Bat/Cat: The Dark Knight Returns

[drsevarius.insanejournal.com]

Comments

[retro_nouveau.insanejournal.com]

More than a pinch of Frank Miller will not make the Batter better.

[ladymirth.insanejournal.com]

This is part of the reason I hate DKR so much.

Selina as a fat, washed-out madame with horrible make up. Augh!

Much as I love Year One... *stabs Miller*

[sherkahn.insanejournal.com]

I actually liked this. A dystopian future that is likely possible, based on how the world turns out. A world without Batman and the standards he brings is a bad world. Now that I am much older and I have seen how my own circle of friends have risen and 'fallen', I can appreciate it more.

And 20+ years later, modern society looks a LOT like the Dark Knight's world than it did back in the 80's.

[sistermagpie.insanejournal.com]

I just will never like this book. For instance, I find I totally disagree with just about everything in the above comment. I don't think society needs Batman's standards to not be this, and the world does not look any more like this future than it did in the 80s to me. It just looks like Frank Miller in any decade.

[benicio127.insanejournal.com]

Actually, I"m thinking of putting up some scans for some kind of Batman Elseworlds week in the near future and Selina is a fat madame in Batman: Nine Lives. *sniff*

But still.. loving the Bat/Cat week(s)!!!

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

And we all know about the the Bat-batter, don't we Robin...

(http://pics.livejournal.com/icon_uk/pic/002eqa3c)

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

I like ASBAR better than this. ASBAR!

0_o

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, but NOT all of your friends have fallen, have they? Some have risen too.

It's the sheer, utter, unremitting bleakness of DKR world which is irksome. Where are the likes of Dick (leaving aside the frankly soul destroyingly jarring DKSA), Wally and Donna? The implication from DKR is that ONLY Batman was a good man who could make a difference. Screw that!

[statham1986.insanejournal.com]

Besides the addition of Carrie Kelly, who was pretty cool as a female Robin and later, Catgirl, I couldn't stand DKR. Not for what it is, and not for what it caused, which is over twenty years of Batasshole! stories striving to emulate this piece of garbage.

I actually preferred The Dark Knight Strikes Again, because whilst it was utterly ridiculous, at least it recognised that and had fun with the traditional notion of heroes versus villains. This was just crap.

[schmevil.insanejournal.com]

I liked parts of DKR. It had a few moments of awesome, but otherwise was ham-handedly dystopic and ideological.

[uadlika.insanejournal.com]

Motto.

At least with ASBAR you can laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it. This is just sad.

[cmdr_zoom.insanejournal.com]

w
wh

[arilou_skiff.insanejournal.com]

Pretty much my opinion as well. Some of it is brilliant (if only in a technical sense) but a lot of it is just eugh.

[schmevil.insanejournal.com]

Yes, that's it exactly. There are moments of technical brilliance, but the whole work is undercut with skeeviness adn misery.

[thandrak.insanejournal.com]

Ah! But you see, she's running a cathouse. A cathouse. Get it? Get it?

...

Well. At least it's not _just_ Miller doing whoreswhoreswhoreswhores.

[kamino_neko.insanejournal.com]

I agree.

Full disclosure, I've never actually finished DKR - because, on top of what you say, it's just badly written. The format ill serves it.

However, what I managed to get through, reading story rundowns, the scans here, even what people say when praising it, has convinced me the writing wasn't the only thing wrong with it.

[sherkahn.insanejournal.com]

Forgive me if I ramble, butI feel passionate about this topic and this book.

In regards to my above comment... the absence of Batman (and the other DC heroes) turned the bright and shiny DC universe in the Dark Knight dystopia future with looser and darker pubic morals, worse than some of Marvel's dark futures.

In this dark DC future there were no ideal heroes around to motivate and inspire people to rise above their own selfish needs. Even with Superman around (although working in a clandestine fashion). The heroes bowed out, and the standards of quality of life and moral code represented better by the Flash, the Green Lantern and Diana went down the toilet.

Further, and to quote TDK Joker, the world and gotham needed "a better class of criminal". Can you imagine the Mutant gang achieving the level of power and fear in the city with the Joker, Killer Croc or the Penguin still running the upper echelons of crime in the city? Where are the mob bosses? Sure they were very very bad men who did very very bad things, but they had standards. I will open this up for debate by saying that TDKR Two-Face doesn't count. Harvey Dent has lost his fight with his dark side, and is self-destructive and nihilistic in his despair. The attempts to clean him up were only cosmetic, and he is rotten to the core, like society.

What we get teens that are street thugs, kids getting their kicks off of theft, rape and murder.
Almost all of them that we see in the book are, except for the new Robin. Basically, teens that grew up without role models on either side. And as hard as I have to admit saying it, those teens are us - the hardened readers. Before the big climax, THE FIGHT, there was a small unspoken moments that I have come to appreciate as I look back at what Batman was, what he is and what he means to us.

It was when the news reporters mentioned that the cities of the United States were in chaos in the nuclear winter, there was ONE city where people could walk safely down the streets. Where the rebelling youth of our future were guided out of the gutter and darkness by one man. The one man who can plunge into the abyss with us and haul us (as a society) back from the brink through sheer spirit and willpower alone into the light. One man who CAN make a difference, with the sheer power of his presence or absence. A man strong enough to take our place in the shadows of our hearts and darkness of our streets and take it all... because he can. Batman.

And to all the posters who have said that we (as Americans) aren't in a world darker now (and closer to the dystopia of the DKNR world), I painfully have two things to counter-argue to you.
1) School shootings
2) the hype over the 'octo-mom'.

[irenem.insanejournal.com]

I remember waiting to floored, expecting at least to be amused. I read it in one sitting and then I read some Nancy Drew to clean my brain.

The combination of ugly art, bad writing, and themes worthy of a 15-year-old boy on crack just didn't do it for me. Batman reminded me too much of Cable, Catwoman was too pathetic, the Joker was... blah. I thought the mutant gangs were pretty hilarious, although I don't think that was what Miller was going for.

I did have one pretty weird dream with DKR!Batman threatening to kill me if I didn't paint a picture of him, but other than that I was unaffected.

[unknownscribler.insanejournal.com]

Someone needs to re-release DKR with shiny pretty art (frex, I don't recall anything in the dialogue referencing Selina'a appearance...)

[benicio127.insanejournal.com]

Oh I got it. ;-P

While I haven't read DKR (It's being sent to me by a friend tho), I kinda get the feeling I'm going to be worried about what Miller does. I just have this sense with him -- and I know I'm not crazy about this one -- that something in his work just makes me think "demonization of gay people." (on top of whoreswhoreswhores)

It's not just me who thinks this, right? Right? Right?

[benicio127.insanejournal.com]

You mean ASSBAR.

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

Oh, rest assured, that is how I pronounce it.

[benicio127.insanejournal.com]

I actually laughed out loud at that.

[thehefner.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

What someone needs to do is remove all of Klaus Janson's inks and have (80's-era) Miller ink it himself.

At this point in time, Miller and Varley were both at the top of their game, but it's Janson's inks that really hideousify this art, IMO.

[thehefner.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

Which is why I do hope we actually do DRK for the book club down the line. This is one of the truly iconic Batman comics, one touted as the single greatest Batman story of all time, with the WIZARD-bred fandom hailing it as on par with (or even superior to) WATCHMEN. Like it always comes down to those two.

I wonder how people outside of the scans_daily mentality consider DKR these days? Does the common fan see it as ugly as we do? Has it aged terribly for anyone else? Would we still have felt this way had we read it when it came out?

Meanwhile, BATMAN: YEAR ONE holds up beautifully, as does WATCHMEN (which also had the same impact of creating the grim and gritty era). Why is that? Those are the questions I'd like to see explored.