Batman: The Dark Knight Returns...

I've been a big comics fan since the late 1970s and, while many of my comics-reading friends adored The Uncanny X-men, I was always drawn to a second-string character called Daredevil.

Fortunately in 1979 this title was taken over, first as an artist then as a writer-artist, by Frank Miller and he slowly transformed the character from a poor man's Spider-man into a part-hero and part-vigilante, who protected his patch of New York thanks to a martial arts background and a determined will to overcome anybody who threatened his Hell's Kitchen home or those he loved. 

Miller’s run on Daredevil featured assassins, crime lords, drug dealers and ancient martial arts warriors. The new characters he introduced were fascinating, such as assassin-for-hire Elektra, while his take on established characters like assassin-for-hire Bullseye and crime lord the Kingpin evolved them from slightly pantomime villains into truly frightening foes.

It was gritty noir story-telling at its best, which would later bear more fruit in one of Miller's other landmark titles, Sin City. 

But it was his run on Batman that truly established Miller as one of the premier forces in comics and his four-issue story The Dark Knight Returns, alongside Alan Moore's seminal The Watchmen, remain the two books that are always cited as changing the comics landscape for good. These were the books that helped the comics industry grow up.

So with all the excitement surrounding the concluding part of the Christopher Nolan Batman film trilogy, I decided I'd go back and reread the Miller Batman to see if it was still as exciting. And it utterly is. 

Set in a dystopian future where all superheroes have been outlawed, Bruce Wayne is introduced as a danger-seeking nutcase who longs to again don the cowl and tackle Gotham’s increasingly violent present.

And when old foes come to the fore, so does the Batman.

But times have changed and his return prompts a debate and he’s branded an outlaw, even though he’s sorting out the mess the police force can’t. And when the outlaw then becomes a political liability, he eventually faces a final battle with Superman, now a stooge employed by the government and sent on missions by an increasingly deranged Ronald Reagan.

The Dark Knight Returns is, quite simply, a superior piece of comics writing and art and no potted summary can adequately summarise the scope of its ideas on personal and public freedoms, crime and punishment, obsession, global and local politics, and justice.

It’s an utterly stunning piece of work and, alongside Love In The Time Of Cholera and 100 Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and King Lear by Shakespeare, it remains one of the few things I go back to and reread every decade or so.

And, like those literary masterpieces, it also never disappoints.