Frank Miller Wonder Woman Dark Knight Strikes Again

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Once more, also known every bit Dark Knight two, was a three issue Batman mini-series written and illustrated by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley in 2001–2002, the sequel to 1986'southward Batman: The Night Knight Returns.

Ready three years afterward the events of The Night Knight Returns, the world has managed to go downhill since and then—the President is a simulated, and the police force state of a world is run past Lex Luthor and Brainiac, who has many a hero enslaved.

Of class, Batman won't be having that, so he and his allies—Catgirl, the Green Arrow, and his Batboys—ready out to change the world by judicious application of violence. But kickoff, they need allies—and they need to bargain with Superman, who is nonetheless in the thrall of the government...

Overall, it goes farther off the deep end than The Dark Knight Returns, almost to the point of being a Deconstruction of the Darker and Edgier nature of the first story though, naturally, not anybody thinks that makes it any proficient. The color palette is much more than varied than The Dark Knight Returns' muted colorization, taking it to an almost garish caste, that takes a little getting used to (many reviewers termed it ugly). It was eventually followed starting in 2022 past Dark Knight III: The Primary Race.

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This miniseries contains examples of:

• Adaptational Ugliness: Nobody is specially good-looking in this comic, but Lex Luthor takes the cake: while rather presentable-looking in the main comics continuity, Luthor here is drawn as a morbidly obese hunchback with a pointy, kleptomaniacal nose.
• Ambiguously Gay: Dick Grayson of the Depraved Homosexual variety
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: At least one commentator regarded News in the Nude with incredulity, manifestly beingness unaware of Naked News . At the very to the lowest degree, though, the latter's a paid subscription service.
  • The sex work industry becoming more or the mainstream, especially among the sexy Cosplay of superheroes, seemed ridiculous for the time both in and out of universe.
• Fine art Shift: When searching the ruins of Metropolis, Superman discovers a locket containing Golden Historic period pictures of him & Lois Lane.
  • The art in general is likewise very different from the showtime book. The coloring is the most obvious change (from muted and dirty to garishly bright) but everybody has really exaggerated figures either in terms of proportions or angles. Lex in detail looks like a shaved gorilla.
• Writer Tract: Obviously Miller doesn't like trends the media are taking.
• Best Her to Bed Her: Wonder Woman.
• Beware the Superman: At the end of the series Superman rules the world with his girl, Lara.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Lex Luthor and Brainiac, with New Joker as The Dragon.
• Blood brother–Sister Team: Hawkman and Hawkwoman's children.
• Butt Brand: One event features a woman with the Business firm of El sigil stamped on her ass.
• Butt-Monkey: Superman. It really gets to the bespeak where you remember Miller has something against the character.
• The Cameo:
  • Alfred E. Neuman appears as 1 of the talking heads in event ii.
  • In a blink-and-you'll-miss it moment, Kara Zor-El makes an advent ◊ leading the Kandorian rebels. In that scene Brainiac gloats over holding Superman'south cousin hostage.
• Cat Daughter: Carrie Kelly, the former Robin.
• Character Evolution: Of a sort. In All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, Batman was a gruesome individual. He treated anybody in the story similar clay, insisted that Dick swallow a rat for dinner, threatened Alfred for feeding him a proper meal, slapped Dick for crying over the loss of his parents, and gleefully killed (dirty, some willing to murder kids) cops chasing him and was overall a deranged, loathsome maniac who ironically gained some humanity from Grayson.
  • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns could be interpreted every bit Bruce Wayne being older, wiser, and struggling to agree on to his humanity and/or sanity. By The Nighttime Knight Strikes Again, Bruce Wayne probably reverted back to his personality in All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. In short, what y'all have here is one seriously messed-upwards man who is non equally rational and logical as he thinks he is.
• Coitus Ensues: Superman and Wonder Woman had several pages dedicated to them having sexual activity for no reason other than to make Superman experience better.
• Comic-Book Time
• Crazy-Prepared: Naturally enough, Batman. To the betoken of having glowing green battle gloves.
• Creepy Child: Saturn Girl.
• Decoy Leader: The President was a decoy for Luthor.
• Defiant to the End: Batman, when captured by Luthor.
• Depraved Homosexual: It'southward unsaid that Dick Grayson had the hots for Batman, but was rejected by him, which led to Dick becoming a villain. At the stop of the comic Batman taunts him with all sorts of quasi-homophobic euphemisms relating to his supposed "sissiness". And since Dick is the villain, plain Miller thinks we're supposed to side with Batman here.
• Destructo-Nookie: Superman and Wonder Woman have sex so over-the-top it alters the earth's atmospheric condition patterns.
• Distracted by the Sexy: More or less the point of "News in the Nude".
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Hawkman and Hawkgirl, ingloriously nuked off-console. Captain Marvel had a longer sequence where a giant edifice was dropped on him.
• Expy: A weird inversion, or something. This story'southward The Question is basically Rorschach from Watchmen, and Rorschach himself was a Captain Ersatz of the original Question, and so this makes this version of the Question closer to the original Ditko Question and oh no, nosotros've gone crosseyed.
• Flat "What": "It's about to blow! ◊"
• Gang of Hats: The Batboys.
• Gonk: There are some seriously ugly character designs here, particularly Lex Luthor, an iconic Diabolical Mastermind, Übermensch and Man of Wealth and Taste who for some reason is depicted as a cigar-chomping, hulking neanderthal with huge hands and a hunchback, to the point that it looks as though his hands are physically weighing him down, forcing him to walk with a hunch and thereby making him a literal knuckle-dragger, causing one to wonder if he is actually meant to be physically deformed. The Gonkishness is mostly limited to the elderly males of the cast (which there are a ton of) but even the ostensibly pretty females have weirdly angular faces.
• Hamster-Cycle Power: This is what the Flash has been upward to lately.
• Centre Is an Awesome Power: I of the libation bits of the series is that Miller really woke people up to just how utterly, insanely ''powerful'' Plastic Homo is. A lot of comics released after this seemed to run with Miller's clarification of Plas as a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass of ballsy proportions.
• Hypocrite: Catgirl berates one of the 'Batboys' in effect one about killing some soldiers and even beats him upwardly for information technology. Yet in upshot iii she clams to accept killed the Joker imposter "without an ounce of remorse" and "without a shred of regret" with an arrow through the head. True he couldn't die from that, but she didn't know that at the time.
  • The chirapsia itself at to the lowest degree is justified by the fact that the Batboy himself reverted to his more psychopathic mental attitude and threatened to break her basic beginning. Now the whole killing only non killing on the other hand...
• Intimate Healing: Superman is completely healed of his injuries afterward having sex with Wonder Woman. According to Miller himself, this was done to highlight the fact that women are "nurturers and life givers".
• Invincible Hero: Batman. By the time anyone comes up with anything he's already twelve steps alee of them. Superman heading for the Bat-Cavern? No problem! Just use the gigantic Kryptonite gloves over there! Got captured? No biggie! It was part of Batman's program all forth. Information technology gets so bad that Batman can literally storm into Luthor's base of operations, vanquish him up, cutting his face up, and merely leave with admittedly nil consequences. In the page image, he spells out why—he wanted to inspire terror in Luthor, to let him know that his empire was crumbling. And he wanted to give Hawkboy the honor of killing Luthor.
• Kill It with Fire: Dick Grayson has go a Nigh-Invulnerable Monster Clown super-assassinator that can survive all attacks, but is finally destroyed one time and for all when he falls into the Lava Pit that formed in the devastation of the batcave.
• Kryptonite Band: More than a ring—try Kryptonite napalm, Kryptonite power fists...
• Losing Your Head: Dick Grayson. He reattaches it.
• Monster Clown: For once, there was a reason to highlight this. Information technology's not the Joker, it's Dick Grayson.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Hot Gates, the porn star who dresses as Big Barda, is a shout out to the recurring theme of Thermopylae that appears in Frank Miller'due south piece of work. She was besides name dropped in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and then it's likewise a Telephone call-Back.
  • The President has the last name Rickard, as in Prez.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands:
  • Luthor'due south nanites removed all the Martian Manhunter'due south powers except his power to meet the future. A power he's never actually had earlier.
  • Superman can now blot energy from the Earth to heal himself and replenish his powers. It was e'er the Power of the Sun before.
• No Name Given: We never learn the names of Hawkman and Hawkwoman's children. Only that their son is called Hawkboy.
• No Ane Could Survive That!: Saturn Daughter has a vision of Catgirl existence murdered by the New Joker. Catgirl isn't besides worried, as she shot the New Joker with several explosive arrows, and then went to piece of work on him with a hatchet.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Happens to pretty much every grapheme, good or bad. Batman is at his sorriest-looking country ever by the end, going well past "beaten up" and into "disfigured."
• Old Superhero: Pretty much the entire cast, with a few exceptions, such as Carrie Kelly, or the new Supergirl (daughter of Superman and Wonder Woman, the fan-ship of many an Elseworlds writer).
• Our Wormholes Are Different: A throwaway line during Hal Jordan'due south journey dorsum to Earth about the wormhole being where he still left it implies he can create or move them.
• Physical God: Wonder Woman calls Superman this.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: It's implied that Carrie doesn't actually know what the Zorro Mark is, merely that information technology means something to Batman.
• Ability Dynamics Kink: Implied if not outright stated to be the case of Superman and Wonder Woman's human relationship. Her response to Superman feeling down near Batman beating him (once again) is to punch him in the face and say, "Where is the man who threw me to the basis and made me his prize?".
• President Evil: Actually a hologram controlled by Lex Luthor.
• Puny Humans: What Lara Kent believes.
• Retcon: Of sorts. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns treats the absenteeism of superheroes (and Superman having "sold out") every bit a consequence of a Super Registration Act, with the unnamed president strongly unsaid to be Ronald Reagan, who'due south super-aged and losing his sanity. Here, information technology's revealed that the whole scenario is due to Lex Luthor and Braniac property the earth (and Kandor) earnest via orbiting cannons and a hologram of the president (whose name is stated to be "Rickard", a reference to the comic Prez).
• Retraux: Superman looks more like his Golden Age version than the one used in DKR.
• Sacrificial Lion: The Guardian, the Creeper, and the Martian Manhunter all die in horrible means to prove how dangerous this "New Joker" (Dick Grayson) actually is.
• Sexposition: Role of the arc's Bad Futureness is "News in the Nude," the only news worth watching. Judge Frank Miller had never heard of Naked News.
• Sibling Team: The original Militarist and Dove are inspired to start fighting injustice once again by Batman'southward speech, but they're a scrap out of shape (fifty-fifty if that probably won't touch their powers much), and Don argues that they spent most of their time as vigilantes arguing with each other.
• Signature Style
• Strawman Political: The Question is a radical Libertarian, Green Arrow is a radical Marxist. Miller didn't give united states of america any clue which he agrees with, and which, if either, is meant to be correct.
  • Fake Dichotomy. Both characters are shown to be ridiculously over the top in their antics. The Question refuses to employ annihilation more than technologically advanced than a typewriter (though that could be Properly Paranoid given the setting), and Dark-green Arrow is a hypocritical billionaire Marxist hippie who presumably spent a fortune to become a cybernetic arm when the earth is in the throes of a nuclear winter.
• Swallowed Whole: Carrie accidentally swallows Ray Palmer early on, leading to a Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
• Take That!: Word of God says the book as Frank Miller's reaction to the Dark Historic period Dork Age he helped inspire.
  • Which leads to some Fridge Logic when combined with All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. For case, this comic lauds Greenish Lantern (Hal Jordan) specifically equally a noble hero exiled by the little people of Earth, but who is shown to be admittedly worthy of godlike ability. In contrast, the Goddamn Batman once lured Hal into an ambush and beat him savagely with little provocation. The beating occurs canonically before he entrusts Bats with a ways to summon him, but was written afterward.
• Technical Pacifist: Batman at this indicate is only 1 out of keeping his discussion. He clearly does not care about killing enemies anymore, letting subordinates use lethal force liberally, and actually shows a disturbing amount of glee over Hawkboy brutally murdering Luthor. Eventually, he opts to break his code birthday when he happily kills Dick Grayson himself.
• Together in Death: Hawkman and Hawkwoman were killed in a armed services strike ordered by Lex Luthor, embracing each other in their final moments.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Batman.
• Villain Decay: Brainiac and Lex Luthor aren't nearly as smart in TDKSA as they are in other stories. In fact, some of the decisions they make are downright moronic.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Light-green Pointer and The Question, in that one wants Marxist Socialism, and the other Randian Objectivism.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: What happened to Mary Marvel? It was never revealed if she was rescued or not.
• Wife Husbandry: Dick Grayson implies that this is what Batman is doing with Carrie, though Give-and-take of Miller denies this vehemently. Too, Dick Grayson was batshit insane at that point, and had just spent a skillful amount of time mutilating Carrie out of psychotic jealousy. He is an unreliable source, to say the to the lowest degree.
• Willfully Weak: This is plain Batman's (and Miller'due south) main problem with Superman, as he stops beingness treated as a Butt-Monkey in one case he starts taking the mental attitude to friction match his power as a Concrete God.
• Winged Humanoid: Hawkman and Hawkwoman gave their children wings while living in Republic of costa rica.
• Yous Killed My Begetter: Luthor killed Hawkman and Hawkwoman. Their children, Hawkboy and his sister, desire revenge.
• Zeerust Catechism: Published xv years afterwards, simply but takes place two years later.
• Zorro Mark: Batman carves 1 onto Lex Luthor's confront.

  Catgirl: "The Dominate leaves his marking. [we see Batman utilise a batarang to make the three quick slices] It must mean something to him... "

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/TheDarkKnightStrikesAgain

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