The final tragedy of Harvey Dent in Miller and Janson's "The Dark Knight Returns"

[about_faces]

When people talk about some of the greatest Batman comics of all time, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is usually listed as number one.

I used to agree, but the older I get, the more I find TDKR to be unbearably ugly. Conversely, I find that Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One gets more powerful and humane with each passing

Comments

[box_in_the_box]

The fatalism that taints so much of Miller and Moore's work in the '80s makes it harder and harder to take in retrospect. At least Alan has looked back on his own self-proclaimed "bad mood" back then and called it out for what it was, but I think Frank himself wound up learning even more wrong lessons from his own work than even the most misguided of his fans did. There's a difference between telling a fatalistic story and contriving so fully to create a bad fate that it comes close to breaking even one's own narrative rules. As Jhonen Vasquez once said, it's the difference between complaining of diarrhea and force-feeding yourself laxatives to prolong your own agony. Looking back on it, as important and well-executed as a lot of The Dark Knight Returns is, it strikes me as the first step toward Frank Miller becoming a storyteller much like the director of Funny Games.

[prof_pig]

Uuuuggghhh... I hated that movie...

[prof_pig]

This does make an interesting Question though. Frank Miller's take aside, what WILL happen to Harvey Dent in the end? As we see here, it probably wont be happy outcome(even though darnit I want it to be!). With your expansive knowledge of the character, his history, and his motivations, what do YOU think will happen to him in the end of things, About Faces?

[thehefner]

Well, considering that Wolper--his only advocate--is killed off by the Joker (his next prize patient), it's doubtful that Harvey would have gotten officially released from Arkham again. The only person he had left in his life to extend a helping hand was Bruce, and Bruce by this point was far too involved in his war, and the cops' war on him. So you have to figure that he probably had nothing left to do but to try and kill himself. That is, unless his inner heroism was awakened during the post-nuclear blackout, with all the riots going on. I certainly like to think that the chaos provided Harvey with the impetus to step up and be a hero again, especially considering that it's better than the alternatives.

[surrealname]

I still like DKR. I don't like what it did to comics, but I like it. I'm also pretty sure that Miller himself has stated that he doesn't like where other people took things via his ideas

[thehefner]

I feel like the DKR and Reagan stuff hinders the work as a Batman story and very much dates it as an 80's story. It's not like Watchmen and, in a different way, V for Vendetta, which get more leeway by being alternate realities. DKR is set in a future that's now very much our past, and uses timeless characters to tell that story. I'm having a hard time making words. Am I making any sense?

[surrealname]

you are making sense. And i feel it's okay for stories to date themselves in a way that it is not okay for other media to. I like the DKR has that context that you can put it in and examine.

I also just live to hate ronald regan. I think that's really what this comes down to, actually.

[box_in_the_box]

You make perfect sense, but once again, this was the problem with the '80s - the apocalyptic zeitgeist was running so strongly that both Moore and Miller were literally incapable of imagining that the world might still exist after Ronald Reagan.

[abqreviews]

I always interpreted it as that Harvey DID come to terms with himself and banish his evil side, but he was so overwhelmed with self-loathing and disgust that he wanted to punish himself, and secretly kept telling himself that he was still evil, still ugly, until he believed it, and that the tears of joy etc. were just cover-ups for how he really felt. He wanted to show both himself and the public that he could never be cured or make amends, he had to pay, so he returned to crime, totally willingly, and totally without the evil side's influence. He'd banished the monster, but even though whole, his own guilt made him the monster again. Or maybe he's just offended that everyone chalks up his fall solely to his disfigurement, and thought plastic surgery was all it would take to cure him (clearly, Wolper has no idea what he's doing

[thehefner]

That's probably the likeliest interpretation of Harvey's story, assuming that Miller wasn't taking liberties with the character in canon and just telling his own damn version of Two-Face.

I love Sin City as well, but unfortunately, I think Miller loved cutting loose to that extent so much that he never tried reigning it in again on anything else, nor did any editors try to stop him. That's one big reason, I theorize, why he went off the rails.

[yaseen101]

So here's a question: who do you think ended up doing the most damage to the character of Batman

[thehefner]

I think Miller, because far more people have tried to imitate him than they have Morrison. However, that may change. We have yet to see just what kind of long-lasting influence Morrison's current run will have on the character. For now, though, the pile of wannabe Miller gritty dark crime Batman comics is sizable. As Box noted with Miller and DD: Born Again, Miller had some wonderful lessons to teach writers, but those writers just took the worst parts and repeated them for years ("Jerk Batman" being a perfect example). So I don't blame Miller for later writers missing the point any more than I blame Alan Moore for writing Watchmen and inadvertently paving the way for stuff like Garth Ennis' The Boys and Mark Millar's whole career.

So yeah, if you get the chance, do check out TDKR sometime and let me know what you think. It gets uglier, but it's also very powerful quite often. Again, give me Year One all the way.

[yaseen101]

I feel like a lot of the writers have followed Morrison's Bat-God interpretation aswell. Which is sad because I feel that both of the jerk and god aspects really undercuts the overall human-ness of the character.

I'm pretty sure that much of Morrison's Batman RIP and Batmen of All Nations will get retconned away in the near future but I think the BatGod aspect will be with us for a long time.

[about_faces]

Henchgirl brought up something along those lines, as she thought Morrison was by far the more damaging. At least with Miller's TDKR, it was out of continuity, leaving current writers to ignore those elements as they saw fit. But current Batbooks must revolve around and incorporate all that Morrison's doing, and what he's doing is world-building and ideas while character development, dialogue, interaction, introspection, and all the stuff I love most about superhero comics just atrophies.

I imagine much of that they will be ignored or retconned, in the same way that Morrison's X-Men stuff was. I dunno, I'd rather see someone take those empty ideas and USE them in ways that would put Morrison to shame.

[tungstencompton]

If you think blowing up the (Gotham) twin towers is awkward, it's even tougher to stomach the scene at the end where a 747 careens straight into the city after the EMP blast.

(Oh, and in case I didn't mention it: I'm althechi over at dreamwidth.)

[thehefner]

Combine that with the fact that Miller inadvertently created explicit 9/11 imagery in The Dark Knight Strikes Again mere months before 9/11 actually happened, and the fact that he became a rabid flag-waving patriot after 9/11... I feel like I should be reaching for my tinfoil hat or something.