'KNIGHT' MOVES In 1985 and 1986, a pre-Sin City Frank Miller invented the Batman character — and the world of comics — with his four-part series The Dark Knight Returns. Miller's Batman is a middle-aged, bitter, obsessive warrior who comes out of retirement to cleanse Gotham City of crime. In the second installment, Dark Knight Triumphant (above), Batman fights a vicious street gang called the Mutants, aided by a new Robin, a girl named Carrie Kelly. Other chapters find Batman battling old enemies (Two-Face, the Joker) and old friends (Superman). The series was apocalyptically bleak, unflinchingly violent, and clearly not for kids. Along with Alan Moore's Watchmen and Art Spiegelman's Maus, both published around the same time as Miller's saga, Dark Knight launched the graphic novel boom and showed mainstream readers that comics could be an adult medium. It also made possible Tim Burton's dark, operatic big-screen take on Batman a couple years later.