In many ways, Christopher Nolan’s film Batman Begins was anticipated by Frank Miller’s troika of graphic novels featuring the Gotham vigilante — Batman: The Dark Night Returns (1986), Batman: The Dark Night Strikes Again (2001) and, in between, Batman: Year One (’87). This summer, to coincide with the release of Nolan’s revisionist take on the Batman saga, the books have been reissued. Dark Night Returns and Dark Night Strikes Back were written and illustrated by Miller, inspired heavily by the Japanese genre of comicbook art. Batman: Year One looked different, literally — being written by Frank Miller but drawn by David Mazzuccheli. Together, these graphic novels are a sort of epilogue and prologue to the conventional Batman adventures. The Dark Night pair focuses on a retired Batman, coming back to get a grip on the grim, postmodern dystopia that Gotham has become. The first of the two was written at the height of the Reagan era; it even featured a president who resembled Ronald Reagan. It was a time of Cold War paranoia, liberal fears over a takeover of America by rightwing control freaks. It’s eerie. Reagan is dead, the Cold War is gone. Crises such as ‘‘the Corto Maltese affair’’ — a superpower versus superpower nuclear showdown centred on a fictional South American country, which is the political backdrop of Dark Night Returns — seem ancient history. Yet in the strange time warp that seems to trap the best graphic novels, the debate, the politics seem so contemporary. Close your eyes and the allusions could be to Bush and his war. Dark Night Returns was a multi-textured tale. At its most basic level, it pitted robust, old-fashioned notions of good and evil — as represented by Batman and his ally, police commissioner Jim Gordon — against the moral relativism of telegenic liberals. At the ‘‘Arkham Home for the Emotionally Troubled’’ — there in the new film too — a pop psychologist ‘‘repairs’’ criminals for release. He pronounces Batman a ‘‘menace to society’’, explaining declining crime rates after his comeback with this mumbo jumbo: ‘‘Picture the public psyche as a vast, moist membrane. Through the media, Batman has struck this membrane a vicious blow and it has recoiled. Hence your misleading statistics.’’ Dark Night Strikes Again is an epic war: Bruce takes on Clark. Batman and his betrayed brethren — including a semi-communist (Red?) Green Arrow — seek revenge on Superman, the Hero who sold out, became a troubleshooter for the establishment. It’s one striking image, a tour de force of graphic art, depicts the coupling of Superman and Wonderwoman — and introduces us to their half-Kryptonian, half-Amazonian love child. Year One is a chronicle of the first year of Batman’s life in Gotham, beginning on the January day when Bruce Wayne, 25, returns to the city where his parents were murdered, after 12 years abroad. Nolan has acknowledged it as an inspiration. Some scenes from the film are straight lifts from the book — Batman using an ultrasonic tone to summon a storm of bats to escape a police siege; the final moment where Gordon, now promoted, waits for Batman to talk about some joker called The Joker — who has ‘‘threatened to poison the Gotham reservoir’’ Miller’s three graphic novels are probably better books than Nolan’s film is good cinema. They are truer to the Batman ethic. The film introduces the supernatural — in the form of an immortal League of Shadows that lives in the Himalayas and wants to destroy Gotham — to the Batman story. In real life — real comicbook life — Batman was the most human, the most vulnerable of the Superheroes: the one with fears, with nightmares, with the guilt of his parent’s death, with a white collar upbringing that kept him from using a gun. Somewhere in Miller’s three novels lie a plethora of Batman films. Pity Nolan’s wasn’t the first one.
