Better not leave the toilet seat up in the Batcave.
In the highly anticipated new comic-book series, “Dark Knight III: The Master Race,” Batman has apparently gone through some changes.
(If you’d rather not know what happens in the story, stop reading now. Spoilers ahead.)
In the first issue, out Wednesday, it’s revealed that a woman has stepped into the famous cowl.
“I just think the suit looks a lot better on a girl,” writer-artist Frank Miller jokes to The Post.
The new Batman is Carrie Kelley, the former Robin introduced in Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” the gritty 1986 series that featured a broken, 55-year-old Batman coming out of retirement. It’s among the best-selling and most influential superhero stories of all time.
The new sequel, “Dark Knight III,” is being co-written by Miller with veteran comic book scribe Brian Azzarello, but Miller says the idea to replace Bruce Wayne with a woman was hatched back in the 1980s.
“Dick Grayson [the original male Robin] in my series made a good sidekick, but he never measured up. He went insane and became a bad guy,” Miller says. “Carrie is Batman’s equal.”
“She’s a great character,” says Klaus Janson, the inker on “The Dark Knight Returns” who’s back working with Miller after three decades on “Dark Knight III.” “Frank was able to introduce a female Robin 30 years ago, and he deserves a lot of credit for that. It was kind of a radical move.
“Nowadays, we have a female Thor and a female Wolverine, and people make a big deal about it, but Frank did that 30 years ago.”
Miller and Azzarello said during a New York Comic Con appearance in October that the new sequel will “piss people off.” Miller says polarizing readers has always been in the DNA of “Dark Knight.”
“Part of an author’s job is like a doctor’s,” Miller says. “The first thing you do is check if the patient has a pulse. In the case of writing a story, the first thing you do is wake up the audience, and you do that by stimulating them with a pleasurable image or a shocking one. You have to get some kind of a reaction.”
The early reactions appear to be positive — so positive that Miller says there will be a “Dark Knight IV,” written and drawn by him.
“I guarantee it,” he says.