Dark Knight Case

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Then again, a comic strip contains pictures and provides those words for you. The Dark Knight Returns is a popular comic book still today. The comics give the reader a visual of action, drama, and fear, just like watching the movie would do but in phases of panels. The panels are not back-to-back in the essence of time, yet they are minutes forward, and they have great drawings of showing what may happen in the next panel. The close reading helps the reader understand the story, characters, and characteristics of each character. The action keeps the reader involved but with a keen eye. There are some literal and obvious evaluations, but some the reader has to be creative and that just makes it more fun.

This comic contains action to the reader right off the bat just because of its known name, The Dark Knight. But even if the reader had no idea what this was about when he/she started to read the panels, they would immediately get a gist of what is meant. When the reader flips to this page, the first noticeable figure is a white man in a blue jacket with a large shotgun. As a reader, I would figure that on this page there would probably be some action, maybe shooting, or a strategic plan leading up to action in the future pages.

Somebody is telling the story in this comic strip, but the reader would not know that by just looking at the pictures without reading the captions. In comics like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, people can most of the time very easily distinguish what is happening by just looking at the panels without reading. Although in the smaller comics we can do that, if we do that too much and then transfer to a comic like The Dark Knight, we can easily lose the plot of the story. The text in the first panel lets the reader know that he is telling someone the story that the panels ahead are about to show. Another reason a reader should carefully observe the text, is for reasons like: if you were to look at the pictures and “notice” the text is there, they could think that those are actually quotations from the figures in the panels. The truth is that they are still the story teller’s words, that decide to show the story rather than show a blank face speaking it.

I think the reason that the white man with Batman’s symbol painted on his face was the main image on the page was because that person was a very relevant figure at this point in the story. By looking at this one page, we do not necessarily know that, but we can infer that it may be an accurate assumption. Why else would an image of someone be that large if they are not an important person during this point in the story? When we look at this page and this page only without reading any of the rest of the book, we can tell that this one man has a lot to do with this story. Then what is his name? They refer to him as S.O.B in the strip. Now the first thing that comes to mind