NULL-MYTHS: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, THE GOLDEN CHILD (2019)

With most of the works I term "null-myths," it's easy for me to see how the artists involved messed up the symbolic discourse of something like a simple formula-tale. But with Frank Miller's newest work in his ongoing DARK KNIGHT RETURNS series, I have no idea what Miller was trying to accomplish.

The original DARK KNIGHT RETURNS from 1986, while not flawless, remains a monumental story, as well as signaling the irreversible movement of the superhero genre into the domain of adult, rather than juvenile, pulp. In 2001 Miller returned to that "future-Batman" universe and produced THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, which resembles nothing more than an artist tossing together a bunch of wild ideas into a semblance of story, though some critics liked STRIKES just because it was so brain-fried. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Brian Azzarello to produce THE DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE, which I asserted to be the closest thing one could get to Miller doing a Justice League story, and this was the first worthy successor to the original 1986 work. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Azzarello and John Romita Jr on the single-issue outing, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: THE LAST CRUSADE. This prequel to RETURNS purported to show some of the events that led up to the murder of Jason Todd.

GOLDEN CHILD begins a few years after MASTER RACE. Superman's daughter by Wonder Woman, Lara, is about the same, but the super-couple's son Jonathan is now perhaps five years old. Rather than displaying the talents of either parent, Jonathan possesses some non-specific mental powers, while he's drawn with receding hair, as if to give him a resemblance to all the "big-brained future men" that once populated pulp magazines and Silver Age comics. Superman is only briefly seen, and it's later explained that he and other adult heroes are off on some mission. Batman's heir Carrie Kelley still maintains the role of Batwoman. We later learn that the three youngsters are charged with keeping an eye on things, and for some reason that leads Lara and Jonathan to go floating around Gotham City, as Lara scorns the masses of humanity, much as she did in MASTER RACE.

A riot breaks out between political factions. One is a group of violent hoods wearing Joker-style costumes, one of whom shouts the slogan, "Buy American! Be American!" The other faction is not identified by anything but a couple of signs expressing dislike of Donald Trump, and they're getting the worst of the encounter until Batwoman and her cadre of erratically-garbed Bat-enforcers show up and kick butt. The Joker-goons flee.

So far, it sounds like the sort of thing that happens in Gotham City in any era. Then Lara and Batwoman converse in some Bat-habitat, and it's revealed that somehow this mundane fracas was organized by-- Darkseid, Ruler of Apokolips and the Guy Who Got His Thunder Stolen by Thanos. Neither heroine comments on the hoods' Joker-motif, but since they don't seem surprised when the Miller version of the Clown Prince is walking around, all alive again, I guess the reports of his earlier extinction were grossly exaggerated. And these two reigning DC villains have teamed up in order to-- elect Donald Trump????

Is there an alternate Earth on which someone could write a good satire based on this dippy concept? Anything is possible in the multiverse. But Miller didn't write one, in part because he drops whatever critique he has of the Presidential candidate and zooms right to the Big Honking Battle-Scene. Joker flees when Lara and Jonathan show up at the campaign HQ and attack Darkseid, who apparently decided to visit Earth with none of his usual Apokolips retinue. An odd sidebar: Jonathan grabs a couple of midget-looking guys in Joker-makeup and Lara tells her brother to drop both midgets-- who launched no attack-- from a great height. Are they robots, like the animated dolls Joker used in the 1986 story? Who knows? (We don't see Jonathan do so, anyway.)

After some super-power exchanges, Jonathan uses his undefined powers to zap Darkseid while Lara turns his own omega-beams against him, and the villain seems to get disintegrated. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

For three pages the disembodied spirit of Darkseid shunts around the cosmos for a while, meditating on his status as "the end of all that is" and marshaling his power to destroy the Earth-- which I think he could have done a long time ago if that was his motivation, and without rigging any elections.

Then, as if to compensate for all the cosmic chaos, Batwoman spends the next eight pages with "street-level" action, taking down the Joker and his thugs. Then Batwoman hears Donald Trump broadcasting a speech that's apparently having a hypnotic effect on the populace, just as Darkseid did briefly in a separate scene. (So, if Darkseid and Joker could do that the whole time, why were they bothering with the ballot boxes?) Batwoman jams the hypnotic signal, and Darkseid just happens to manifest the next moment, blowing up a few city streets. 

Lara shows up, and the two super-beings fight for a couple of pages before Darkseid casts his hypnotic mojo over her, his speech implying that he's got plans for her nubile body. Jonathan hurls another humongous power-zap at the overlord, freeing Lara, and then--

And then Darkseid kneels on the ground while Batwoman shows up and gives a speech about how the spirit of free-thinking mankind will never die. Or something like that. And that's the end of the story.

This muddled and incoherent excuse for a narrative probably resulted from Frank Miller's attempt to serve two masters, and both are Jack Kirby-- though for argument's sake I'll call one "Social Commentary Jack" and the other "Cosmic Jack."

The figure of Donald Trump, while a valid target for well-done satire, is just the half-baked spawn of Miller trying his hand at the social commentary Jack Kirby worked into his NEW GODS saga. Trump-as-Darkseid-pawn is just a retooling of Glorious Godfrey, Kirby's religious-fanatic satire of Billy Graham. However, Godfrey made sense within the context of Kirby'[s setup. His Darkseid used assorted strategies to find the Anti-Life Equation within the minds of the teeming Earth-people, and Godfrey was just one of such strategy of mental manipulation. 

But in the latter half of GOLDEN CHILD (a title that doesn't seem to have much meaning), Miller's Darkseid-- who never has any reason for his election-fixing scheme-- suddenly pivots into Cosmic Kirby territory. Yeah, Kirby-Darkseid spouted some Macbeth-like line about being a "tiger-force," but he didn't go jaunting around the universe like Galactus, playing the role of Cosmic Hot-Shot. This sort of powerhouse doesn't need to play mental games, or to employ maniacal clowns as stooges. And given that he almost decimates the world, one wonders what errand kept the elder heroes busy wherever.

GOLDEN CHILD, in short, is nothing but a leaden bore.

ADDENDUM: Raphael Granpa shows himself to adapt well to the Millerverse despite the incoherence of the story. Granpa came to prominence with the highly enjoyable graphic novel MESMO DELIVERY, a hyper-violent shaggy dog story. Possibly Miller had some notion of emulating Granpa's more successful foray into wacky humor.