'Deadpan do-gooder' to 'ultra-violent vigilante': How 1980s comic The Dark Knight Returns transformed Batman

First published 40 years ago in 1986, Frank Miller's graphic novel transformed the Caped Crusader from a camp, comical figure into a brutal new kind of superhero. He tells the BBC how it became a sensation.

A deadpan do-gooder who wears underpants over his tights, and always carries a can of shark repellent spray.

For a long time, that was Batman – or, at least, Batman as the general public saw him, thanks to the camp 1960s television show and film. In his DC Comics adventures, he was depicted as a more serious and even sinister character, but the average person still saw him as Adam West in a self-mocking comedy with an infuriatingly catchy theme song.

Then came the graphic novel that changed everything – not just Batman, but superhero comics, and the many Hollywood films those comics would inspire.

First published as a four-issue mini-series in 1986, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was an edgy satirical masterpiece that demonstrated just how sophisticated and intelligent the genre could be. "In superhero fiction, we're dealing with symbolism, with metaphor," Miller tells the BBC.

"We do not have a Superman in the real world, but we do have huge military forces which can be used for good or evil. We do not have Batman out there, but we do have people's own desire to resist the use of force against them, and so on. I wanted to use the machinery and iconography of a children's story to tell a story for an older audience."

Described by Star Wars creator George Lucas as "the Michelangelo of our time", Miller is notable in the world of superhero comics in that he is a writer-artist who both writes and draws to the same breathtaking standard. He made his mark on the industry with an influential run on Marvel's Daredevil comics in the early 1980s. The Daredevil TV series and films, the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and the ninja gang in the new Spider-Man film all borrow from or pay homage to those comics.

Miller has since had phenomenal success with his own independent creations: 300 and Sin City each had two film adaptations. But he is best known for The Dark Knight Returns, which Stephen King rates as "probably the finest piece of comic art ever to be published in a popular edition".

'An out-and-out resurrection'

As he recalls in his newly published memoir, Push the Wall, Miller was still in his twenties when he was commissioned by DC to "breathe new life" into a character who was at the time "emasculated" and "a second-class citizen in comics".

He tells the BBC that "everything else started falling into the place" when he set his story in the near-future and made Bruce Wayne a middle-aged man who had given up being Batman a decade earlier. "It was a matter of wanting to make him look as big and fatherly and square-jawed as he was when he was drawn in the '50s when I was first reading him as a child, and then combining........

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