“I want you to remember, the one man that beat you…” (Patreon)

While I find that Frank Miller’s work on his Batman stories always unintentionally exude a kind of toxic masculinity out of the character, The Dark Knight Returns has always held a softer place in my cold emotionless heart

The original TDKR book did leaps and bounds for Batman during the late 80s in tandem with the 1989 Burton film and gave Bat’s this sort of precedented seriousness to the character that the fan base was craving.

But man, re-reading that book in 2021 is ROUGH. Like there’s so much macho shit in it that I actually found it hard to read it all in one go. While with hindsight of Frank Miller’s later sequels to this story, this one by comparison is more refined and tame (for lack of better word), and yet still a batshit crazy story.

And somehow it’s still one of my favorite bat-books (how does that work?) ...I honestly think it comes down to those radical ideas for the time that really make it stand out in my mind.

It’s the junk like Two-Face’s psychoanalysis, Joker’s symbiosis with Batman, Superman being a tool for a government (and getting nuked), the fascism comparison of the Mutants and their leader, the media-garbled meta commentary on the Batman character throughout the book, the brains that the character of Bruce is given when planning literally every confrontation in the story… the list goes on and on! I could literally talk about it for hours!

But instead I’ll just show you guys some silly pictures I took with my silly camera because that’s why we’re all here :)

I got around to assembling a street to photograph this new fig and man did I have a blast with it! Lot’s of fun panel recreations and well yeah, good stuff. Also I took the opportunity to update some of my other TDKR figs. I hope that’s alright :P