Frank Miller's fascist Dark Knight is a very modern archetype

Miller presents Gotham through the ugly lens of a billionaire’s delusional, messianic fantasy – his Bruce Wayne is not so different to Donald Trump

I have a long relationship with The Dark Knight Returns. I first read it in 1990, four years after it came out as a mini-series. I had always hated the silly Batman TV show and I had yawned my way through the stuffy movie version starring Michael Keaton the year before. But Frank Miller’s uber-dark graphic novel reimagining of the Batman mythos captured my 13-year-old imagination. I read it a dozen times and sang its praises to everyone I knew. Eventually, one of my comic-reading friends agreed that he liked it, but made the killer criticism: “Damo, he’s turned Batman into a fascist.”

There’s no doubt Frank Miller is a virtuoso graphic storyteller. A decade after retiring as Batman, the 55-year-old Bruce Wayne returns to the streets, but he’s not that interested in fighting crime. Obsessed by the corruption of the human soul, the caped crusader morphs into a modern messiah. Miller even has Batman “die” at the hands of Superman, so that Wayne can be resurrected as the leader of a new religion.

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