OK, we’ve shown you a few pages from the Dark Knight Returns Gallery Edition but now it’s time to pause briefly to talk about the book as a whole.
The Dark Knight Returns Gallery Edition from Graphitti Designs and DC is due out 5/18 and every day for 13 days we’re presenting a page (sometimes two!) EXCLUSIVELY here at 13th Dimension.
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For the full 13 DAYS OF THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS Gallery Edition Index, click here.
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Variant cover
I’m not a huge collector of Artist’s Editions or Gallery Editions or whatever you’d like to call them, depending on the publisher. They’re an expensive proposition and if I’m gonna spend that kind of money it pretty much has to be something that is really special to me.
Well, The Dark Knight Returns is special to me, as it is for many Batfans. I read it when it came out in 1986 and it was like a thunderbolt went through me (sorta like the one on the cover).
This was something new and powerful and utterly unlike anything I’d seen in my young age. I collected everything I could that was connected to the series, including multiple hardcover and paperback collections, a grand poster, a plastic store advertisement and t-shirt.
If they made more, I’d have gotten more.
That was 30 years ago and the remarkable thing is that it stands up just as well now as it did then, despite the dated pop-cultural references.
Obviously, when Graphitti Designs and DC Comics announced The Dark Knight Returns Gallery Edition, I was all over that like Batman on the Mutant Leader.
Cracking open the 13 x 20 book, you immediately see the feverish imagination that went into creating this classic story, the kinetic lines, the crammed layouts, the bold splashes.
A lot of art fans enjoy these books, which meticulously reproduce original comic art as it was drawn on the boards, because you can see the notations, the white-out, the erasure marks. All the little obsessive details.
Me? I see a book like this as a trip into someone else’s head. When you see the bold line work, the use of letters, the way dialogue fits into the storytelling, you’re seeing up close the choices Frank Miller made. You see the art from his point of view, even if you can’t replicate actually being there.
That makes the most interesting feature of the Gallery Edition the conflict between what Miller envisioned for the page and the inks produced by Klaus Janson. Throughout the book are translucent overlays that allow you to see Janson’s inks and how they were reworked by Miller. Sometimes it’s a single panel, sometimes an entire page.
The overlays actually do line up. I left it this way to illustrate how they work. This is Miller’s work on the overlay.
These are Janson’s inks
Miller knew what he wanted and even though he and Janson were already long-time collaborators, you can see how his perfectionism superseded everything in producing this visionary work.
Getting to see that creative tension up close, through jagged lines on a page, is an almost prurient experience.
Miller’s original treatment of the cover, as an overlay.
Lynn Varley’s cover painting
Graphitti’s production values are outstanding, with crisp resolution and binding that allows you to lay the book flat as if combing through a portfolio. If there’s a knock, it’s that some of the story’s most famous pages are missing, replaced by black-and-white page scans that were not taken from the original art.
But that’s to be expected. It’s not like all these pages have been sitting in a vault somewhere. Instead, Bob Chapman and his crew at Graphitti Designs had to scour a network of international resources to acquire the pages they did and they came away with 80 percent of the book.
That’s more than good enough for me. Because when I closed The Dark Knight Returns Gallery Edition, I turned to my family and said, without hyperbole, “This is the greatest book I have ever owned.”
The painting used for that store ad I mentioned above. It’s a two-page gatefold in the book.
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For the full 13 DAYS OF THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS Gallery Edition Index, click here.
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The 216-page book, which includes story pages and other illustrations such as marketing material, lists for $175. It will hit retailers 5/18 but you can also order it directly from Graphitti Designs. The company is also selling a signed, limited edition for $275. Click here for more info.
Main cover
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