5 Reasons That Year One Is Frank Miller’s Best Batman Story (& 5 Why The Dark Knight Returns Is)

5 Reasons That Year One Is Frank Miller’s Best Batman Story (& 5 Why The Dark Knight Returns Is)

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Year One are among Batman’s greatest stories, but which of the two is the author’s best?

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Frank Miller’s two back-to-back Batman books, The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Year One in 1987, are often credited with creating the modern interpretation of Batman, turning a character previously most-associated with the Adam West television series into the Dark Knight.

While Miller’s modern work has proved more divisive than his 20th-century works, his earliest Batman books are still held in high acclaim and have influenced almost every other interpretation of the Caped Crusader. Let’s compare which of these two books are the best.

10 Year One: Jim Gordon

Despite what the title indicates, Year One is more a story about Jim Gordon (not yet police commissioner) than Batman himself; both the story’s opening and closing panels are focused on him. The bulk of Year One’s page-time is given to Gordon, with focus on his home-life, his conflict with his hopelessly corrupt colleagues in the GCPD, and his initial skepticism to an eventual partnership with Batman.

Almost always a supporting character throughout his history, giving Gordon the spotlight was a refreshing turn.

9 The Dark Knight Returns: Batman

Unlike many of its imitators, The Dark Knight Returns earns its darker tone by probing deeper into the psychology of Batman himself. The book first allegorizes Bruce’s crime-fighting as an addiction; he’s picked up drinking in his retirement but gets over it immediately once he puts the cowl back on.

From there, the book examines Batman’s world-view, differentiating it from Superman’s while at the same time critiquing the authoritarianism of that world-view. If a new reader wants to understand what makes Bruce Wayne tick, The Dark Knight Returns is the book for them.

8 Year One: David Mazzucchelli’s Art

David Mazzucchelli is one of the most reliable artists in the business. Fresh off his 1986 collaboration with Miller on Daredevil: Born Again, Mazzucchelli drew all four issues of Year One. A comic can live or die with its art, so thankfully, Year One’s aesthetic is a perfect fit for the tone.

Year One is about a Gotham City before the arrival of the “freaks” that populate Batman’s rogues gallery, and neither the city nor Batman himself had ever looked more photo-realistic. The second chapter’s scene where Batman crashes a dinner party of Gotham’s elite makes beautiful use of shadow, while the third chapter, when Batman is hunted through a tenement by a SWAT squad, has excellent character blocking and use of the setting.

7 The Dark Knight Returns: Splash Pages

Miller both wrote and penciled The Dark Knight Returns, and while his art is overall nowhere near as cleanly drawn as Mazzucchelli’s, the mini-series does demonstrate his strength at drawing immediately iconic still images.

The collected edition’s famous cover – Batman posed and shrouded in shadow as lightning strikes – uses the same core compositional effects as Miller’s later work on Sin City to striking effect, while the interior work doesn’t disappoint either. Some of the most (deservedly) famous splash pages include Chapter 3’s image of Batman and Robin posed in mid-air, or in Chapter 4 where the armored Batman decks Superman.

6 Year One: Grounded Villains

Due to being set during Bruce’s early days as Batman, none of his traditional rogues gallery of colorful super-villains, aside from Catwoman, appear in the book. Instead, Batman fights villains emblematic of Gotham’s systematic corruption; mobsters, cops, and corrupt politicians.

The most significant such characters are Gotham’s resident Mob Boss Carmine Falcone and several members of the police force. These are Police Commissioner/Falcone’s frequent dinner party guest Gillian Loeb, Gordon’s partner Arnold Flass – introduced beating a black teenager with flimsy-at-best justification – and Branden, leader of the GCPD’s resident gang of psychopaths (aka the SWAT team).

5 The Dark Knight Returns: The Joker

While the majority of Batman’s rogues gallery have long since retired, Batman’s final chapter wouldn’t be dramatically fulfilling without resolution to his greatest feud, with The Joker. Having spent a decade catatonic since Batman’s retirement, the Joker re-emerges during TDKR’s third chapter upon hearing of Batman’s return.

Miller adds homoerotic subtext to the Joker’s fixation on Batman, and this manages to be insightful. It makes a statement about Batman himself, for he is so consumed by his mission, the closest thing he had to a friend in life was his most hated adversary.

4 Year One: Tighter Story

Each chapter of The Dark Knight Returns is double-length from a standard comic issue, and as such, each chapter functions as a story in-and-of-itself, with a separate primary antagonist for each issue to boot.

In contrast, Year One is a much simpler story with a less grand scale. However, the relatively un-heightened nature of the book results in a tightly-written, brilliant-in-its-simplicity story.

3 The Dark Knight Returns: Politics

Year One isn’t without social commentary (the depiction of Gotham’s police as thugs complicit in the city’s corruption and who keep Gotham’s downtrodden that way has aged quite well) but The Dark Knight Returns goes much more explicitly.

The US president, though never named, was drawn as the then in-office Ronald Reagan. Miller found time to critique Reagan’s imperialist foreign policy by showing a US invasion of fictional South American island Corto Maltese, with Superman leading the charge.

2 Year One: A Beginning

Every legend has a beginning, and though Year One wasn’t the first story to tell how Batman came to be, it refined his origin so well that it became the standard-bearer for the Caped Crusader’s beginnings from there on out. Films that touch on Batman’s origin, both live-action like Batman Begins and animated like Mask Of The Phantasm, all include homages to Year One.

The story’s influence is so strong that Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Zero Year, a rewriting of Batman’s origin for the New 52 continuity, purposefully broke away from Year One’s grounded aesthetic towards the fantastical. Though Zero Year is an excellent comic in its own right, it felt as if the story was trying to justify its own existence by being so different.

1 The Dark Knight Returns: An Ending

True legends need not just beginnings but endings as well, and as Alan Moore wrote in a glowing essay on The Dark Knight Returns, that’s where the book’s true strength lies. Moore writes, better than anyone else could, that “…with Dark Knight, time has come to the Batman and the capstone that makes legends what they are has finally been fitted. In his engrossing story of a great man’s final and greatest battle, Miller has managed to create something radiant.”

The Dark Knight Returns provided closure in a way that felt definitive for Batman, even if his legacy as a comic character did not end in 1986.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/dc-batman-frank-miller-year-one-dark-knight-returns-best/

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