In the course of my packing and purging of items accumulated over the last 30 years in the process of merging the households of a single mom with two kids and a man divorced 10 years with no need to discard possessions because of the room available in his (that is, my) house, I have rediscovered a large number of items, including first issues of now famous short-lived series of comic books, along with other items that if I had been more proactive I could have either preserved or sold at relatively high prices.

Instead, due to constraints of time and space, I have been limited to a triage of finding the most important works to me to keep, others to sell at fire-sale prices in hopes of preventing heartbreaking disposal, and a third set of books and other printed matter to be discarded despite my insticts because it is now obselete either due to more recent developments or the advent of ready information from the Internet (for example, one volume encyclopedias).

When I sold my collection of comic books that encompassed around 6 long-boxes, I found the original paperback collections of the miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, which revolutionized the comic book industry in the late 1980s.

In my re-reading of these rescued volumes, I have discovered an unexpected resonance of the views and fears of the mid 80s with the mid to late 2000s. While in part this may be due to the archetypes and well-written stories used by Miller, I wonder if the echoes do not run deeper, with a strongly conservative President whose philosophy is out of touch with both the times and the electorate, not to mention other parallels that may not merit mentioning in a terrorism-addled age where the slightest threat seems to prompt the most drastic infringement of civil liberties.

This does not even include the story of Watchmen, which also raises questions that are still relevant even in a so-called “post 9/11 world.”

Sometimes even recently created stories with classic archetypes, if they are well written, can overcome the ravages of being a part of their era and ring to situations deeper than those existing at the time of authorship.