Frank Miller Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #2 Iconic Cover Original Art (DC, 1986). While we've sold a number of stand-out pages from this legendary series -- including a splash page from issue #3, which achieved a record price, for a piece of American comic art, of $448,125 in 2011 -- we don't have enough superlatives to describe this jaw-dropping cover, the first ever to appear at auction. This is the only cover from the four-issue series to be rendered in pen and ink completely by Frank Miller, with no significant painted elements or overlays, and in our mind is artistically the best of the four. Batman's gritty resolve in the face of overwhelming adversity blazes through in this iconic image. In short, this is one of the greatest pieces of comic art to ever be offered at auction; not only does it represent one of the most memorable images from the decade, but from Batman's entire illustrious history. Miller's revolutionary Dark Knight radically altered the direction of comics with its prestige mini-series format, combined with the fact that it was one of the first modern mainstream features to put a gritty noir patina on the squeaky-clean Silver Age hero mythos previously exemplified by DC. The series has since been celebrated as among the most important and influential stories ever published.