman meets with Robin and his young gang and plans to take down not villains, but the corrupt authorities who always went after him out of spite and not the villains.

The Dark Knight Returns is a watershed of comic writing. Released in its entirety before even the first issue of Watchmen (though there’s only a few months separating them), it revitalized made people take Batman seriosuly again. Batman had been thoroughly castrated in the 50s and 60s first by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who infamously condemned all comics for leading to juvenile delinquency (Batman got hit hard for the “implied” homosexual relationship between Batman and Robin), then by the camp 60s TV program that, among other things, depicted a Batman whose arch-villains plotted nothing more insidious than idle threats (and who could forget that most envious of Bat gadgets, the shark repellant spray?). While he clawed his way back from the abyss in the mid-70s, there was still a definite stigma attached to the character, one that got pummeled into the ground with kryptonite fists.

The new, improved Batmobile.

Miller took Batman into the future, yet back to his roots. He recognized that a hero whose only real power is fear should be feared, not just by his enemies but by his allies and even us, the readers. He examined the culpability of a hero’s effect on crime, and how they are just as responsible for the emergence of more organized, sadistic, and brilliant villains as they are for every cleaned up block. The artwork is strange at first, but the more the story plays out the more it expertly fits the twisted state of the characters’ minds. It doesn’t look pretty, but then the characters are far more grotesque than the drawing, and it becomes a deft visual metaphor for Gotham’s devolution.

Yet despite the gritty noir feel, there is a definite joy in Miller’s writing. Consider when Batman rides into the sewers to take on the Mutant Leader: His brand new Batmobile is like nothing we’ve seen before; it’s a fully equipped tank instead of some gimmicky car. The sheer epic quality of him spraying rubber bullets into the gang members and taking on the leader is the perfect blend of classic comic majesty and the modern gritty perspective that Miller himself is creating with this book. His ride into Gotham in the midst of chaos truly makes him the Dark Knight, and there is an unrestrained revelry in Batman’s heroism. While the explosion of darker comics that followed in the wake of this mainly went for grittier takes on heroes for the sake of chasing that zeitgeist, Miller’s is the original and it’s one of the few that recognizes and even pays tribute to the joy that heroes were meant to bring.

Batman kicks ass in the Kentucky Derby

Most of the themes presented here would be presented in even greater detail when Watchmen debuted a few months after this, and it’s weird how both Moore and Miller seemed to have the same mindset around the same time after decades of unstable quality in comics. However, though Watchmen is the deeper book, DKR is the more instantly readable of the two and all the more impressive how Miller works within the basic continuity while inventing a universe all his own (he would bring the character full circle, albeit in reverse, when he put out the seminal Batman: Year One later that year).

DC was already making somewhat of a comeback against Marvel as that company hit the downhill slope of Jim Shooter’s tenure as editor-in-chief, but The Dark Knight Returns really thrust the company into the spotlight and was the first in the coming tidal wave of classic comic books that would force critics to treat the medium as serious literature. Most importantly, however, is that this continues to be a fresh read after 22 years and a slew of imitators. Not a whole lot of art can claim that.

Grade: A+

Watchmen is a 12 issue miniseries from comics god Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons that depicts a realistic world that must contend with real masked men. It’s an expansion of an idea that Moore first toyed with on the seminal (and woefully out-of-print) Miracleman, and it ends up being a nice foil for his first great graphic novel, V For Vendetta. V posed socio-political questions, while Watchmen is more of a personal, psychological profile. It realizes that anyone who would put on a costume and mask to pummel thugs is inherently insane, not heroic. Over the course of its 12 issues, the book evolves from a whodunit about a killer possibly targeting former masked heroes into a commentary on the thin line between vigilantism and crime and how a hero’s quest to save others can ultimately turn him into the world’s biggest threat. It manages to be twisted, deep, thought provoking, suspenseful, thrilling, darkly funny, and tragic, often at the same time.

**potential minor spoilers and more after the jump**

"Hurm."

The novel opens with a police investigation of a murder, which attracts the attention of one of the last active masked men, Rorschach. Clues are littered about from the start that Rorschach isn’t all there, and his journal entries, written in broken English, seem to confirm his mental ill-health (even on the first page). He learns that the man murdered was none other than Edward Blake, the Comedian, another of the precious few “heroes” still active, though Blake was actually hired by the government. As Rorschach investigates the murder, we are introduced to more and more characters and the plot unfolds in a way no one could guess.

In this world, masked men and women- all without powers- came to prominence in the 40s, helping bust gangs and the odd flamboyant criminal. However, the fad soon passed and the heroes stopped having any real work to do. Eventually a second generation came along, armed with better technology, but they soon found themselves redundant in the face of Dr. Manhattan. If you haven’t read this book yet, Dr. Manhattan is the big blue man blowing up Vietnamese in the film trailer.

Doc's feeling bluer than usual

Due to a scientific mishap, Dr. John Osterman was turned into the first true Superman, and his very existence has radically altered the universe. Historical events, technological innovations, and US-Soviet relations are all vastly different in this world, yet Moore uses this world to make highly relevant statements about our reality. The extent of Manhattan’s powers is never fully revealed, but that may or may not be because a limit does not exist.

It’s astonishing how swiftly yet subtly Moore moves from the introductory plot line to the bigger picture, and his fear of a nuclear holocaust pervades the book, giving it a sense of urgency that still resonates in a post-Cold War world. The opening page of each chapter displays the infamous Doomsday Clock, and even the seemingly arbitrary image creates tension thanks to Moore and Gibbon’s slow buildup.

The main outpouring of fear comes from the characters who hang out at the local newsstand. They form a sort of Greek chorus for the novel, though they comment on background tensions rather than developments in the heroes’ stories. Alan Moore is seemingly incapable of writing a throwaway character, and sure enough, every person introduced in the comic brings an interesting case study to the table: the newsstand vendor who personifies the mounting unease, the lesbian cab driver trying to live a normal life in an ultra-conservative America, the psychiatrist who is in it for the fame until he becomes consumed by his case, the aging “super-villain,” and the boy who reads the comic-within-the-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter.

There are plenty of brilliantly written aspects of Watchmen (i.e. the entire thing), but perhaps the single most inspired device in the novel is Tales of the Black Freighter. On my first read, I didn’t understand the point of this comic being read alongside the actual events of Watchmen, and I after a point even started merely skimming the bubbles pertaining to it. However, re-reading it with full knowledge of the outcome, it has transformed from a superfluous distraction into a masterful allegory of the events and mood of the events and characters. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say whom it’s ultimately about, though even then I couldn’t stick to just one name since it pegs so many characters on wildly different notes. Really, the best way I can describe Tales without giving too much away is that it’s the closest a piece of literature can come to having a film score. Also of particular worth are the blocks of prose at the end of chapters, all excerpts from fake interviews or novels. The sudden format of a “real” book threw me at first, but these excerpts hold a vast amount of importance, be it a deeper understanding of a character, an exposition of a theme, or a small seemingly insignificant tidbit that, in retrospect, is actually foreshadowing.

Not to be ignored is Dave Gibbons’ incredible art. David Lloyd did a magnificent job with Moore’s other masterpiece, V For Vendetta, but Gibbons takes Moore’s cynicism and fears to new heights. Gazing at the subtle intricacies of the panels it’s easy to see why Alan Moore thought this could never be adapted well long before he started seeing his work savaged on the big screen. The wistful smiles on the heroes’ faces as they think back on better days. The way the Black Freighter is set against a yellow sky to

Just a small, spoiler-free taste of the beauty within

make it resemble the radioactive trefoil. How it can be so vibrant and yet so dark and gritty at the same time. I routinely cop to knowing next to nothing about artwork, but compare this stuff to the primary colors, simple shapes, and childish tone of Golden Age and Silver Age comics and you’ll see that the penciling alone has matured, and the soft yet somewhat dirty palette raises the bar into the stratosphere. It might not be as gorgeous as a Jim Lee panel or an Alex Ross painting, but it’s a damn sight prettier than all that came before even if it isn’t nearly as bright.

I usually don’t care about spoilers; I am of the opinion that anything existing for longer than three years is fair game and you shouldn’t be reading if you want to be kept in the dark anyway. However, Watchmen is one of those rare items that I just cannot spoil; everyone should go into this without knowledge of how it ends or how the characters develop (though at this point everyone knows the basic premise, the inkblot psycho anti-hero, and the big, blue, nude dude). Ultimately, I could go on for thousands of words dissecting Watchmen, breaking down chapters, characters, and even panels; even in this lengthy review I have not permitted myself to truly delve into the issues brought up, opting only to name-check to let you see for yourself. Who knows, maybe I will post a more in-depth analysis sometime down the road; however, for now, if you haven’t read this yet, it should be first on your list. No one can claim to be a fan of comic books, or even a fan of late 20th century literature without having read this release.

If Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns and Moore’s own runs on Swamp Thing and Miraclemen showed the medium evolving, Watchmen reveals the finished product. It’s a quantum leap forward in the balance of gritty realism and old-school comic fantasy, and it represents the realization of comics’ potential to stand as allegories for real world issues. If you want to see it’s impact on the superhero world, simply read some of the more acclaimed comics made since its release (Batman comics in particular a good place), and watch films like The Incredibles, which takes a lot from this book.

The upcoming film has renewed interest in the novel thanks to its brilliant trailer, which is unquestionably the most exciting movie preview I’ve ever seen. I hear that copies of Watchmen are flying off the shelves of every LCS and even regular bookstore around. Good. I hope everyone on Earth buys a copy; hell, buy two copies in case one breaks down. I for one am hoping to replace my paperback with the beautiful Absolute edition hardcover when it gets a re-release.

Grade: A+, and that’s underselling