Byrne on Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns

Over at the John Byrne Forum, John Byrne offers some interesting information on how Watchmen may or may not have influenced Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns:

...I read WATCHMEN up thru issue 5 in xerox form, as the books were coming into the DC offices. I was working on Superman, then, and Frank was hard at work on DKR. He was also seeing those xeroxes.

Now, if you look at DKR with this in mind, you may notice something (something of which I was very much aware at the time): DKR is the first half of one story, and the second half of another. Right down the middle is a line, which splits of the story Frank started, and introduces the story he completed. And that story, the second one, was heavily influenced by what he read in WATCHMEN.

Example? DKR opens with Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon sharing a drink as a newscaster on the TV wonders whatever happened to Batman and hopes that, wherever he is, he is sharing a drink with a friend. But by halfway thru we all know what happened to Batman -- he and all other superheroes were banned, outlawed, just as they were in WATCHMEN. There's no reason for that newscaster to be wondering whatever happened to Batman. Everybody knows.

So, yeah, DKR (or, rather, people misreading it, even to this day) can take a big mea culpa for much of the mess the industry is in today, but without WATCHMEN, I very much doubt that would have been the case.

It's an interesting thread; go check it out.