Rating: 
Summary: Weird and disappointing
Review: Let me start by saying Miller's original work, "The Dark Knight Returns," is one of the best pieces of Batman literature. It was a fantastic alternate-future story and its art was beautiful. Now we've got a sequel (with a [bad] title, I might add) that takes place three years later. The time setting is irrelevant because the art is so ugly, you can't even tell this is Gotham City. Somehow or another, Braniac and Lex Luthor have taken control of the world with a US President who is really a hollogram. All of the heroes, except Superman, have gone into hiding or imprisonment. Did I miss something? This obviously didn't happen as a result of Dark Knight Returns, so what gives? Superman gets a major beat down from the other heroes and even though I'm not a big Superman fan, I don't understand why he's being beaten up by Batman and the rest. I am only giving this [...] three stars because this is issue #1 and the first time I read this, I thought issues 2 and 3 would be better. I was so wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: dk 2
Review: A truly worthy sequel which says a lot if you read and loved the first. I expected to hate it thinking it was something of a cash cow but Miller has played a blinder
Rating:
Summary: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Review: People must realize that this is not the original nor can it live up to it. The original book was THE definitive bat-book, so dont expect the greatest batman story ever. Frank Miller hasnt done a bad job so far as so many uneducated folks have slandered his work here. Yes the artwork leaves something to be desired and the book still hasnt come out with its third and final instalment, due in October. But realize, Miller is taking a different take on not just batman, but several different DC characters. I cant say too much since the third book isnt out yet, but i will say that so far Frank has done a good job as he always does and i salute him. If you loved dark knight this book is a nice addition along with year one which i also HIGHLY recomend.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbelievable disappointment
Review: In what has to be the biggest disappointment this year (with Wolverine: Origin running a close second), Frank Miller has turned in 2/3 of his weakest story and art ever. Miller publicly expressed ambiguous feelings over the recognition he got for his work on Batman and other characters that he did not create. Given his notorious contrarian attitude, I could almost believe he was daring the comic-reading public to declare the emperor has no clothes. This book has a weak, uninspired story largely designed to depict as many DC characters in decaying senescence as possible. The art literally appears to have been faxed in. To add insult to injury, the last issue is late (not that I will be buying it). Miller's true talent is better showcased in his recent historical work "300," which is everything that DK2 is not.
Rating:
Summary: DC Comics should be ashamed of themselves.
Review: When I read the first dark Knight story by Miller some years ago. It was a rather unquie take on the Batman story. Dark and violent but also very human in it's story approach. Now almost fifteen years later we have the sequal and brother does it make for lousy reading. Batman and Superman come across as old/selfish men, and there is a lot of R-rated movie violence in this book that seem to have been written solely to make money. I think DC Comics and Frank Miller should be ashammed of themselves for this book and they both should wash their mouths out with soap.
Rating:
Summary: Most Disappointing
Review: I love Miller's work as a writer and an artist much as the next guy, but i felt this was a bit...sloppy. It seemed more like an experimentation of his style then anything. The art made it very difficult to make out what was happening in a panel. I also felt like it was just throwing other DC characters in to just see how Frank Miller would draw them. As a younger reader I was expecting more of this because I was a child when The Dark Knight Returns came out and always hearing about how good it and Watchmen were, I was excited to jump off from the sequel. I was, however, severly disapointed. I did not buy the rest of the issues in this series.
Rating: 
Summary: "Let's see how much money we can make off the original."
Review: ... Its not well written and the huge splash pages seem like an excuse to extend a story that could have easily been told in one issue to three so that the DC could maximize profits. Sure, the art is pretty good; a little overly CGed for my taste, but that could just be me. Its that it doesn't have the grime and grit of the original series that really drew the reader in to this recreated world of a defeated Dark Knight detective. The whole story seems contrived: Bats beats up on Supes.... again. Seemingly to show that, yep, Batman is still ... bad ... and Big Blue is still a dumb wimp.
No new territory is gone over in terms of characterization, which is what made the original so fascinating. In the original DKR, Miller truly broke Batman's character into his component parts, studied them, and showed the readers how Bruce would react in this futuristic distopia.
Don't bother with this one kiddies, its not worth the [money].
Rating:
Summary: Its unbelievable that anybody would even agree to print this
Review: Like many others here, the Dark Knight Returns turned me onto comic books. Its tight panels, with their amazingly detailed artwork, and how they compressed a huge and complex story into a mere 200 pages, I'd just never seen anything so cool in my life. Afterwards, I instantly started buying comics in the form of the trade paperbacks, until I got Knightfall Part One, and decided I still liked them, but just enough to pay the kind of bucks it takes to get them.
Let me say, DK2 is quite possibly the worse thing I have ever spent money on. The fact that the average right now is four stars makes me extremely cynical about everything I read on Amazon.com. Maybe the people who scored this high were just too exuberated and happy to get their hands on the thing to realize this, but this book was terrible. First off, the plot is ridiculous. They take the Anti-Gov. undertones from the first book and magnify them by about fifty times and then pound them into your face. The idea is that Batman has sat back, and watched everything go to straight to HELL! (as he says) Apparently, Batman thought three years would be a good amount of time to wait. In those three years, Lex Luthor became president and forced Superman, who now loves Wonder Woman, to do his bidding, and Robin became the next Catgirl just for kicks, and now Batman has an army, and he goes and starts liberating old superheroes.
Basically, this thing is filled with plot but all of its fruity and paper THIN. The first DK was packed, there was a ton of dialogue and the story moved at a nice pace and was very coherent. None of that is here. This book is a sloppy incoherent mess. All it is a show piece for a bunch of old super heroes to get together and basically get drawn once or twice.
And on top of that, this thing looks so terrible I don't know how they got anyone to even print it. There are parts of this where you literally can't tell what the hell something is suppossed to be. In one scene, I was looking at a gun for a moment before I realized it was a guys fingers. There are many scenes where characters are drawn without faces. In one scene, a mechanical frog appears in a panel out of fudging nowhere and then we never see it again. Its like Miller just drew whatever the hell he felt like and then pushed it out the door. It has absolutely none of the polish of DK, it all looks like a first draft. Add to that absolutely terrible coloring. This thing looks like it was coloer by Frank Millers kid, not by the same person who performed so brillantly in the original DK. There are times where there is actual pixelization, but it looks terrible. Lots of the computer effects look like screen savers or something that could've been performed on the SNES.
Add to that, SPOILER ALERT! but old Batman himself doesn't show up till the very end. This brings me to the last point I'll make. This thing is filled with splash pages (I think that's what the're called, when there's one panel that takes up the whole page). In the old DK, these always wound up being excellent. But here, they're just laughable. When we finally see Batman, its in a splash page, but he looks so...poorly drawn, that I was almost started laughing... until I realized the joke was on me. All I got then was angry. The only good thing I can say about this is that it doesn't ruin DK. Probably because its so different and spastic looking that its impossible to imagine it as the sequel to that rich, colorful world that old Frank Miller created. And by the way, hate to ramble on, but having the first issue end just like the last book of DKR is pretty weak. Umm, I think we've all seen that before.
Rating:
Summary: You must be joking..!
Review: This latest offering by Frank Miller is an absolute disgrace!
One can't help wondering why he bothered to produce such a piece of poorly-scripted, badly drawn utter tripe as DK2!
The first series was marvellous, magnificent even, with a darkly sombre mood and a revelation behind what makes Batman tick.
We see the almost spiritual symbol of the Bat that drives him beyond the endurance and capability of his body.
We see his obsessive quest for justice and the way it draws others into its web.In short, we see probably the most mature and best rendition of the Batman mythos ever produced. And, then there was the sequel...
The story is so far beyond ridiculous that it is painful to read. (
Even the art was bad! The first series was gritty enough to impart a sensation of realism and believability. The art was stylised in such a way to emphasise physical aspects - such as larger fists etc - which made for some interesting images but it worked!
The art in the sequel is just [awful]! It is badly drawn and honestly looks like it was done in an amazing hurry to satisfy some impatient editor.
There are so many examples I could give of why this was so bad but it would waste precious time and I would hate to have to relive those terrible moments.
The 'beating up of Superman' was a poor rip-off of the first one which was inspired, emotional, and...fantastic.
Oh, it's just too terrible to relate... Do not buy this! Re-read the first series and try to pretend he never did a second.
Rating:
Summary: It was inevitable. But did it have to be SO bad???
Review: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (TDKR)was a watershed moment in my life. I had never really read comic books as a kid, but as I flipped through Miller's 1986 masterpiece at a friend's house I became engrossed in this larger than life archtypal myth and its central character, the tormented and driven Bruce Wayne. Thus started a lifelong love of the Batman as a literary character. I have since become a TDKR evangelist, pushing the book on people who would never have picked up a comic book on their own, assuring them that it would be one of the 5 best STORIES they would ever read. So one could imagine my surprise when I first saw Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes again in a comic book store 15 years later. Of course I bought it, but I had bad feelings about it from the start. First, TDKR is the capstone of the Batman mythos. The story ends the legend so perfectly as, finally after 40 years, Bruce Wayne conquers the obsessive demon within himself that drives him to such extreme behaviour. He's finally successfully integrated the pain/trauma of his childhood into his personality and has found some measure of lasting peace. As such, Wayne should NEVER don the cape and cowl again. If Miller wanted to write a story about Wayne, and his army of former street toughs to "bring sense to the world," THAT would be an acceptable storyline. But the Batman is dead. GONE. Never to arise again. Wayne & crew live "beyond the burnt remains of a crimefighter who's time has long since passed." Second, I'm just not into the whole Frank Miller government paranoia thing. A critical element to TDKR was that it was not really the government, as such, that demanded the decline of the superheroes. It was the American public. It was, in Clark's words, "The endless envy of those not blessed..." that doomed the uberfolk. Society changed. It wasn't that the big bad government forced the superheroes out of their roles. And with the introduction of the whole evil government element, you've eliminated what made Superman so cool (or frightening) in the first place. Clark saw that society was changing and that, as such, his role would have to change. He made an affirmative decision to become an agent of the United States government and to work for it as a "licensed superhero." He made a moral choice which stands in contrast to the choices made by Wayne. But in DKII, all moral choice is removed from the superheroes. Clark isn't working for the government as a result of the decisions he's made. He, and all the heroes, are being held hostage by the "big, bad government." In DKII, Superman is absolved of any guilt that he must bear because he has no choice. Otherwise, people in the bottle city of Kandor will suffer. This makes him a much less interesting character, and diminshes the heroic nature of the Batman's moral decision to resist. ... Clark's defeat at the hands of Wayne at the end of TDKR works because it is the climactic battle of the storyline. It's not simply a fight between Superman and the Batman, but it's the final struggle between two ethoses, between law and justice and between the conflicting elements of Wayne's own personality. And, once resolved, the Batman's raison d'etre vanishes and he dies. And on a mere formal level, Wayne is able to defeat Clark because he's clever and has a lot of unexpected tricks up his sleeve. I find it difficult to believe that Superman, having had his ... handed to him before, would be quite so cavalier about confronting Wayne again. (He is supposed to be a genius you know) On top of that, Miller has seemed to have lost any gift he had for storytelling. TDKR builds to the appropriate climax. But DKII just seems rushed. And one of the great things about Miller in TDKR was his innate sense of filmic style. There are classic film-style *edits* in TDKR which move the story brilliantly. Like the sequence where the last frame on one page contains a newsreader claiming that "the sightings match the description of the Batman. Or at least the impression he was known to make..." Then, forcing you to turn the page, Miller hits you with a full page image of the Batman leaping through the air. Truly "the impression he was known to make..." But DKII is just a mish-mash of images with no contrast between them to move the narrative forward. Perhaps it was inevitable, given the success of TDKR, that there would be a sequel, but Miller should have left it alone.
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