Award-winning cartoonist Frank Miller is among a handful of writer-illustrators who, in the 1980s, transformed the comic industry into a source of entertainment for adults as well as kids. Writing Marvel Comic's "Daredevil" series from 1979 to 1981, he changed that classic into "the first film noir comic book," according to Lloyd Rose in Atlantic. Rose also noted that the "Daredevil" comic book and its full-length graphic novel spin-offs--"[v]iolent, kinetic and set in a moodily lit New York City"--remain "the most successful marriage of beauty and blood in mainstream comics." Miller's seminal 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was a crossover success as a graphic novel, selling over 200,000 copies. Rose described the series that gave rise to that book as a "fever dream that a disturbed and imaginative city-dweller" might have. Reading it is, according to Rose, "like seeing your squirmiest, grossest street fears brought into the light...