SOURCE: Phillips, Gene. “The Dark Knight Reborn.” Comics Journal, no. 114 (February 1987): 70-4.

In the following review, Phillips argues that, despite its flaws, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is an entertaining work that clearly incorporates modern mythic orientations into its storyline.

Frank Miller has referred to his project as his “Great American Super-hero story.” This four-part opus, whether or not it proves to be entertaining and meaningful to everyone, must at the very least be judged a milestone in the development of techniques for giving any sort of comics project the aesthetic and structural qualities of a novel, forcing the graphics to do triple-duty to make up for the medium's inherent restrictions on wordage. Because of its novel-like complexity, Dark Knight deserves to be assessed as a novel, which means, among other things, that two critical questions are foremost among those that should be addressed: Is Dark...