During a recent interview with Film Comment about the upcoming DVD, Blu-ray and digital download release of his film The Dark Knight Rises on Tuesday, director Christopher Nolan said something that struck me as out of character for superhero narratives.”To me, for that mission to succeed, it has to end, so this is the ending,” Nolan said of his decision to end the Dark Knight Trilogy and walk away from Batman at the end of the film.An ending? And (spoilers for those who haven’t seen the film) a happy one, to boot? Egad, man, it’s as though you’ve never read a comic book before in your life!It’s the nature of ongoing, serialized storytelling that you can’t give anyone a true happy ending, but in recent years, the major comic book publishers have been particualarly aggressive at rolling back even the most modest gains made by our heroes in an effort to keep them eternally young and forever trapped in the status quo familiar to casual fans who know them only from Saturday morning cartoons.DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio addressed the issue at the Meet the Publishers panel at San Diego Comic Con International this year, where he said that the hardest part of writing these long-running supehero characters is separating the best interests of the characters and their hardcore fans from the best interests of the company. As a fan, he admitted, you want these characters to eventually be able to rest.
