Headscratchers / Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

• Why didn't the Soviets enjoy that their first nuke caused a nuclear winter to try and attack again? More so if they knew it had neutralized Superman.
  • That would have ensured retaliation (that nuke wouldn't have taken out the entire US nuclear arsenal). Add to that the very real risk that being at ground zero of a nuclear blast was only enough to temporarily neutralize Superman (as indeed turned out to be the case), and it is more than a little likely that more cautious elements in the Soviet leadership realized that this was not the time to escalate things further.
    • The astronaut writing a letter to his wife actually does make the point that the Coldbringer nuke left the US defenseless and open to a full nuclear strike that would have no retaliation (Batman himself says that the nuke had an EMP effect equal to a few dozens of nukes exploding all over the place), and that the only thing stopping it would be the people making that decision behaving like human beings. That's exactly what happened, the Russians wanted to give a strong warning to the US government (which apparently did work, as that particular plot thread about the imminent nuclear war ends right there), not to annihilate hundreds of millions of people.
  • A better question is why they'd launch a warhead specifically designed to cause a nuclear winter in the first place. Since nuclear winter would necessarily be a global phenomenon they'd be doing just as much damage to themselves. Creating what's basically a doomsday device to serve as a deterrent might make at least a little sense. Launching it in a fit of pique over a defeat in a proxy war that was embarrassing but hardly an existential threat doesn't make any sense at all.

• Does the Bats actually shoot the thug who takes Nigma's kid hostage? Or does he only shoot the wall next to his head? Because there is a bullet hole in the wall after that but none visible in the thug. Yet the current Doesn't Like Guns example write-up says he killed the thug (whatever happened to his no-killing rule). I am confused.
  • The panel certainly doesn't make it clear...I've always read as Batman non-fatally shooting him since he takes the baby from the Mutant without a struggle, although he certainly could've just shot by his head to scare him into giving up.
    • In the animated film, he shoots the thug in the hand only and it's enough to disable her.
  • There's a quite obvious blood splatter on the wall which seems to suggest he shot her somewhere in the chest. Chances are, she's dead, Jim.
    • When I first read the story, I'd assumed that Batsy had fired a bullet so close, so Green Arrow-precise to the Mutant's body, that he (or she, I forget) simply fainted in fear.
    • It's quite obvious that even if Batman had shot the kid, it was non-fatal. Otherwise, it would contradict the later plot point of him being (wrongfuly) accused of his first murder.
  • Word of God confirmed it as a nonfatal shoulder shot.
  • Nygma's kid? It was the son of the Ridley family.

• I've always wondered why it is that Batman gets more and more deformed as the series goes on. In the first issue, in his blue-and-greys, he's practically Neal Adams' svelte acrobat. But by the time he's taking on the Mutant leader, he's a stubby pile of muscle. One could say that this is an artistic choice, but since all the other character designs are so consistent, it feels like there should be something to this.
  • There is. He wears down on the outside at the same pace, and in the same way, that he wears down on the inside.

• Why, oh why does Bats (spoilers ahead) take the SOBs and former Mutants to become his army. These are the same people who bombed a poor waitress on the subway, kidnapped a toddler, used napalm to break up a Three Card Monty, cut off a clerk's fingers because he wouldn't defend himself, etc. I mean Rob and Don make it pretty clear that they were going to make a pass on the underage Carrie until she, in disguise, told them she was the Mutant Leader's. These are the people Batman trusts to take care of Gotham when he is gone?
  • As Bruce put it, the Mutant Leader was a strong presence and his gang worshiped him because of it and followed his example, Authority Equals Asskicking or something like that. Some of them formed their own gang in his image after he pulled a Bane on the guy at the mud hole. Now that Batman's taken them under his wing, he can mold them to fit his example.
  • There is a strong "What makes people go bad is a lack of strong parenting/moral figures in their life" message in a lot of Miller's stuff. Compare and contrast to how clinical psychology is portrayed in this series. Obviously your mileage will seriously vary on how much you buy it.
  • "I realized it was too big for me to judge. He was too big." A big part of The Dark Knight Returns' ethos is that the big picture requires short term ethical compromises, and it is the role of great men and leaders to make those judgement calls. The mutants are criminals, but as Bruce points out to Clark, so are masked vigilantes. Gotham doesn't need prisons full of teens and young adults, it needs an inspiring and immutable symbol to push people into action.
  • The implication seems to be that the kids who form the Mutants and later the Sons of Batman aren't so much evil as they are extremely lost, undirected, and malleable. As a result, they gravitate to any strong personality that presents itself- and in Miller's eyes, Gotham/American society is too soft or weak to provide that. So they're drawn to figures like the Mutant Leader, both because of his physical strength and because they see his violent rejection of social law and order as moral strength. Basically, the Mutant Leader is an ubermensch- he creates new values for them in a world that's fallen into a moral vacuum. Batman defeats the Mutant Leader and the kids' attention shifts to him, and he's confident that he can provide a strong enough pull- with a little work- to keep the kids under control and useful.

• Was that Humpty Dumpty helping out the Joker, I know he is supposed to be good with inventions.
  • Well, Humpty Dumpty debuted in the comics a few years after Dark Knight Returns. It was originally intended to be some crazy ass dude who liked inventing but when DC looked back at the issue and saw the similarities between Dumpty and the crazy dude, they said that was Dumpty.
    • Then they're ignoring their own story. His name is Abner (as Batman reveals when he and Robin check out his apartment). So unless they reveal Abner as Humpty Dumpty's real first name, I doubt this retcon can mesh.
    • It's a little confusing. Although he's identified as Abner in the voice credits for Part 2, storyboards identify him as "Humpty," and director Jay Oliva also refers to him as Humpty in the DVD/BluRay special features.
    • Maybe Abner was Humpty Dumpty's real name all along. Presumably his parents didn't name him Humpty.

• The whole first part of Part 2. Why was Batman disguised as an old woman? Why was there a topless muscle bound female Nazi? What connection did she have to the Joker?
  • Bruno seemed to be an old henchman of Joker's, and Batman was disguised to get the drop on her before interrogating her about Joker.
  • As said above, Batman was in disguise to get close to the baddies. As to why a topless Neo-Nazi woman... she's a crazy Neo-Nazi. End of story.
  • Bruno worked for The Joker. You can't expect someone with that past to not be insane (assuming he/she wasn't already crazy to begin with).
    • Considering the life expectancy of Joker's goons, you'd have to be pretty crazy just to take the job in the first place. Being beaten up by Batman and left for the cops is generally the least bad thing that can happen to them.
  • For that matter, how did Bruce, a tall and muscular man, manage to pass himself off as a relatively small elderly woman? I know he's supposed to be a master of disguise but this is really pushing it.
  • To answer your first two questions, it's been lost to time and believing his own hype but Miller intended TDKR to be taken both seriously but have a lot of satire as well. So why is Bruce fighting a big breasted Neo Nazi in an old woman costume? Because it's funny.

• If Batman had Powered Armor the whole time, why didn't he bust it out for the Mutant Leader or Joker?
  • Ego.
  • Batman still has his "no kill" rule, regardless of who writes him. The powered armor would have been overkill and would have made it easy for Bruce to step over the line and kill the mutant leader or the Joker with a single punch. This is also why he uses rubber bullets in the Batmobile and doesn't just run over the mutants or their leader or the Joker.
  • Who said he had it "the whole time"? There's a three-month skip between Parts 1 and 2. Also, the armor's almost certainly power intensive, possibly prohibitively so for day-to-day use.
  • In the case of the Mutant leader, he's not just trying to defeat one thug in that fight, he's trying to put the fear of Batman into the other Mutants. Seeing their leader squished by Powered Armor isn't going to impress them nearly as much as seeing him bested by a man who has the courage to put his own life and body on the line. If he'd resorted to technology to thrash their old boss, the gang would have dismissed him as a "cheater" and picked a new leader from among their own ranks.
  • If Batman just wanted to take out the mutant leader he could have done it with his tank, or any number of other gadgets. He needed it to mean something.

• How is the Joker such a good shot with a batarang in his eye? Surely that would effect his depth perception?
  • Here's one for the animated version of that: how can he still use his arms? He didn't take any batarangs to the shoulders, but they had to have hit bones or muscles that supports the shoulders.
    • It's the Joker. He doesn't care about pain or worsening his wounds.
  • Sometimes it's easier to aim looking through one eye.
    • Proper shooting technique is to keep both eyes open but concentrate on your dominant eye.
  • Binocular vision is only one of several factors in depth perception. Losing one eye doesn't affect it nearly as much as you might think.

• I find it hard to believe that one nuke could do...whatever it did, to Superman. This is a guy who's flown into the sun like it was a walk in the park, for crying out loud! If anything, the nuke should have tickled!
  • Superman is energised by the sun - that overcomes any damage it would have done from heat and radiation. The same is not true of nukes.
  • Technically Superman is energised by a certain kind of radiation: solar radiation in the yellow end of the spectrum or higher. The problem is that the radiation released by the nuke is no different from any form of radiation created by a high energy explosion - lots of visible light at varying ends of the spectrum and plenty of high energy gamma rays, x-rays and low energy microwaves and so forth. Unfortunately fiction writers tend to overlook the fact that all light and radiation has the same properties, no matter where it comes from.
  • Also keep in mind that this story was written with early post-crisis Superman, back then, he wasn't powerful to shrug off planetary destruction level events like he is now.

• How is Batman's new Mutant army going to help him bring back order without guns? Sure, Batman can handle cops, army troops, thugs, etc because he's had years of training and experience under his belt, in addition to his impressive arsenal of weaponry. Batman, in the short time that he has left on the Earth does not have enough time to train all of the Mutants into the killing machine that he is. And if he doesn't want them to use guns, what does he expect them to use? Batarangs? With his cave destroyed, I doubt he could make more of them in such numbers. Even if he did, Batarangs only work if you have body armor and ninja training to back it up. Seems to me, the Bat-Mutants are going to get shot dead if they try to fight the Army or the cops. Also, two of the Mutants definitely made a pass on Carrie Kelely early on in the story and have been known to brutally rape and murder people. Why would Batman let Carrie anywhere near those thugs?
  • Defeat Means Friendship, apparently. (Plus, Carrie is capable of handling herself. Did you read her parents' dialogue? They hardly even remember they have a kid. She'd need to learn to look after herself.) They could use tasers or slingshots untill they get a good enough understanding of the Batarangs. Plus, Bruce could just tell him which methods he used to train so they could go learn themselves. Plus, he's Batman. (Or, was.)
  • Also, the cave wasn't destroyed; Batman monologues about how it goes for miles.
  • Batman's Mutant army was not meant to take on the army or the cops, it was meant to take on criminals and quell the riots. For the former, they did receive the necessary training later. For the latter... Do you think there's any Gothamite who would have the balls to say no to Batman, especially when he's backed by hundreds of guys who used to have the city begging them to be spared before the very guy they're now supporting defeated their leader?

• So, ten years on from the time he retired, Batman is old and stiff at times and Catwoman of all people has gotten old and overweight... the Joker spends a decade as basically a vegetable, and is still just as physically dangerous as he was when he stopped?
  • Off-screen rehab? Or it's more like Batman's lack of training in the 10 year gap, beating from the Mutant Leader, and exhaustion fighting the cops earlier weakened him enough to make things fair.
    • This. Almost every instance of physical combat between the Batman and Joker usually ends pretty quickly in the former's favor. The fact that Joker got some stab wounds and gunshot wounds to Batman is a testament to his older age and decline.

• The Joker's Thanatos Gambit is a little wonky, given even if Batman straight up twisted his head off, it's a clear case of self-defense (When Batman breaks the Joker's neck, the Joker is repeatedly stabbing him in the guts in full view of witnesses and in defense of others. It might be handwaved by Crapsack World and Yindel's Lawful Neutral state... but still.
  • But still what? The Gotham PD were using lethal force to try and apprehend Batman prior to him snapping the Jokers neck, and the US government wanted him shut down or killed for disobeying them and making them look bad. The only person who seemed to even slightly care that Batman killed the Joker was Yindel, and that came across as more an excuse for her anti-Batman agenda anyway. Might even be why the Joker went on such an enormous spree after coming back. He could see Batman wasn't going to be around much longer and wanted to get that last laugh in.

• How old is Bruno?!! She looks like she's in her 20s or 30s in All Star Batman and Robin. Is she in her early 50s in TDKR?
  • All Star is set in a new timeline, separate from TDKR but taking a lot of elements from it since they were both written by Frank Miller. In TDKR she was implied, or at least insulted by claiming she was, a post-op trans woman (Again, Frank Miller). However by the time he came around to writing TDKR Miller seems to have gotten a taste for large bosom-ed Aryan woman to ask her character to be drawn as straight female. Either that or Miller's art is just horrible when portraying any woman who isn't small and nubile.

• Were those 2 dolls sentient or robotic? They sure looked alive and aware of things.
  • Yes, they were sentient, or at least ridiculously close to it. Flying sentient robots and mind-controlling lipstick were standard fare for silver age supervillians, of which Joker is king. Part of the comic's deconstruction is transplanting ideas like this into a darker, more realistic setting.

• Where are Bruno's nipples? You can see a pair of swastikas on her breasts, but there are no nipples...
  • They're swastika-shaped pasties, maybe?
    • Yeah, I always assumed the tape or whatever the swastikas were made of was covering her nipples.

• Really, who the heck in Gotham City thinks that going to a live interview featuring the Joker is a good idea to begin with? All Gothamites know perfectly well that the Joker is a deranged lunatic who has murdered millions of people throughout his career and go on to David Endochrine's late night show to see him because Dr. Bartholomew Wolper said that "he had reformed"? Are that many Gothamites that stupid or what?
  • According to this author, yes. Consider the media prioritizing popular culture and viewer opinions over the astronaut reporting on an incoming nuclear strike. This story repeatedly portrays humanity as willingly laying their own heads on the chopping block for monsters, with only outliers like The Batman willing to make an actual difference.
  • Well, he had been largely out of the public eye for ten years. Although the fact that anyone was willing to let Joker appear on a talk show in person, with minimal security to boot, suggests that many Gothamites are literally Too Dumb to Live.

• Is Dr. Bartholomew Wolper an idiot? Why does he say that Batman created the members of his rogues gallery if, as far anyone can recall, unless you count The Killing Joke as canon, Batman never caused any of his villains' misfortunes. The Riddler turned to crime just because he was bored, Killer Croc had a bad childhood, the Scarecrow grew obsessed with fear because of enduring bullying and mistreatment, etc. Even Harvey Dent turned evil because Sal Maroni threw acid on his face, and Batman wasn’t responsible there!
  • The same way the World Security Council or whomever it was blamed the Avengers for New York, Sokovia, D.C., the Wakanda embassy... The existence of superheroes causes supervillains to challenge them. Vision even notes the increase in super-threats since the formation of the Avengers. As Gordon says in Batman Begins, it's escalation. "We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds... And, you're wearing a mask. Jumping off rooftops."
  • Wolper is a grifter who latched onto the Joker to make money. Book sales, talk show appearances, etc. He'll say anything that'll bolster his profile, and his whole pitch is that he's the miracle doctor who cured the Joker. So he's got to find someone else to blame for Joker's villainous deeds. He's so caught up in the acclaim and fortune he's getting that it never occurs to him that it might be a bad idea to pal around with a murderous psychopath.
• How exactly does Batman to break the Joker's neck in a way that it paralyzes him but doesn't kill him?
  • It happens by accident in car crashes, people do survive broken necks. If you have the Batman's knowledge of human anatomy it appears you can do it on purpose.
  • At that instant, Batman might've been angry enough to actually *try* and kill the Joker intentionally but could only manage to paralyze him due to his injuries.

• When the Joker gasses the studio, why doesn't David Endochrine or the guests try to escape through the entrance zone used by the Joker and Dr. Wolper to enter into the stage if the main doors were locked? The Joker was able to lock the main doors, but he couldn't have locked the door to the room where he and Dr. Wolper waited until the show started because then Dr. Wolper would have found it suspicious...
  • It seems as though the gas was too fast-acting and spread through the studio too quick for anyone to do anything but die. We can also put it down to freezing in panic.

• In the animated film, why do a couple scream in horror when Batman finally snaps the Joker's neck? Okay, they likely thought Batman had killed the Joker, but rather than acting like "Oh no! Batman killed the Joker! He's a criminal! Let's go call the cops!", shoudn't they have been like "Yeah, Batman! Kill that psycho once and for all!"?
  • I think they are just overwhelmed by what was happening and reacted accordingly. Also the couple may not have known who or what Batman was.
  • I'd go with the idea that they were just terrified by what happened. Keep in mind that some modern adaptations of Batman note that he relies on the "urban legend" angle to reinforce his mystique and leave people unsure what he actually is, so some people think of him as a potentially supernatural entity rather than just a guy in a batsuit. The average person is not going to react well to the idea that the bat-like figure who goes around beating people up just broke someone's neck in front of them, even if they know that Batman isn't a killer most of the time.
• Why in the world would someone stop Gordon from shooting the Mutant Leader after the latter killed the Mayor?
  • After the mayor's death, he wasn't immediately threatening anyone else. It would be very hard to legally justify shooting him under the circumstances.

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