Dear Frank Miller,
I'm sorry that I have been so disappoined by The Dark Knight Strikes Back, your garishly coloured sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, which I've always held in much lesser regard than your Batman: Year One in any event.
I've always liked Year One much better, possibly because of artist David Mazzucchelli. The work you and Mazzucchelli did on Year One and Daredevil: Born Again represent about the best stories ever told about those characters; two extraordinarily high-quality tales in a genre that not only is known for mediocrity but seems to actively encourage it. They represent a career high for you, Frank, whether you know it or not. And both are still in print, which I am greatly relieved of, otherwise it might be difficult to prove to today's readers that you once created a great Batman story.
I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Back, but the book has such a striking effect on the people that read it that I've seen quite a few theories attempting to explain it. My favourite is that this is your way of flipping the bird at both DC and the readers by turning in the worst possible art and script you can. While that seems impossible to believe, the available evidence, that is to say the comics themselves, indicate quite strongly that this just might be the case. The Flash in shorts is evidence enough for me.
As reviewer Johanna Draper Carlson said on a recent post to the Warren Ellis Forum, "I almost couldn't sleep last night because I couldn't stop writing rants against this atrocity in my head." I can understand that, and I believe her. For my part, I was so repulsed by the obvious contempt for story and art demonstrated by the first issue that I wanted the thing out of my house as soon as I closed the cover. I was staggered by how bad the book was. It was worse than just about any bad comic book that comes to mind. Worse than Youngblood, worse than anything written by Frank Tieri. Worse, one supposes, because everything you've done for the past 20 years has built in an expectation of at least a baseline quality. A baseline sorely missing in this ugly, garish nightmare rehash. It came as a great relief when a local comics shop offered to take it off my hands for two dollars.
Looking back, the indications of what you were up to were there pretty early. There was the abstract cover you turned in that later got redone with a new background to make the book more sellable. But that garish splash of flaming colour that originally sat behind Batman's defiant fist was your real statement. The only thing that could have made it more accurate would have been if Batman's middle finger had been raised.
Augie De Blieck of Comic Book Resources said "Varley’s colors have more of the look of a strobe light bouncing of a fisheye mirror in DK2." He also said "The colors do not get in the way of the storytelling for me," but that's where we part company. In fact, I believe that the reason the colouring of this book is getting so much attention is because it's being used as a crutch to attempt to hide the fact that, art-wise, there's not a whole lot going on here. Entire pages are turned over to Varley as you draw little silhouettes at the bottom of the page. It's hard to understand the lateness of the second issue when some pages clearly could not have taken more than five minutes to draw and maybe ten to colour, assuming Varley's computer needed two minutes to boot up before she began splashing her virtual neon paint on the page.
Summing up her feelings, again on the Warren Ellis Forum, Johanna Draper Carlson said "I thought it was absolute garbage. Hard to read, ugly, badly colored, poorly paced, stupid ideas for their own sake that don't make sense if you stop to think. Trash. Waste of time and money." Longtime Galaxy readers may know that I have no vested interest at all in quoting Johanna: She is not my biggest fan, although I continue to respect her opinions about comics, especially in this case.
Another worthwhile examination of DK2 came on the Ellis Forum from John D. Fellows, of the Ninth Art web site: "Frank Miller scrawls whatever comes into his mind and Lyn Varley sees just what all those Photoshop Effects can do. It looks like a stoner's nightmare, strange hallucinogenic dayglo colours streaking across the vision whilst big black things squat in the centre. Still no backgrounds, still no design aesthetic." And, I would add, no goddamned story at all.
The script you've written, Frank, picks the bones of a book that many held in high regard, and most still do: The Dark Knight Returns. I always had reservations about that work, and thought you were trying to combine too many disparate elements to really succeed. I couldn't reconcile in my mind the cartoony mutant gang with the darker, more realistic look at Bruce Wayne's inner demons. In DK2, though, there is no conflict. There are no disparate elements. There is only hastily scrawled artwork, badly coloured, with a shambling zombie of a script trying its best to piss and shit all over whatever goodwill remains from DK1.
The most amusing result of the disasterously bad D2K, though, is the fanboys tripping over themselves to explain how the hideousness of this work is some sort of pithy comment on, you know, something. They wanted to like this work so bad that their fevered little imaginations are working overtime to create a scenario by which they won't look like total tools for spending $24.00 on one of the worst, most worthless comic books ever published. Take, for example, the review of the second issue from Randy Lander of The Fourth Rail. Randy manages to use all of the following phrases: "Two weeks late," "All over the map, storywise," "script and art never quite settle down," "Truly odd characterization of DC's legendary characters without much explanation of their motives," "I'm disappointed in the book, especially given how impressed I was with the first issue," "The artwork is likewise hit and miss this issue," "Miller seems to think that bringing on familiar characters simply to kill them off somehow lends weight to the story," "Not terribly interesting," "My disappointment comes from a shift in quality between the two issues," and "I expect better from Frank Miller, especially on a project as hyped and long-awaited as this one," and then sums it all up numerically by rating the second issue "Seven out of ten: Recommended." Whether this bizarre contradiction is a matter of schizophrenia or sycophancy is ultimately up to the reader to decide, but I prefer to think it's one from column A and one from column B.
Or as Lander's partner Don MacPherson eloquently said in his "Eight out of ten: Recommended" review: "The visuals were distractingly simple. Many characters, mostly minor ones, are little more than cariacatures, and while Miller might be trying to point out how one-dimensional they are that way, it robs the characters of their human." Sic, as the scholarly journals like to say.
That's it, Frank, that's exactly what you did. You robbed the characters of their human. And since I got two bucks back for the first issue, you only robbed me of six dollars. If that's the price I have to pay for not further exposing myself to this monumental joke you're playing on the readers, it's money well spent.