Hello again my crispy cousins, and welcome back to another episode of OH GOD IT BURNS!!! Your Buyer’s Guide to Bad Comics.

Without a doubt Frank Miller wrote two of the most influential comics of all time when he dropped Batman Year One and Dark Knight Returns barely within a year of one another. It was an amazing time, made even more amazing by the fact that in those same years we saw the release of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, JM DeMatteis’ Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt, and oh – what’s this? – oh, yeah, that’s just some other Frank Miller comic called Daredevil Born Again. No biggie.

All of these comics were collectively responsible for legitimizing the medium comics as a genuine literary artform, and I don’t know if you were keeping count, but out of the six stories I mentioned above, our boy Frankie accounted for 50% of them. So when I say that 1986 showcased Frank Miller in his prime, understand that this man was almost single-handedly responsible for changing the industry for the better – and for the worse.

2001’s Dark Knight Strikes Again definitely falls into the worse category, and it does so in what has become one of most psychologically tortured, erratic, and drug fueled journeys into misery ever published. And we owe it all to Osama Bin Laden. If Bane broke the Bat, it was 9/11 that broke the Frank, and for anybody who has dared to endure this book to the last page, it is evident that this series is a masterwork in creative self-destruction, and one that is an absolutely essential addition to your coveted Longbox of Cursed and Forbidden Comics, not only for how it so thoroughly disgraces its predecessor on the surface, but also for how it stands as heart-wrenching metaphor for how the great indominable American spirit was emotionally shattered in the face of such real-world existential evil.

Bruno and I cover all the bases and leave no stone unturned as we agonize over Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Strikes Again on this week’s episode of OH GOD IT BURNS!!!