So it’s the 30th anniversary of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, and a lot of artists and writers are sharing their “Frank Miller Experience” so I thought I’d share mine.

I love Frank Miller’s Batman, as in, I love his vision of what the Batman is and should be.

Through “The Dark Knight Returns” Miller gave Batman writers and artists an end goal for Batman, showing what kind of toll his years of crime fighting would take on him and on the city of Gotham. Then Miller wrote “Batman: Year One” which went ahead and gave us a well defined starting point for the Caped Crusader.

In between these two moments of Batman’s career we have the works of other artists.

A lot of people love different versions of the Dark Knight. Some like him as the Denis O’Neil era detective, others love the “one step ahead” smart ass, know it all Batman that a lot of current writers are rolling with now; I grew up with a combination of Neil Adam’s Detective comics and the 1989 Batman film, both of which I think found the perfect union in Bruce Timm’s Animated 90’s series.

But I think no artist or writer has been able to commit to the foundations and end goal that Frank Miller had set for the Dark Knight better than Miller himself.

This brings us to the very short lived “All Star Batman and Robin” which was written by Miller and drawn by fan-favorite Jim Lee.

Miller’s “All-star” Batman was crazy. He painted himself yellow when fighting Green Lantern (Because GL’s ring has no influence over anything yellow), he broke arms and smashed through cop car windscreens in pursuit of his prey. And when Robin asks why he calls his car the “Bat Mobile” the answer is simple: “It’s because I’m the good damn Batman!”

To me, Miller address a fundamental part of Batman that very few other writers and artists take on, and that is that Batman is totally insane.

You would have to be more than a little insane to spend your nights dressed up as a giant bat, jumping roof top to roof top fighting crime.

Miller’s Batman is still sharp enough to be one step ahead of things every now and then; like we saw at the end of Dark Knight Returns when he out thinks Superman, but at the end of the day, he is just too much of a narcissist to stay in the shadows. Miller’s Batman strikes like a heart attack and makes crime pay hard.

Miller’s Bruce Wayne is a violent, psychotic sociopath. He drinks and sleeps his way through the day,hoping to skip it all so he can dawn that cape and cowl and run off into the dark to fight bad guys.

Though Miller’s Batman has the same sympathetic back story as the other Dark Knight writers, this Batman has turned his pain outwardly into hurt. Whatever noble reason Bruce Wayne once had to slip behind the cowl is almost unrecognizable now; Instead I see a man, who somewhere inside him, hopes that the end will justify the means. It is this bitter hope, that I think, redeems the Miller Batman; a product of violence who in turn begets violence.

Because criminals, by nature, are a cowardly and superstitious lot, and Frank Miller reminds us that a grown man dressed as a Bat, is just the thing to instill fear into their hearts