Bleeding Into Reality

The panel design in The Dark Knight Returns has been a focus for several of our classes, and rightfully so. The splash pages are both dynamic and physically improbable, and the layout breaks free from the traditional grid system into a new, sprawling narrative where panels extend behind each other, bleed of the page, and no longer completely confine the action as the panels in older comics would. By having the panels extend to the end of the page, the scenes are less directly cropped. Cropping has been used as an artistic technique to flatten scenes and make them more two-dimensional and removed from reality. By leaving panels and pages without any cropped border, Miller and Varley create a more visually immersive space for the reader, where the scene presented becomes their reality. This fits with the idea that the Batman ideology is more realistic and approachable to readers. He, just like readers, has no external powers or abilities, but rather is a peer- someone with flaws, challenges, trials, and failures. The crop, an example of which is on pages 114-115, brings our reality in contact with that of Batman's- it effectively merges the two worlds. Miller and Varley's use of the crop allow us to identify more with, and potentially understand, Bruce Wayne.