With these words Frank Miller opens the collected edition of his most memorable contribution to comics, The Dark Knight Returns. The work presents perhaps, the most elegant solution to Miller’s problem. Miller makes Batman older, which in the parlance of graphic novels (née comics) means somewhere around fifty. Thus, we get a Batman, much older than Miller’s thirty, a Batman who worries about his knees when climbing up his bat-rope, who needs Bat-ifocals glasses to ensure that his batarangs hit their targets, and will probably need to go to Bat-cross for his medical needs. However, nothing in comics but the status quo lasts. DKR was only a few issues long and it was not long before Bruce Wayne stopped being a Dirty Old Man and became a dashing millionaire playboy again. The number one rule of comics: you get older, but Bruce Wayne will never collect Social Security.
It was only after college when I had some sense of what Frank Miller was writing about. I found that I could no longer identify with the teen sidekicks. My life had passed them by and unless their emotional plight hit some type of universal cord, I just could not identify with them. Yes, it could be exciting to see Robin fight a Yeti in the rocky mountains of Tibet, but in the end I could not care about his fights with his father or the bad grades he got because he was out fighting crime. Even for comics, it seemed trivial. I had my B.A., was working a crappy administrative job at UCLA, and was hopping that I would get into graduate school so that said job would be over. Robin was fifteen, worrying about getting his driver license, and was hopping the Teen Titans would ask him to join. I was simply too old to be hanging out with the Boy Wonder. I had Big Boy concerns.
But, if comics eventually make you feel old because you outgrow the characters, things get even worse when you realize that your mastery over the storylines has grown out of date. Every 10 years DC Comics does what fans call retconning, meaning that they retroactively change their company wide continuity; they change the narrative past. Small retconning is common place in comics to allow for creative growth, however every ten years it seems DC attempts to do it in a comprehensive way. Since DC Comics overhauled their line last year I’ve found that things I could recall with a frightening level of encyclopedic detail – things such as Superman’s origin story – have been, if not fundamentally altered, significantly tweaked. Now, if you asked me to give you a description of what Krypton was like, I honestly could not tell you with any veracity. This is after a lifetime of reading Superman comics. Things I used to know, I don’t know anymore. What really makes you feel old as a comics is fan is not growing older than the perpetually young heroes of your childhood, but that comics companies force an odd form of senility upon you. It’s nerdy, fictitious Alzheimer’s and I don’t know my way around the House of Mystery.
