Frank Miller Announces New ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Sequel

Frank Miller hadn’t tweeted for over three and a half years before today. Guess he waited until he had something major to tweet about it. I would say this qualifies:

DK III: The Master Race will be the third volume of Frank Miller’s hugely successful and influential series of Batman comics set in a dark future where the Caped Crusader is nearing the end of his career. The first volume, The Dark Knight Returns, debuted in 1986 and became a sensation. Heralded as part of a wave of more adult comics in the mid-’80s, it’s credited with helping push Batman (and mainstream superheroes in general) in more mature directions. The book also inspired much of the look and feel of many of the Batman movies that followed, including Christopher Nolan’s trilogy (which used The Dark Knight as part of two of its titles) and Zack Snyder’s upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which is aping the book’s climactic confrontation between Batman and Superman (right down to Batman’s armored costume).

In 2001, Miller published a sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, but it wasn’t nearly as critically or commercial successful. Since then, Miller’s spent more and more time on his creator-owned Sin City comics and movies; his last published work for DC was a short-lived series called All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, a sort of rebooted and modernized Batman set in a world free of continuity. The book was a hit, but Miller and artist Jim Lee struggled to complete and publish issues on time, and the series fizzled out after just ten issues.

Miller was supposed to do an original graphic novel called Holy Terror, Batman!, in which the Dark Knight would have fought Al-Qaeda terrorists, but DC and Miller eventually parted ways on the project. (Miller published it himself without Batman as simply Holy Terror.) Which is to say that Miller’s comics output in the last decade has been sporadic at best and frustrating at worst. But perhaps a return to the Dark Knight mythos will also mark a return to form for Miller.