Even the hero of Miller's The Dark Night Returns is hardly the hero that any of us would want to follow. Miller's Batman is an unapologetic reactionary who in the process of an interrogation of a prisoner, he threatened a man he had put in a neck brace and crutches and mocked him when he claimed, "I got rights (Miller 45)." The new Batman seems to be an even bigger reactionary than the person who trained him (ibid 199). The darkness of the Bat Cave brings the tale full circle as the heroes have become like what they are fighting, dark and corrupt without any inherent light. Only outside and artificial light illuminates imaginary Gotham of Miller's dark knight as it does the New York City of Spiegelman's mouse man as he sees himself, unable and powerless to change the world reality he so loves to hate. In this short essay, the author has compared Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No...

Like their aging human counterparts, the cities reflect the very societies that built them in the first place. They are decaying slowly and crumbling around the ears of the city inhabitant and they really are not immortal. They die like humans and not quickly. Rather, the decay slowly eats away at the essence of its host until there is nothing left but putrefying and dying matter. This is not a pretty picture of reality and the older Spiegelman has no solutions. The corruption so fully eats up reality that he has become reactionary in his reflections and ruminations on the events. After reading both novels, this author does not know which is better. Perhaps we should just say none of the above.
Works Cited

Miller, Art. The Dark Knight Returns. New York, NY: DC Comics,…