It's been over twenty years, and still to this day no one has been able to match the thunder from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. As to why, that's open to debate... perhaps it's because when Miller took up Batman he was...
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It's been over twenty years, and still to this day no one has been able to match the thunder from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. As to why, that's open to debate... perhaps it's because when Miller took up Batman he was at his lowest point, and with nothing to lose, bet it all on black and won. Miller managed to not only push Batman forward (in both time and storytelling) but pull him back from the brink as well - like Batman does time and time again on the page, death gets but a taste, but never it's fill of Batman. And because of that, anything anyone tries with Batman tends to suffer from the echo of that thunder. Paul Pope's BATMAN: YEAR 100 tries to have it both ways - borrowing the dystopian view from DARK KNIGHT, while lifting the origin style from BATMAN: YEAR ONE and tries to fuse them together into one book and have it, somehow, make some kind of sense... it doesn't. The story is cardboard (and often cheap), the characters are pale copies (or distant relations) of their originals (all of whom occupy the same roles or positions of power or importance within the BATMAN UNIVESE for no other reason than that's the way it's always been - luckluster and unimaginative), and while Pope tries to sell us on the mystery as to who this Batman really is - you end up not caring. It's just a tepid 24 set within the BATMAN world. You'll have a hundred questions by the time you reach the final page - but forget getting any answers, there's none to be found. As for the art - it's a TWO FACE coin toss here - you'll either love it or hate it. I happened to have loved it. Pope really knows how to pace his action, and when Batman is on the go here - this book zips (in fact, it almost zips too fast - you'll quickly come to realize how thin the story is after you sail through all the action, only for the book to come to a dead stop when it comes to the talk), and some of his action poses for Batman are wonderful... but it doesn't save the book. For the curious, give it a try, enjoy the art - but for the die-hard fans... we're still children of the thunder and BATMAN: YEAR 100 is just a pale shadow. Comment | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)
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