(2) Third to last panel, after Bruce has lowered his eyes. When he looks up into the light, with the X across his face, you know that Batman is looking up, not Bruce.

And the answering machine messages from Harvey, Clark and Selina are just great story development squeezed into the corners of the scene…

It is also interesting to me that one begins to see the styles of Miller and Janson are moving in different directions. Janson’s inks are less careful, less controlled here, than on their Daredevil run. While Miller may have left a lot of room for interpretation on the DD run, here his penciling is very controlled, and Janson can just barely reign himself in. The coloring by Lynn Varley should also be mentioned, as with the strong use of positive and negative spaces a lesser colorist might have felt the need to fill in the blanks. Varley instead is more restrained, giving us a palette similar to watercolors, instead of bold acrylics.

Still, the story telling is phenomenal, which may be what makes Miller’s later Batman works so disappointing. He goes from having such a strong understanding of the character and moves almost into self parody. His Spawn / Batman story just felt wrong, character wise, and All Star B & R moved even further into a caricature of the Dark Knight persona.

He may always have been the GD Batman- but he never would have said it, instead showing it through his deed and action.

Hard to believe it’s been 25 years.

Also, I love Superman’s message. It effortlessly tells us the relationship between the two.

Nice!

Although All Star Batman and Robin is just terrible. So was The Spirit movie

Possibly the most important contribution Miller made to the Batman mythos (the image from Batman: Year One, of young Bruce kneeling in the spotlight between his parents would be the other one)

Miller manages to show the reader how things look from inside Bruce Wayne’s mind. The view from in there is pretty terrifying. Miller focuses the flash-back to the murders on small details: the aforementioned pearls, the father’s protective hand and the shell casing being expelled. Paradoxically, by showing less the reader a sense of the enormity if the crime.

If you follow this emotions, then you notice Bruce Wayne moving through the stage of the Kubler-Ross model. First, is denial (“…just a movie, that’s all it is”), followed by anger (the grinding teeth as he watches the news), followed by bargaining (“You cannot stop me with wine or vows or weight of age …”), then depression (the answering machine panels) and finally acceptance (the Bat crashing through the window). That juxtaposition takes the reader directly to core idea of Batman: that grief takes human beings to extreme places.

No other medium could have achieved the same effect as easily. The montage effect was borrowed from the movies, but I don’t think an actor could’ve played Bruce Wayne the Miller has him acting here. A novel couldn’t have given you the same impact as the visual. It is still an amazing, shocking and unmatched piece of, I guess, cartooning. You can’t read it and snicker about Batman ever again.

Damn, Miller was good back then!