This year marks 40 years since Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns first hit shelves, and Graphitti Designs is celebrating the anniversary with a commemorative package that's live now on Zoop, built around two pages of original art that have never been reproduced at this size before.
If you're a Dark Knight Returns fan, this one's worth a serious look!
The campaign is capped at 500 sequentially numbered packets.
The packet is an add-on that ships alongside the previously released Variant Edition of the Dark Knight Returns Gallery Edition, the oversized art book Graphitti put out in 2016 under license from DC Comics. Buyers get the two new prints bundled together with that book.
What's In The Packet
Graphitti listed the contents in full:
- Two new prints: the classic spread from Issue #1, page 26, and a replica of the color cover art for Dark Knight Returns #2. Both run 12.75" x 19.75" on heavy 160 gsm acid-free stock chosen to match the paper used in the book.
- A sequentially numbered certificate of authentication.
- All three elements polybagged together.
That second print is a bigger deal than the listing makes it sound. The Dark Knight Returns #2 cover is the only one of the four Miller inked entirely himself, and the original board sold at Heritage Auctions for $478,000 back in 2019, as Bleeding Cool reported at the time.
There's also an early bird tier, and it's the part collectors will move on first. The first 50 supporters who grab the 40th Commemorative Book with Packet each receive a raw, uncut 16-page full color interior section that was physically printed in 1986 for use in the original Dark Knight books. That's leftover press stock from the original run, and only 50 people are getting it!
Why Gallery Editions Look The Way They Do
If you've never handled one of these, the format is simple. Graphitti scans the original art boards and reproduces them at actual size, 13" x 20", in full color.
The scans keep the correction fluid, the visible pencil lines under the ink, the paste-ups, and, per Graphitti, the coffee stains. You're looking at what sat on the drawing table, blemishes and all.
It doubles as preservation. Original comic art from the mid-80s is scattered across private collections and auction houses now, and most fans will never see a Dark Knight Returns board in person. A same-size scan is the closest thing to standing over Miller's desk.
The four-issue series landed in 1986 with Miller writing and penciling, Klaus Janson on inks and Lynn Varley on colors. The aging, retired, borderline unpleasant Bruce Wayne it introduced reshaped how writers have handled the character ever since, and the prints in this packet come straight from that Miller, Janson and Varley run.
Graphitti Designs itself dates to 1982, when Bob Chapman started it out doing screen-printed shirts for the comic shop market before it grew into deluxe hardcovers, limited-edition books, prints, statues and figures. The Gallery Edition line is the high end of that, and the company has been working with the direct market longer than a lot of the readers buying these books have been alive.
The campaign also carries a spread of other Frank Miller related items. Aside from the enhancement packet itself, those are all New Old Stock, published and produced by Graphitti and sitting in inventory rather than newly printed.
Zoop bills itself as a home for creator-owned crowdfunding, handling pre-orders, production and fulfillment directly for publishers. A licensed DC book, and one of the most reprinted Batman stories ever, running that crowdfunding route says a lot about how far this end of the market has shifted toward pre-order models.
If you want in, the campaign is live on Zoop now, and with only 500 numbered packets in the run, the early-bird 50 will be the first to go.
I'll be honest, most anniversary editions I see come down to a slipcase and a fresh foil cover. Real 1986 press sheets, plus two prints making their full-size debut, is a nice change of pace, and at 500 copies it won't sit around long.
Have any of you handled a Graphitti Gallery Edition in person? Are the actual-size scans worth it, or is the book enough? I'd love to know whether they live up to the hype…
Let us know in the comments below!
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