“Sin City” is Mr. Miller’s masterwork, but he hit lots of other high notes before that.

In his first star turn in the early 1980s (while still learning on the job), Mr. Miller took Daredevil, the Man Without Fear (and without many readers), and transformed the adventures of Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer turned superhero, into a must-read. He remodeled the series as a street-level crime comic and made it one of the peaks of the 1980s, a notch below Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen” and his own “The Dark Knight Returns.” Along the way he brought to life one of comics’ best antiheroes, the female assassin Elektra (a prototype for Miho in “Sin City”), and turned the Kingpin into one of the most memorable bad guys in the Marvel canon.

Then came the 1983 samurai drama “Ronin,” a crucial artistic leap before “The Dark Knight Returns.” Both Mr. Miller’s writing and drawing grew more sophisticated in this myth-inflected science fiction novel about a ronin — a masterless samurai — who wanders space and time, from feudal Japan to our near-future.

Influenced by the French illustrator Moebius, Mr. Miller’s art on “Ronin” is looser, and the painted colors by Lynn Varley stunning. In its time, “Ronin” was the unlikely child of an indie sensibility nurtured under the DC banner. And with the concept of the ronin, Mr. Miller found a metaphor that served him well as he focused first on Batman and then on the quixotic hero-losers like Marv, Dwight and Hartigan of “Sin City.”

Mr. Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (1986) is one of the pillars of modern comics. With a Gotham City that made Detroit look like a gated community, he reimagined the mythology of Batman, drafting an angle of vision for Bruce Wayne and his significant caped other that has shaped him for the past 30 years. Mr. Miller’s Batman is a creature of the night who seethes with rage, lusts for vengeance — a Batman just right for the urban decay of the 1980s.

While “The Dark Knight Returns” foreshadows the stylized (and stylish) Peckinpah-like bloodshed of “Sin City,” Mr. Miller’s series All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, from the mid-2000s and just released in a striking oversize Absolute edition by DC, looks backward toward those savage graphic novels.

Written by Mr. Miller and penciled by Jim Lee, All-Star Batman is a sort of prequel to “The Dark Knight Returns,” but its soul is all “Sin City.” The Joker, a vast tattoo of a red dragon coiled on his back, has casual sex with a woman and then strangles her. And Batman, sizing up how his night has gone, says: “I fed a drooling mugger his teeth. By the dozen. He’s probably still coughing them up.”

At that, I can just imagine Marv, hunkered down in his “Sin City” hovel, grinning in approval.