It has been ten years since Batman was last sighted in Gotham City. Commissioner Gordon is set to retire soon. The city has become darker and more dangerous as time has passed. The people are being terrorized by a youth gang called "The Mutants." Billionaire playboy, now well into middle-age, still indulges in high-risk sports. After a long rehabilitation, Harvey Dent is being released from Arkham Asylum, his disfigured face finally repaired by advanced plastic surgery. The Joker sits in his cell in Arkham staring catatonically into space. The world, it seems has moved beyond Batman. But when Harvey Dent inexplicably breaks his parole and reverts to his Two-Face identity, the city needs a defender. Visiting the spot of his parents murder, Bruce Wayne is beset by a terrifying vision. The need to become Batman is upon him again. His war on crime resumes. In the new Gotham, however, he is seen as a dangerous vigilante, a psychotic who is as bad as the criminals he combats. Batman reclaims the city from The Mutants, then has a final, fatal encounter with The Joker. Things come to a head when international politics begin to fail. There is a war in the banana republic of Corto Maltese. Superman, whose very name is now prohibited in the press, is dispatched to enforce American interests in the conflict. Finally, someone pushes the button and a new kind of bomb is dropped, one that Superman fails to stop, one that brings on a global EMP and begins a nuclear winter. Gotham, like the rest of the country, errupts in panic. But Gotham's defender won't allow his city to spin into chaos. He restores order: his order. This is an embarassment to the powers that be and Superman is dispatched to Gotham to apprehend The Dark Knight, leading to a final, cataclysmic confrontation....
During the mid-eighties, comics grew up for a while. This was the era when Alan Moore was revolutionizing the craft of comics writing, when Art Spiegelman was demonstrating that the medium could be made to say profound things, and when the creators began to demand ownership of personal projects. Image Comics--the first creator owned comics company--was born from this ferment. Some of the changes even began to appear in the mainstream. In many ways, 1986 was a watershed year for the medium. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons produced Watchmen, Art Spiegelman published Maus, and Frank Miller redefined both Batman and the possibilities of the superhero genre. The Dark Knight Returns, Miller's magnum opus, brings to bear the full range of comics storytelling with which Miller had been experimenting over the previous seven years and focuses them tightly into a tough, uncompromising vision. In his hands, Batman becomes a foil for the absurd comedy of modern society. Miller sets his story in the future, but it looks uncomfortably like the present. His depiction of Batman himself is striking, balanced on the fine line of obsessed hero and dangerous psychotic. In the insane world that Batman inhabits, it isn't terribly surprising that he would dress up like a bat so that he can impose some sort of order on his society. Miller hasn't taken very many liberties with the material, really. Other depictions have hinted at what Miller presents--certainly, Bob Kane's early Batman stories are more brutal than one would expect--but none have extrapolated Batman's effects on his society as ruthlessly as The Dark Knight Returns.
On purely formal grounds, Miller is not much of a draftsman. His anatomy is haphazard and his range of expression is limited. Inker Klaus Janson imposes much of his own persona on Miller's drawings, much to the betterment of the project, and colorist Lynn Varley's muted palette creates a striking mood of moral ambiguity rare in comics. As a designer and a comics storyteller, on the other hand, Miller is impeccable--he has restlessly experimented with page designs and layouts to dazzling effect. During the process of creating The Dark Knight Returns, Miller was pushing his comics towards a formal abstraction that he later fully realized in Sin City. The precarious balance on the verge of non-representational abstraction provides some of the series's best moments, particularly when we get a POV image of Gotham City as seen by a crook Batman has suspended upside-down from the top of Gotham's tallest building ("It was hard work carrying three hundred pounds of sociopath to the top of Gotham's tallest building," Batman muses, "The scream alone was worth it.").
The depictions of the familiar cast of characters is very interesting. Without significantly changing any of them, Miller radically recasts them in his own image. Commissioner Gordon is no longer Batman's version of Le Strade, but is a tough, aging cop who has had to bend the law a little in order to police his city. Two-Face is a tragic figure who finally gets a face where both sides match--on the outside he now looks normal, but on the inside, he is forever disfigured. The Joker is a gleeful psychotic who murders the entire audience of the David Letterman show with his deadly Smile gas. The Joker is one of Batman's pet demons. "How many people have I killed," Batman wonders about his longtime nemesis, "by letting you live." When he finally catches up to The Joker in a funhouse shoot-out, he discovers that, even for The Joker, murder just isn't part of who he is. To Batman's grief, The Joker finishes the job himself, his suicide framing Batman for a murder he didn't commit ("Whatever was inside of him shuffles and leaves," Batman's inner monologue tells us). Without materially changing how Superman is depicted, Miller transforms The Man of Steel from a paragon of virtue into a stooge. The friction between the two heroes comes to a head at the end of the story, when the age-old schoolyard question of, "Who would win, Batman or Superman?" is finally answered pretty definitively ("I want you to remember the one man who beat you," Batman tells a beaten Superman).
Miller reserves the lions share of ridicule for politicians,
the media, and an apathetic public. The Dark Knight Returns is populated
by soundbites and ridiculous political actions by the powers that be. This
world is shown to be blissfully ignorant of the reality around it.