Although it’s hard to believe, this year marks the 30th Anniversary of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
CBR.com sat down for a short but informative interview with Frank Miller that’s worth a read. Here are a couple of tidbits…
When did you realize that it really was something that people were going to be talking about for decades to come? Was there a moment where you thought, “We’ve created something bigger than I ever expected”?
It was an ongoing set of surprises. You go up to bat and you take your best shot. This one turned out to be a homer. But I didn’t expect it to keep on rewarding like this. Now, it’s become apparent that it’s going to be something that we can enjoy revisiting again in the future.
When you see how influential your original take on Batman was, and the kinds of things that stuck forever: the way you did narrative dialogue captions over thought balloons, a lot of the approaches to the character. And now we’re seeing things like “Batman v Superman,” where we’re seeing a lot of imagery that comes directly from your pencil. What has that come to mean to you over the years? You’ve seen just how much people embraced what you did, sometimes swiped what you did?
I mean, I’ve learned a lot since doing the first “Dark Knight.” I learned a lot about life too. Instead of resenting, as I first did, when they would take some of the stuff in the movies — I resented and I thought, “Oh I’m being ripped off!” — I’ve come to realize that what I did was a piece of an overall collective work that’s evolving and changing as time goes by. I didn’t make up Batman, I just contributed to the myth. And now they’re using some of my stuff to take it in their own direction. God bless them as well.
