Cartoonist Frank Miller’s most famous work, The Dark Knight Returns, is about a long-disappeared hero returning to his old stomping ground. More than 15 years after the Dark Knight revolutionized comics, Miller has done more or less the same thing: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (DC Comics), a/k/a DK2, whose first issue was released a few weeks ago, is his first Batman story since then — a return that once seemed impossible.

The Dark Knight Returns upended almost every superhero cliché around, extrapolating adult psychological complexity from 45 years of kids’ stories. Miller treated Batman as a sort of benign psychopath: a man driven by his parents’ murder to dress up like a bat, fight crime with his fists, enlist children in his private war, and demand that no one ever die. The Dark Knight Returns’s mood was dark and brutal, its jokes were blacker than black, and its artwork was like almost nothing ever seen before in mainstream comics: stylized and crinkled, full of tiny, eccentric lines that earlier comics’ printing techniques wouldn’t have been able to handle. (Miller was one of the first American cartoonists to demand high-quality paper stock and printing, and he got it.) If the original Dark Knight seems almost normal today, that’s because (along with Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen) it set the tone for the wave of " grim and gritty " superhero comics that’s still rolling on. (There’s a cameo nod to Watchmen in the first issue of DK2: an obscure character who was the inspiration for Watchmen’s grimy, ultra-rightist ex-hero Rorschach paraphrases a line of Nietzsche that Moore quoted in that series.)

DK2 is the original four-book miniseries’s antithesis: a trip from darkness into light, with big, bold illustrations in place of Returns’ claustrophobic grid and deliciously garish computer coloring by Miller’s long-time partner Lynn Varley. Originally rumored to be a 48-page one-shot, it’s evolved into three issues of 80 pages apiece (the second installment is due January 16). " I always think it’s going to take fewer pages than it does, " Miller explains. " I finally gave myself a bunch of swinging room. "

Set a few dozen years in the future (and three years after The Dark Knight Returns), DK2 is very much a story about the present, even more than Miller knew. Parts of his future dystopia with a happy face were co-opted by reality after the story was created but before it could be published — daily news broadcasts with naked anchorwomen now exist on the Web, for instance. And in one scene from the first issue, " National Security Enforcement director Bill Prick " is talking to grown-up reporter Jimmy Olsen about a theft from a bio-research lab: " Evidence suggests that this was the work of agents from a rogue nation. . . . No, Olsen, I will not tell you what evidence. " Note that Miller finished the issue early last summer.

The appearance of DK2 also comes as something of a surprise. Miller was one of the more outspoken advocates of the creators’-rights movement in comics, a movement that insisted cartoonists should own their work outright; and he’s spent most of the past 15 years on his own successful projects, notably the comics Sin City and The 300. Why the return to someone else’s sandbox? " I try to never say never. I wanted to do another Batman comic, and you don’t do that without asking DC. And I do love the superheroes. I think the best thing I could’ve done was stay away from them for 15 years. "

He’s returned with a vision of the heroic ideal much gentler than the first Dark Knight’s; whereas in Returns Superman was a semi-fascist tool of the Man, for instance, he appears in DK2 as an aging warrior torn between his conflicting responsibilities, and sadly resigned to moral gray areas. Most of all, DK2 is fun, in a way Miller has rarely let his work be before. " When I did the original Dark Knight, I hadn’t strayed very far from superheroes, and in some ways I was rebelling against them — wanting to take it into darker, more-adult territory. Then I went on to projects where I had absolute liberty. Now I want to see what really works about superheroes and, I guess, play more to the fantastic. That is, what I like about [DK2 superhero] the Atom is that he gets small. I don’t care about his childhood. It’s become a kind of test for me to see if I can make adults feel like eight-year-olds. "