Short reviews of pretty much whatever. Finally, you can discover if Frosted Flakes Gold has more social worth than Illmatic or Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.
DC - "Let's hire a famous writer to write an industry changing book!"
Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is the definitive Batman story, the best superhero book ever written, and the 2nd best graphic novel/comic of all time. Published in 1986, the pit of the Reagan era, DKR imagines a contemporary Batman in his fifties who has been retired for ten years. Gotham is overrun by mutants who dress like bizarre funhouse versions of 80s punk rockers, news reporters who get giddy at any hint of violence or devastation, and a president (Reagan) who pushes the country to the brink of war by using his charm and the American flag as a ruse. Batman comes back from retirement to ostensibly try to change the hopelessness society is feeling, but more likely because Bruce Wayne is psychotic. Anyway, Frank Miller himself has proven himself to be legitimately insane and a hack in the two decades since DKR was published, but this is still one of the most amazing reads you'll ever have in comic book form. I never cease to be surprised by it, and you owe it to yourself and your economy to go buy a copy of it brothers and sisters.
Firstly, there are no spoilers here. Secondly, I've been told that there's a fine line between genius and madness. Unfortunately, in the case of Final Crisis, someone has erased it. This was the total antipodal-opposite of decompressed storytelling. It's like someone writing a smart, funny, cognizant review on this website, except they used only SAT words and left out all the vowels. Sure, a few people died, heaven and hell, earth and time were redefined and blended, but what it really showed me was that with his taste for frenetic pace and the weird, Grant really, really, really should write an awesome Flash title, where everything gets good and fast and weird. Final Crisis was everything - good, bad, and ugly - all at once, all the time.
I suppose if you're a comic book company that's been around for 46 years you might have a real clusterfuck of continuity. So what better way to resolve that problem with a brand new 12 issue clusterfuck called Crisis on Infinite Earths? Back in 1985, DC had a problem, because different writers over the years had done different things with their characters: Superman was the last surviving Kryptonian or maybe it was Supergirl, Batman caught his parents' killer or maybe he didn't, The Flash was something who even knows. Anyway, they had this event to get everything on the right track but there's no use explaining it because even though I read a lot of comics and just read the whole thing, all I remember about it was that it was 12 issues of beautifully drawn nonsense in which Flash and Supergirl die. DC continues to have these events to straighten everything up every few years but who cares, they're largely incomprehensible even if they kill Batman.
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