GB: Miller’s work was an absolute pivot point in comics history and pushed the medium into new pop-culture conversations, but, over the years, other writers and artists grabbed the most superficial aspects of Miller’s Batman. Often, they reduced the character to sputtering rage and ultra-violence.

GM: There was a lot of that. Batman’s paranoia and alienation and rage became foreground, but I guess these things have to happen. People take a direction to the limit and the limit reveals the character kind of trapped in a box. So, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, there was a lot of great Batman work being done – there always has been – but there was a tendency to push the character into a very dark place where I think he didn’t entirely belong. There’s a lot more to a man like that, if you want to try to take it seriously and imagine what he would be like. There was almost a blue-collar Batman that was being presented. This guy who is very singular and thuggish in his motivations and I thought we had to kind of bring back an aristocratic seeker, the guy who has traveled the world and seen and done everything. That has a lot more story potential.

GB: When I was young, I adored the version of Batman by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers . He wasn't a chipper guy, by any means, but he seemed to be driven more by the light of intellect than the heat of rage. And he was a citizen of the world, too.

GM: Yeah, very much. He kind of dealt with his trauma. A lot of the post-Miller stuff was all about trauma and re-living the trauma. I kind felt like he got over a lot of it by being Batman. If he hadn’t been Batman he would have been insane...

I will wait for Rafael's level-headed judgment as to whether I should buy this.

Hey!!!!

Let it be known that I judge Grant Morrison's work more harshly than every other writer around.

It's not my fault he always pass with flying awesomeness.

I knew I could count on Rafael to give this the strict criticism it deserves.

So, according to the interview above the problem is that Miller's imitators (vast hordes of them, let it be noted) only took the "superficials" of his work--things like "sputtering rage and ultraviolence". That's only the "superficials" of his work? Rage and violence have always seemed to me pretty much all there is to Miller's work, unless you count the corrosive hard-boiled cynicism. Which has also been much imitated.