Book Four: The Dark Knight Falls, featuring Superman on the cover.
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is 1986 comic story about Batman coming out of retirement as a superhero. Superman is featured heavily in books three and four.
Summary[]
Characters[]
Publishing history[]
Batman: The Dark Knight was originally released as a four issue limited series in 1986. It has since been published in collected editions as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the title of the first issue. The story now is very often referred to in the media as just The Dark Knight Returns or by its creators, simply Dark Knight.
Batman using a power suit to fight Superman
Trivia[]
- Design of Superman's S-shield during fight with Batman greatly resembles one of Earth-2 Superman (which can be see on Action Comics/cover gallery #52) directly inspired design of Superman (Henry Cavill)'s film series' S-shield.
- Iconic scene of Superman surviving nuclear blast becoming very thin and shriveled directly inspired similar scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. With notable differences being that in The Dark Knight Falls the rocket was specially designed to block the sun and to wipe out electronic, as well as to make area of damage inhabitable afterwards while sparing all industrial buildings. Unlike the film where Kal-El is revived by direct and unfiltered by Earth's athmosphere sunlight from space , in the comic he is revived by all green in area "giving him" sun energy (while also may be a hidden reference to original Jerry Siegel's concept of Superman's powers , in unreleased K-Metal from Planet Krypton, being result of Krypton galvanizing its people (who were super strong even on Krypton) with them, meaning that Superman fully assimilated and considers Earth as his home planet). Also in the comic Superman flew away from the blast while in the film the rocket exploded in close proximity while Superman was only "shielded" by Doomsday's body mass.
- Before this comic nuclear explosion dealt as much damage towards Superman as to be able a scar left by Kryptonite (as can be seen in Action Comics #239)
- Superman working with American Goverment on war efforts was inspired by original Earth-2 Superman, who was frequently depicted helping during many war conflict by either directly destroying enemies' vehicles and sometimes killing soldiers themeselves or by supplying troops with resources and shielding them from blasts. But in original comics Superman was acting mostly on his own agency sometimes even bringing friendly fire on himself by scared allies.
- This wasn't the first time Batman fought Superman on the pages of comics, previously their fights could be seen in World's Finest Comics #74, 95, 109, 122, 143, 153, 163, 176, 180, 182, 185, 186 and 187 (two parter), 195, 202, 258, 320 and in Justice League of America (1960) #63. [1]