DarthShap

While I did appreciate a lot of the ideas (like Batman actually liking Gotham and its people), many set pieces, the storytelling, the art and the general tone, which is pretty refreshing, this is a very messy, very unfocused (I mean, halfway through, the story just completely changes direction, some characters and ideas just appear out of nowhere, like that Julie Madison scene, some iconic scenes are copy-pasted from Year One without their proper context), overlong origin story that just tries way too much to just be different from what it wants to replace, which leads to many questionable ideas (like "the origin story of Gordon's raincoat", the" I shall be a bat" scene, now in 3D!, the Red Hood being the inspiration behind Bruce deciding he needs to become a bat, Batman giving the finger, Bruce choosing he wants to fight Crime right before a brainwashing session, Gordon being corrupt, Lucius being compromised, Batman being an idiot, a way too literal version of The Killing Joke's "If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!", the out of order narration, the way too literal "Batman as a lightning rod" metaphor etc...)

It is a bit like Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man or Zack Snyder's Man of Steel in that sense. It tries so much to do things differently that it often just adds a lot of useless stuff which gets in the way and ends up missing the point.

In MoS, Superman is a curse on humanity. The movie keeps saying he is the new Jesus, saviour of all mankind but had he not come to Earth, thousands of people would still be alive.

The thing is TDKR did change comics. It just did not change Batman comics all that much.

Batman comics were already pretty mature and readers knew that. It's the people who were not reading comics who were surprised by TDKR because, to them, Batman was Adam West or the Superfriends character. But apart from stories like The Cult, Year Two or Ten Nights of the Beast, Batman stories pretty much remained the same. When it was time for Batman to be an extreme 90's Badass, O'Neil decided to created another character, Azrael so that he would become Batman for the time being.

Because that is what TDKR did to comics, it did not make them grow, it made them retarded. It's not Miller's fault, his TDKR was actually pretty great but that's what the Dark Age of comics was, Marvel artists trying to be more badass that Miller's Batman and that's why most Marvel and Image comics pretty much sucked in the 80's and 90's. Batman stories did not because Dennis O'Neil remained the head Batman editor and the writers were pretty much the same guys.

TDKR did not create Watchmen, Sandman, Hellblazer, Animal Man, the Doom Patrol or Starman, the British Invasion did that to comics and it actually started in 1984 when Karen Berger hired Alan Moore to write Swamp Thing.

You're welcome.

You're kind of like all those people saying Hush was very original or that Court of Owls was the greatest thing ever. I'm not blaming you. You just did not know any better. Now that you do, you can read those Bronze age comics and see for yourself.

Agreed. Bob Kane was basically the Devil :

http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-164-bob-kane-is-just-the-worst/

1) You really should not talk about "Kane's vision" when you're talking about Batman. At best, Bob Kane did 30% of the work. Pretty much everything you know and love about the character came from the mind of Bill Finger.

2)The 1966 TV show did absolutely nothing to the tone of the comics. Batman comics were kind of silly ever since the 1940's, when Robin came along and Batman dropped his gun, when he stopped being a Shadow rip-off and became a super-hero.

3)Neal Adams was a penciller. I think the only Batman story he wrote was Odyssey, in the 2010's.

4)I argue that TDKR isn't the progenitor to all modern Batman comics because I have actually read a lot of comics from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's which means I can see where and when the big change happened and it wasn't TDKR. Dennis O'Neil was the game changer, not Miller. Guys like O'Neil, Englehart, Wolfman, Wein, Moench, Goodwin, Conway, Levitz etc... were writing pretty dark Batman stories wayyyy before Miller came along and they kept on writing these dark stories after he had done his two masterpieces.

5)If you do not think the arrival of Dennis O'Neil on the book was a big thing, I'm sorry but you just do not know much about comics history. That's what he did in the late 60's-early 70's. He was the guy who put an end to DC's Silver Age. His Wonder-Woman, Superman, Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow were absolutely revolutionary.

Which ideas are original?
Hush himself is just another anti-Batman, like Mike Barr's Wrath or Bane.
Hush being new reader friendly really does not make it great. Being new reader friendly and being good are two completely different things.
Drawing elements from other stories is OK, but you really need to do something different with those. Here, Loeb is just stealing entire scenes from other books. Catwoman seeing Batman's scars, Batman being stopped from killing the Joker, the sword fight scene in the desert with Ra's, Batman fighting Superman, Harvey Dent being cured, etc...
It's not a bad selection of Batman's greatest hits and it's definitely well done but if you've already read The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne, Death in the Family, the original Ra's al Ghul saga, etc... there really is not anything new to see here.

No. Dennis O'Neil reinvented Batman in the 70's. Miller wrote two great stories and went further with the dark approach to the character but O'Neil was the one who originated it, some fifteen years before TDKR.

If you're looking for the real comics which fathered the modern Batman, read Joker's five way revenge, There is no hope in crime alley, Half an Evil or the first Ra's al Ghul saga, all of which were written by O'Neil years before he hired Miller to write TDKR (he also edited TDKR).

Hush? That's just sad.
Hush is not bad but it's just not very interesting either. Basically, it has no original scene. Every scene comes from some better, more original comic book. In the end, it's just a well made "best of Batman" drawn by Jim Lee.