The Dark Knight Returns: Book 1

Here, we arrive to the famous tale of Batman's rebirth. Written by Frank Miller in 1986, The Dark Knight Returns was the turn from the Adam West TV Batman, who many regarded as cheesy and campy , to the modern, dark, brooding figure we know in the current age. The Dark Knight Returns shows strong creative differences from our previous reading material, Watchmen. In Watchmen colors cascade with a warm vibrancy, the colors are strong and bright and pop in each panel, even in the darker areas. Here, though, in The Dark Knight Returns, colors are used sparingly, at best, and even in bright scenes, strong colors are opted out for pale shades. This can be taken, perhaps, as a sign of the times; of the bleak, unending, hopeless nightmare of city that Gotham has become in it's famed guardian's absence. Possibly, it is an indicator of the state of Bruce Wayne's mind. Overtime though, we start to see more colors pour in, blues and yellows, not unlike the silver age batsuit seen in this graphic novel. Undoubtedly, the return of colors, symbolic of hope, is in direct relation to the return of Batman.

Another aspect we can tell is immediately different is the change of panel structure, from Watchmen's standard 9 grid, to a little more crammed 16 grid. Though there is really a lack of consistency in terms of the 16 grid; there are only a handful of pages that actually have a full 16 panels. This graphic novel is definitely a more flexible in terms of style and structure, opposed to Watchmen. As well as sporting many "freestyle" pages The Dark Knight Returns makes use of the background of which the panels are set as a panel of it's own. Typically, the panels are set against a white background, but Miller ventures to have some scenes, expand beyond panels perhaps to provide weight or importance, subtly to whatever is happening within the background. Take for example page 31, where, from the shadows, The Dark Knight takes out a couple of baddies attacking two young girls, in the background, we are focused on a silhouette lurking, tossing batarangs and silently dealing JUSTICE.
Another aspect really expanded upon by Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns, is the visual use of sounds. We got little-to-none of this in Watchmen, but here Miller evokes very powerful feelings of epic scale; the primal strike of thunder is as a Que for the Dark Knight to strike his punishing blow upon the rampant criminal underworld of Gotham. It is really remarkable the ways Miller is able to give the impression of a sound through visuals. The rumble of thunder in the distance is long and low, the crack of lightning is large, the sounds of a man being barraged with batarangs "THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNKK" is heard in the mind's ear so clearly, it's as if we can actually hear it.