The Fundamental Flaw with Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight III: The Master Race’.
In the late ‘80s, Frank Miller created two Batman stories considered to this day as some of the best comic books ever. Batman: Year One is for many, the definitive origin story for the character, whilst Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is its opposite. Both have influenced the medium enormously and the latter has spawned two sequels in the years since to middling effect.
The Dark Knight Returns goes like this; A decade after retiring following a traumatic event, Bruce Wayne has grown old and weary, and is in need of a death that he would deem to be “good enough.” Frank Miller writes Batman and Bruce Wayne as, quite literally, two separate entities, and the Batman wants to return just as Gotham City becomes plagued by a group called The Mutants.
From here we witness Batman’s return to the city. He’s older, slower and bears an enormous, hulking frame that contrasts with his classically lean but broad appearance. To emphasize this bleak future, all of the heroes have put their super-heroics aside and Superman has become a lapdog for the government. There’s one ray of colour to be found in the story, and it’s in Bruce’s new Robin. Carrie Kelly becomes an inspiration and motivation for Bruce and she helps to revitalize him. It’s a relationship that confirms more-so than ever that Batman needs Robin, and not the other way around.
The book is nearly thirty years old, and still to this day would make for a fitting end to any reader’s time with the Batman, that is, if we chose to ignore the 2002 sequel. The Dark Knight Strikes Back is legend for its status as a book with little to no redeeming qualities. The story is poor, the art is worse. It is a sequel that could have gone some way to tarnishing the original’s legacy, though good fortune means that it is more often than not simply forgotten – willfully or otherwise.
Still, DC and Miller decided that they would keep digging, to mine further from the original. In 2015 a third chapter kicked off and it had a long-winded, drawn-out release schedule. Eventually it concluded and is now available in a hardcover collection. And the book is, despite many concerns and expectations, readable and a far superior work to the last book we got. Co-written with Brian Azzarello, The Dark Knight III: Master Race manages to capture the same tone of the original while staying true to the characters that played major roles in The Dark Knight Returns. There is however, some redundancy which is just the tip of some concern that goes beyond whether the book is simply any good.
It starts with the first issue’s reveal that Bruce Wayne is dead. Of course, that’s proven not to be true very early on in the next issue. Later on Batman dies again. This time it’s in-panel but Superman won’t let that happen, and he flies him to the mythical Lazarus Pit, a tool used for decades in Batman comics primarily by Ra’s Al Ghul.
Superhero comics are infamous for their cyclical nature. Eventually, if you read for long enough, you become aware that you’re just going in circles. You digest the latest major event and some pretty dramatic things may or may not happen within the story. Eventually though, these things are reversed. Batman’s death has been one of them on a handful of occasions this century alone. So too recently his son has been the victim of this cycle. Damian Wayne, the most recent Robin in the ongoing continuity at DC, died in the pages of Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. It was a devastating end and it was handled excellently in Peter J. Tomasi’s own series, which ran concurrently titled Batman and Robin. Of course, Damian is back among the living, the wheel keeps spinning.
The Dark Knight Returns, in 1988, offered something unprecedented. It presented to its readers an ending. It’s that rare event that puts a full-stop on a superhero’s story. Whilst The Dark Knight Returns is considered an “Elseworlds” title, existing outside of the regular continuity, it is still an anomaly. And as it turns out, as time would tell, that ending was no ending at all. The Master Race needlessly continues a story that needed no continuation in the early 2000s, but that’s not really the main problem here. In fact Frank Miller has already been vocal about continuing the story with a fourth book, written entirely by himself (which in and of itself gives fans cause for concern given that much of the positive feedback for The Master Race is attested to Azzarello’s involvement).
The real problem is what comes after Bruce’s resurrection in the later stages of The Master Race. The choice of having him regain his younger body is a betrayal to the original story. All of a sudden the series is no longer defined by its themes of ageing and the passage of time, the very nature of crime and Batman’s fruitless war. Instead The Master Race has turned the Dark Knight Saga into just another superhero story, ready to flick the switch and make everything right again when it suits the future of the series. The characters address his de-aging a few times, with Bruce Wayne not thrilled with Superman’s actions, while Carrie Kelley (now ascended to the role of Batwoman) is stunned but overjoyed to have her mentor and father-figure back.
The suddenness of his return to life, and the results of his revival, goes to great lengths diminishing the tale that’s been told. There’s little unique to pique from the future of this series, at least at this point, and we can expect that it will stand apart from every other long-running Bat-tale on its historical relevance alone. We can at least expect it to share some resemblance to the boots-to-the-ground structure of its original, carried through to the latest book wherein a lot of panel space is spent commentating on the political atmosphere of Gotham city through various television reporters and guest speakers. The Master Race twists this for the modern audience, having various text boxes appearing on pages with awfully written text messages between characters commenting on the events unfolding in the city.
But can this minor difference help what’s become a full-blown franchise to stand out? The Master Race triples the amount of issues that the original story required to tell its story, and it’s four times the length of The Dark Knight Strikes Again. That’s not to mention the Last Crusade tie-in that was written, a prologue centered on the Joker, just last year. Presumably the fourth book will be fifteen issues or so. The revival of nostalgic properties is something of an industry in and of itself now. It’s certainly at the fore of the film industry. Sometimes it works. Often the right intentions are poured into these projects. The Master Race certainly has plenty of sincerity in the story it’s telling, but even with the right intentions, maybe it could entirely damage the legacy of its predecessors, which is the most crucial thing a modern take can possibly do.
As a self-contained story, The Master Race is a joy. It’s far better than many expected and in many ways acts as a decent sequel to The Dark Knight Returns. Its role in defining the future of The Dark Knight series is less enticing and promises more of the same as we continue to move through an era of unbefitting sequels where there, at least at times, is no need for them at all.