Comic Book Legends Revealed #297
by Brian Cronin on January 28, 2011 @ 10:26 AM

COMIC LEGEND: The phrase “grim and gritty” first appeared in connection with Batman…on the 1960s Batman TV series!!
STATUS: True

The term “grim and gritty” is sort of a catch-all phrase used to describe the trend since the mid-1980s to make superhero comics, well, grim and gritty.

Typically, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns are credited with inspiring this trend… but really, you could go much further back than that if you’d like. I suppose, though, Moore and Miller’s works were SO popular that people tended to follow their leads more so than other similar works.

Heck, Batman was so “grim and gritty” at one point that it even became a plot point where a young boy, Tim Drake, feels Batman has gotten TOO grim and gritty, and needed a Robin to balance him out…

[ Read more Comic Book Legends Revealed #297 ]

August 2009: Flashbacks to the past
September 29, 2009

(excerpt)

August 1989's top seller at Capital City was Batman #440, the first part of "A Lonely Place of Dying," the storyline notable for introducing Tim Drake as a replacement Robin. "Lonely Place" gave DC an opportunity to really capitalize on the attention following the release of Tim Burton's Batman film, which was still in theaters in August; Capital City's preorders on the issue were 122,550 copies, putting the true total in the 500-600,000-copy range.