In an interview with Geoff Boucher of the L.A. Times Frank Miller explained the reason for DC’s recall of All-Star Batman & Robin.  "I wrote the actual words in the script and had them put on the page so the black bars would be the right size on the page but on a few you can read right through them; they're more gray than black," he said.  "It's a simple printing error, that's what it is."

Miller told Boucher that the ASBAR comic series was geared toward older readers, not kids, and the use of “ripe” language was an effort to capture the “street sense” of the gritty tale.  As Boucher explains it in the Times: “In every issue, the graphic language was blacked-out graphically (think of the dark bars that cross out words in a redacted police report). Somewhat surprisingly, this was accomplished by putting the words on the page and then crossing them out. It sounds like they were asking for trouble to me, but Miller said it was simply the most practical way to do it.”

Though Miller joked that he wanted three copies of the imperfectly blacked out comic (which DC has asked be destroyed, see “All-Star Batman & Robin to Be Destroyed”) for his collection, he made it clear that no one was trying to sneak anything pass the censor: “The rules are changing all the time, especially in comics, and people are trying to sort it out. But this was absolutely not intentional."