The Dark Knight Strikes Back

My favorite line:
"Frank Miller, you fool. You DAMN fool. Fool."

Or... something like that. It was pretty awful. Mostly it took everything irritating about the Dark Knight Returns and amplified it tenfold. Miller tries to present it as something serious and insightful, but ultimately it winds up being illogical, overblown, and incredibly pretentious. On top of that, the series completely destroys the excellent closure given to TDKR, and seemingly abandons pursuit of the question over whether Batman is truly a good person, or just insane. Instead, he becomes a nigh unstoppable genius who instigates revolution and takes back the world from all of the people Frank Mill- uh... Batman... despises. Fortunately there were lots of cameos within the comic by notable characters such as Flash, The Green Lantern, the Atom, Plastic Man, and (SPOILER ALERT) !@#$ Grayson]. Unfortunately, Flash is flat, the Green Lantern is a deus ex machina, the Atom is flat, Plastic Man is crazy and flat, and (SPOILER ALERT) !@#$ Grayson is an indestructible super-being bent on killing Batman's new sidekick and regaining his love, all of which you find out in the last few pages of the book and... you might have guessed, doesn't tie into the story in any other way. At all. ] But hey, at least the art is great, right!?

Oh.

Oh my, no it is not. It is actually shockingly bad in places, to the point I half expected one of the thousand media talking heads (you know, the media! Everyone hates the media right? It's killing society! The media is corrupt! Are you getting any of this? I could make them say silly things to show how stupid they are! They are stupid! I hate the media! Oh right, back to the review, I almost expected one of the characters...) to be a smiley-face sticker because they just didn't feel like drawing any more. Honestly, it looks rushed and sloppy, has no real sense of visual style, and even worse, manages to distract from the story. Or... maybe that's a good thing? I can't really say which was worse. I can't help but think a major comic like this could have been competently illustrated, but it seems that either the artist/Frank Miller decided on a style that just failed (more aptly, a nonstyle), or they just didn't feel like putting the effort into the art that the story required. Possibly a mixture of the two?

After reading The Dark Knight Returns, I felt a certain respect for Frank Miller as a writer. I didn't completely agree with him, but I respected him. This took that down a notch. The fact that he came back almost two decades after TDKR to make a sequel and did so this badly, really makes me question what he is doing. I'll likely still read his other works, if only to figure out whether this was a one-off failure, or if he's just losing it, but yeah. Not really impressed by this. Could have been better, for sure. If you want a well done Batman book, read The Dark Knight Returns. This isn't anything special.