Foolkiller: The Dark Nutcase Returns

By 1990, interrogating vigilantism is no longer new to superhero comics, a fact of which Gerber must have been perfectly aware.  He had, in fact, been a bit ahead of the curve with his first two incarnations of the Foolkiller.  Returning to the character after the developments of 1980s comics could well have been redundant.  But Gerber was not haunted by the anxiety of influence.  He embraced this redundancy by doing what he had always done: bringing his comics into dialogue with their predecessors.

Though the artistic style, series format, and tone are completely different, Foolkiller proves to be an ironic recapitulation of Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  The commonalities are glaring once you start to look for them.  The vigilante (or a version of the vigilante) reappears after an extended absence.  The urban environment has bred an amoral, criminal youth underclass that the vigilante must address.  The vigilante's actions are continually commented upon by television media personalities, with each side of the debate given weight by the narrative itself. Psychaitric interventions into the problem of criminality prove ineffectual and ridiculous. The Foolkiller, like the Joker, appears on a popular television program, though the resulting body count is lower.  The comics are driven by a first-person narrative that, while central to the book, is occasionally absent in favor of featuring other characters.  The vigilante transcends partisan politics, but ultimately becomes public enemy number one, and fakes his own death. 

The only convincing argument against seeing Foolkiller as a response to The Dark Knight Returns is that this would be an unusually subtle response on Gerber's part.  From his early Howard the Duck days in the 1970s through his brief return to the character in a 2001 miniseries, Gerber's critique of other comics was usually packaged as part of a very broad parody.  In the 1970s, the targets included Killraven and Shang-Chi; thirty years later, it was Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan and the grotesquely oversexualized heroines published by Image Comics. Fookiller, though broad an blunt in its caricature of late twentieth-century excess, never actually becomes a superhero parody.  This is fortunate, and there are a few plausible explanations.  At this point, the Foolkiller is a legacy character, even if that legacy is primarily the creation of Gerber and his collaborators; he was not designed to parody a specific character, but rather to critique a set of attitudes.  Certainly, by the time Gerber revived him for the 1990 series, the Foolkiller was a concept that could stand alone, with no particular antecedent as the target.  Instead, the Foolkiller is a walking, murdering critique of an entire set of societal trends that Gerber saw as toxic.

It is entirely possible that Gerber was not conscious of his repetition of so many of Miller's story beats, but was simply stepping into a space that Miller had held open. Certainly, the two men (who respected each other enough to have pitched their own revamp over Superman before John Byrne got the job) were using similar motifs to make different arguments. As writer and penciler, Miller had the advantage of near-complete control of the material, while Gerber always had to rely on an artistic collaborator. Each of them insisted on considering the vigilante character within the context of the broader media ecosystem that conditions our understanding of law, criminality, and deviance.  Ultimately, even as it points in the direction of fascism, Miller's vision is more optimistic.  The lone vigilante can inspire entire groups of people to take justice in their own hands when institutions fail them. 

Kids, don’t try this at home

For adherents to liberal democracy, it is a frightening vision, but to those who can see themselves in both Batman and his followers, it can look like a better alternative.  Gerber also allows for the Foolkiller to act as a kind of social contagion (after all, Kurt is the third man to use the name), one facilitated by old media (television) and new (the modems that Greg and Kurt learn to use in the early issues).  But even as his dismissal of partisan politics and potentially sincere ideological differences could potentially be instrumentalized by cynical authoritarians, Gerber never approaches fascism, if only because of an innate distrust of groups of any kind.  In his commitment to an individualistic, atomized understanding of the self and society, Gerber refrains from gesturing in any practical political direction. Even as he demonstrates the violence and contradiction inherent to the superhero comic, Gerber's Foolkiller remains committed to the the individualism that spawned the superhero.  Were he ever asked, this Foolkiller would not for a moment considering joining Justice League or the Avengers.  HIs only path is to go it alone.

Despite the structural connections to Miller's now classic Batman story, the Foolkiller's vigilantism is truly one of a kind.  Most vigilantes we have seen so far have, when confronted with the choice between law and justice, choose justice as an abstract ideal that cannot be brought about by the law alone.  Some of them, like Daredevil, grapple with the implications of their choices; others like Batman, seem completely untroubled by doubt.  The three iterations of the Foolkiller move from religion (a received framework for justice seen as its own law), aesthetics (an artistic judgment that becomes a proxy for morality) to....what, exactly?  Kurt Gerhard is certainly flouting the law, but justice does not appear to be his goal.  Nor is he motivated by Greg Salinger's "poetic" sensibility. Though Kurt kills people he thinks are a plague on society, there is no evidence that he is trying to build a better world.  His killings are the manifestation of his fundamental objection to the behavior of the people around him.  Kurt is not trying to actually accomplish anything other than homicide.  If Gerber is continuing the critique of vigilantism that was apparent in the first Foolkiller and implied in the second, it is only to show the vigilante as entirely directionless.  Ultimately, the Fookiller's actions become a kind of reflex.  The resulting comic does not constitute a coherent argument against the Foolkiller, even as it does not make a persuasive case for him.  Gerber's satirical target is the same as the Foolkiller's actual target: the people whose actions and behavior make the world a worse and more ridiculous place.  No amount of vigilantism can solve these problems; the vigilante merely uses the conventions of the superhero genre to draw our attention to them before slipping away to continue his ideologically motivated, but practically fruitless, actions in another story.

Next: The Underground (Super)Man

The Cultural Logic of Misanthropy

Fookiller is a conundrum of a comic book. It is a perfect fit for its time, not only because of the very contemporary objects of its satire, but because its grim outlook and excess violence make it the missing link between Miller's exploration of vigilante violence in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and the Grand Gruignol of 1990s Image comics.  In 1992, Image would give the world Shadowhawk, who, after mobsters infect him with HIV-positive blood, becomes a vigilante whose signature move is breaking criminals' spines.

But Foolkiller is also very much an outlier. It may well be the most pessimistic comic Marvel ever published.  This is not a Campbell-inflected hero's journey; no one is enlightened, and the world is not a better place in the last issue than it was in the first.  Instead, Foolkiller is the story of Kurt Gerhard's increasing alienation and cynicism, framed in a critique that offers no indication of any possibility for positive change.  Kurt's extrapolation from is own suffering deadens his sympathy for others rather than developing empathy; wherever he goes, he sees new variations on the "Fool."  A self-described Reagan-voter who was a happy cog in the system until it failed him, he makes political decisions that he sees as apolitical.  The fault with society is that people no longer make any real effort, chasing simple pleasures and blindly following demagogs.  Gerber tries to make Kurt look like an equal-opportunity slaughterer of fools, someone who is above everyday politics. 

The comic takes a remarkable, almost certainly unplanned turn in issue 8, which is devoted in its entirety to the run-up to Operation Desert Storm. To my knowledge, this was the only Marvel comic to respond to these events in close to real time, and it was an opportunity for very pointed political commentary. Instead, Gerber doubled-down on a politics that pretends to rise above partisanship, calling down a plague on both houses. The morning after war breaks out, "the peaceniks and the warniks have taken to the streets."  Both sides feature idiots who spout "the wisdom of the bumper sticker" ("You don't deserve to live in this country!" ("Why? 'Cause I don't think the troops should die for oil company profits?!") A disguised Foolkiller confronts two protesters mid-scuffle:

Foolkiller Pardon me.  Do you always demonstrate for peace by grabibing other people's property and kicking them in the face?

Hippie: Get off my case. Geek. 

There's nothing wrong with using force to resist repression.  That's what King George is doing--right?

Foolkiler: I see. 

He can't achieve peace through violence, but you can. 

You're a fool.

I kill fools.

He disintegrates the hippie, leaving the warmonger speechless:

Foolkiller: Why so upset over a few ashes? Didn't you want to nuke Saddam?

Which raises another question: Why haven't you enlisted? 

Or does your support for the troops only extend to fighting peace marchers, not Iraqis? 

Whereupon the Foolkiller fires again.  By this point in the narrative, homicide no longer bothers him.  He walks away, thinking to himself that "liberals suffer from vicarious compassion, " while conservatives "are afflicted with vicarious courage."

In case the reader misses the message, Kurt also slaughters a man selling "Support Our Troops" flags at $5 a pop, and an anti-war protester  encouraging his audience to destroy war toys because "the toy companies are to blame for the war in the Gulf!" Kurt has particularly harsh words in this case: "In China, the protesters have to stand in front of realtanks....Real people are dying, and you're protesting toys. You're a toy protester."

Two important points emerge from these particular killings:  first, that Kurt (and, by extension, Gerber) is completely uninterested in engaging in the substance of these political disputes.  He is so outraged by the conduct of the "fools" he targets that the actual ideas that ostensibly motivate them are irrelevant.  This indirectly links him to his predecessor, Greg Salinger, whose targets lacked "poetry."  The Foolkiller's objections are based on distaste and disgust. He, too, is guided by his aesthetic judgments in order to make conclusions about morality and worth. This, combined with his refusal to address politics, underscores the essential misanthropy of the Foolkiller concept.  There are simply too many people who are a worthless waste of space.

The other point is also about the confluence of aeshetics and morality.  The "toy protester" embodies a longtime Gerber bete noire:  critics and "concerned parents" with a naive, simplistic understanding of texts and audiences that falls in line with the mid-twentieth-century "Media Effects" school.  This approach assumed that audiences are helpless before media inputs, incorporating messages exactly as they are intended and imitating the actions they see on television or read in comics.  Gerber, as always, is arguing for personal responsibility, as well as for a different understanding of media.  He opposed all forms of censorship, particularly the insistence on non-naturalistic representations of violence.  His earlier mouthpiece, Howard the Duck, argued that violence should be depicted in as much bloody and unpleasant detail as possible in order to avoid romanticizing it.  This is where Birch's matches Gerber's violent aesthetic:  Kurt's victims have their flesh stripped from their bones; at one point, the purity gun accidentally chops a child in half.  Kurt rolls around in garbage to inure himself against his own disgust, but the Foolkiller comic insists on exposing the reader to grotesque depictions of violence in order to wake the reader up.

Next: Foolkiller: The Dark Nutcase Returns

The Foolkiller vs the Culture

In 1990, Gerber revives the character in a surprising ten-issue miniseries. Why surprising? First, the mere fact that Marvel was committing to this project with a writer whose history with the company was tumultuous (he sued Marvel throughout the 1980s over ownership of Howard the Duck.  Second, it is a safe bet that fans were not bombarding Marvel with letters asking for a Foolkiller series.  There is little evidence to suggest that the character had a significant fan following, and, in any case, his infrequent and uninspired appearances since Gerber's departure were unlikely to have helped lay the groundwork for a ten-issue commitment. 

But the biggest surprises were contained within the comic itself. Certainly, Gerber's familiar irony, facility with narration, and complex characterization were evident and expected.  The series' violence and high body count also had ample precedent by this point, not only thanks to the various Punisher series, but also because of the "grim and gritty" trend that had begun to dominate the mainstream since Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. [1]  Marvel's willingness to let Gerber sustain such a dark critique not only of contemporary culture, but contemporary vigilante comics was rather startling.  Gerber's new Foolkiller combined Bernie Goetz, the antiheroes of the Great Recession, and the Punisher in a compelling pathology that was unlike anything the company had ever published.

This does not mean that the series is fondly remembered as a classic.  Despite being self-contained, the Foolkiller series had little hope of becoming the next Watchmen.  Gerber bears some of the responsibility: the series lacked subtlety and left itself open to accusations of racial stereotyping.  The art may also have been a barrier. J.J. Birch's angular, grim pencils certainly fit the book's themes, and his subsequent work on Mileston's Xombi shows an impressive imaginative range. But Birch's largely realist art, rather than reinforcing Gerber's prose, pushed the grimness to unintentional self-parody:  the scenes of an underwear-clad Kurt Gerhard exercising while surrounding himself with garbage are difficult to take seriously, at least as visuals, while the Foolkiller's redesigned costume (all leather, with an open zipper baring his chest and a gimp mask covering his face, is laughable enough, but when that cover of issue seven is a close up of the Foolkiller shedding tears through the leather masks eyeholes illustrating the phrase "Tears of Torment!" we are veering into camp territory.  One can appreciate the boldness with which Birch embodies Gerber's longstanding attitude towards the depiction of violence (it must be explicit, graphic, and disgusting enough not to seem admirable), but this is not art that is likely to draw the reader in.  In hindsight, Gerber's grim satire might have been better matched with art that was more deliberately cartoony (in the mode of Mike Allred).

Nonetheless, the Foolkiller series has much to recommend it. Even more than Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, it reflects a very specific historical moment. While this moment certainly involves violent crime and urban blight, the driving force is economic: serialized in 1990 and 1991, Fookiller unfolds in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash (and its smaller 1989 echo).  Appropriately enough for a vigilante story, Kurt Gerhardt's transformation from low-level savings-and-loan officer to multiple murderer is tied to the collapse of most of the institutions that propped up his life.  First, his father is killed by muggers disappointed that their haul consists of the six dollars he carried in his wallet; then he is fired from his job.  Kurt explodes when his wife gently suggests that he might have been in some way at fault, a scene that manages to convey both Kurt's own instability and the pernicious neoliberal ethos that ignores structural flaws in favor of personal responsibility.  Reduced to working the counter at Burger Clown, his attempt to stop the fast food restaurant's robbery only earns him a concussion.

But Kurt's transformation would not have been possible without a parallel set of institutional failures. The first issue ("Mad...as in Angry" by Gerber, Birch, and Tony Dezuniga, October 1999) begins not with Kurt but with Greg Salinger, the previous Foolkiller, who is well into the process of duping his psychiatrist at the Central Indiana State Medical Institution.  Greg  has written a short manifesto about the fools responsible for the sorry state of the world, and is quickly mastering the modern technology that will allow his words to go viral.  First he learns to use the mail merge function on the hospital computer, and then realizes his best bet is to get the attention of Runyan Moody, the shock jock host of a tv talk show  that recalls the heyday of Jerry Springer. Greg has inadvertently discovered the vulnerabilities in the (then-contemporary media ecosystem.  The issue ends as Kurt, recently abandoned by his wife, turns on the tv:

"Tonight--live from Indiana--is this the collapse of Western Civilization?

Are liberals and criminals destroying our way of life?

Runyan Moody asks---

--the Foolkiller!"

To be fair, this goes better than when the Joker went on Letterman

This first issue efficiently introduces the characters and establishes just how damaged their world is, setting the stage for a rethinking of the Foolkiller concept. The first two Foolkillers, however different their moral frameworks might have been, were limited by the very individualism that so often defines vigilantes.  The Foolkillers look for specific fools, and kill them, as if targeted assassination could solve any important problem.  But Kurt's story immediately moves into more complicated territory, particularly when he rejects his wife's implication that he is somehow responsible for what happened to him.  Kurt is a passive aggressive sad sack, certainly, but he did not fire himself.  A casualty of a devastating recession, Kurt knows that he has been failed by a system (a system that we might now call neoliberalism).  Neither of the previous Foolkillers had a developed sense of the political, at least in their earlier appearances; Salinger seems to have spent his years of compulsory psychiatric hospitalization on his own education (perhaps he had more sophisticated interlocutors than Richard Rory in his prison days).  Now Kurt will encounter Salinger as that now painfully familiar phenomenon, the disembodied, ranting voice on the Internet. Together with Runyan Moody, one of the most incendiary voices in an inflammatory old media genre, they give Kurt intellectual mentorship and a public platform as he embarks on his career as the third Foolkiller.

Kurt will rack up a disturbingly high body count over the course of his ten issues, establishing one of the intellectual and ethical conflicts that will animate the series:  what is the role of individual retribution in the struggle against an entire system? 

Note

[1] Still, this was only a few years after the graphic violence in Gerber and Val Mayerik's abortive Void Indigo series outraged retailers throughout North America (and another few years before Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon would go much, much further in DC/Vertigo's Preacher.

Next: The Cultural Logic of Misanthropy

Live a Poem, Die a Fool

Gerber wrote three different incarnations of the Foolkiller: the religious fanatic who briefly fought Man-Thing; the ex-con social crusader against urban blight who just as briefly appeared in Omega the Unknown before being brought into the wider Marvel universe by subsequent writers, and the former corporate shark brought low by predatory capitalism in Gerber's 1990s Foolkiller series. In the Foolkiller, Gerber uncovered a formula that was useful in its generality:  anyone could become the Fookiller if he (and it was always he) had been kicked around enough by contemporary life, and anyone could be labeled a fool as each iteration of the character adopted a new definition of foolishness.  The Foolkiller, then, was just the sort of device that Gerber needed for his more personal storytelling:  he was a universal machine for satire.

This was not the only way that the Foolkiller was an anomaly in the serialized Marvel Universe.  Linked primarily to his creator until just before Gerber's death in 2008, the Foolkiller came and went along with Gerber.  The first two incarnations were from the writer's longest stint at Marvel (1972-1978), while the third was part of Gerber's intermittent freelancing with the company from 1983 to 1991.  When Gerber and co-creator Mary Skrenes introduced the second Foolkiller in Omega the Unknown, they weren't just brining a new incarnation of an old character to Gerber's latest (and strangest) Marvel book;  They were  importing the character to Hell's Kitchen, where the story was set.  Gerber had been living in Hell's Kitchen, which at the time was a notorious site of urban blight. [1] Now he is Greg Salinger, former cellmate to longtime Gerber supporting character Richard Rory, who has just arrived in Hell's Kitchen to share an apartment with the book's main characters. Rory has just received one of the Fookiller's calling cards, convinced that Everbest has somehow miraculously survived  ("See? Same cheap paper--same pedestrian design--same clumsy syntax--!" (Gerber & Skrenes, and Jim Mooney, "Fightin' Fools!," Omega the Unknown 9, July 1977). Rory is initially relieved, though quickly unsettled, to discover that this new Foolkiller was inspired by his jail-time storytelling:

"I know, Rich--the original Foolkiller was insane, but I realized I could carry out his mission correctly--by secularizingit! [.] --but my criteria differ somewhat. You see...I'm a poet."

Rory is convinced that Greg has lost his mind, but James-Michael Starling, the primary viewpoint character in Omega the Unknown, imparts the wisdom that he has gathered since his arrival in the neighborhood seven issue ago: "I think you may be judging your friend too harshly, Mr. Rory...an' too hastily. / You're...new to Hell's Kitchen."  Where the first Foolkiller was a one-note religious fanatic, the broad satire of a phenomenon Gerber clearly despised, and where Conway established the Punisher as the embodiment of a reactionary vigilante impulse that deserved condemnation, the second Foolkiller presents a greater challenge to both readerly and authorial sensibilities.  If, to paraphrase Irving Kristol, the conservative is "a liberal who has been mugged by reality," Gerber's characters (James-Michael included) have lost their patience with procedural liberalism because they have been mugged by actual muggers.

The rest of this issue drives the point home. When the Foolkiller disintegrates two young men engaging in a knife fight, Omega's friend Gramps voices his approval of "blasting the human vermin."  Two issues previously, Omega (who shares a mysterious psychic link with young James-Michael) had fought a criminal called Blockbuster, whose explanation that he robbed banks in order to provide for his son was enough to convince Omega to let him go (much to the consternation of the crowd). Now he has had a chance to reconsider, as now he is the one who needs to get money to protect his "son," James-Michael. When he sees Blockbuster robbing a jewelry store, he is only motivated to fight by the owner's offer of a thousand dollars--his morality has become depressingly transactional. But the Foolkiller disintegrates Blockbuster before Omega can claim any reward, a move that appears consistent with "blasting the human vermin." Gerber holds out the possibility that the Foolkiller, if not exactly right, is not exactly wrong, either.

Oh, sure. No pressure or anything

There is, however, a mismatch between the Foolkiller as exterminator of pests to the urban ecosystem, and the Foolkiller's own conception of his mission.  Yes, he targets criminals, but lawbreaking is not the only criterion.  The Foolkiller dismisses Blockbuster on aesthetic grounds ("never a poetic thought or word or deed--!"). It is a strange combination, one that is difficult to justify without a broader familiarity with Gerber's work.  Every the disenchanted satirist, Gerber, particularly in Howard the Duck, filters everything through a sensibility consisting of a profound moral disappointment that often expresses itself through a judgment somewhere between the aesthetic and the philosophical. Gerber's characters cannot stand bullies or villains, but they have just as little tolerance for frauds, posers, and the followers of the day's trends.  The targets of Gerber's ire tend to exhibits failure in not just morality, but imagination.  At the end of the second story arc of Matt Wagner's Grendel (also about a murderous antihero/villain), the narrator describes Hunter Rose (the titular Grender) as "the demon of society's mediocrity"). To the say the same of Greg Salinger, the second Foolkiller, during his earliest appearances would be to overestimate him; "the demon of society's mediocrity" is what this Foolkiller aspires to be.

Note

[1] And so it remains to this day in both the Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universes, despite the fact that in real life, it has been gentrified for decades.

Next: The Foolkiller vs. the Culture

God's Executioner

The first Foolkiller, retroactively named Ross G. Everbest when Roger Stern included the second Foolkiller in Amazing Spider-Man, was a religious fanatic who died in his second (and final) appearance in a Marvel comic. [7] As a young boy, Everbest was cured of paralysis by a faith healer named Mike, joining his savior in a new career as an evangelist. After catching a drunken Mike with his arm around a woman, Everbest killed him and became the Foolkiller. Targeting particularly egregious "fools" (such as the rapacious industrialist F.A. Schist and Ted Sallis, whose research inadvertently turned him into the monstrous Man-Thing), Everbest warned his victims with a card one day before attaching them:

And well you might “Ooh!”

Foolkiller

- e pluribus unum- 

You have 24 hours to live. Use them to repent or be forever damned to the pits of hell where goeth all fools. Today is the last day of the rest of your life. Use it wisely or die a fool!

Everbest is not exaggerating:  somehow, this former child evangelist gained access to a great deal of mad scientist tech, from the stasis tube preserving Mike's dead body to his weapon of choice: a white-light-emitting laser that instantaneously reduces its target to ashes.  Naturally, he calls it his "Purification Gun."

In his original incarnation, the Foolkiller satirizes the world that created him more than he does the genre in which he functions.  True, he wears a form-fitting costume, but he is not trying to right wrongs or rid the world of crime.  The fool, unlike the criminal, is not a legal or civic category; for Everbest, the fool's failings are moral. At this early moment in Gerber's career, the Foolkiller was one of the first example's of the writer's broadsides against religious fanaticism and moral superiority; just a year later, the Man-Thing would be helpless against the onslaught of book-burning provincial fundamentalists who aligned themselves with a murderous "Mad Viking" on a crusade to restore true American "manhood."

What makes the Foolkiller different from Gerber's other moralists is that he is not entirely wrong; all of his initial chosen targets are fools of one kind or another (more on this in the next post). The problem is that offenders in so elastic a category are subject to only one punishment: disintegration.  Here the Foolkiller partakes of the same maximalist logic as the Punisher, one that can implicitly critique vigilantism with a story that celebrates it.   The tools at their disposal are as limited and lacking in nuance as is the moral imagination of those who wield them. Superhero comics tend to deploy these vigilantes as foils for the conventional superhero in order to put the hero in a better light.  But really, such vigilantes are only the superhero reduced to his most absurd avatar.  With few exceptions, superheroes are equipped to solve every problem with violence; if violence is not the solution, then the problem remains invisible.  Recall how laughable it was that Superboy Prime changed continuity by literally punching the walls of reality in Infinite Crisis; for this to work, reality itself had to be reorganized into something susceptible to punching. Had the Foolkiller or the Punisher been in Superboy Prime's place, they would have shot reality into submission.

Next: Live a Poem, Die a Fool

What a Fool Believes

Well before Miller's revitalization of Daredevil and Batman, Marvel Comics was already interrogating the status of the four-color vigilante.  In a curious coincidence, the company introduced The Punisher, a character who would become the most successful fictional murderous vigilante in the medium just one month before  the first appearance of The Foolkiller, who functioned as an unintentional parody of what appeared to be a one-off character. The Punisher made his debut in The Amazing Spider-Man 129 (by Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr, and Ross Andru) (February 1974), right before The Foolkiller in Man-Thing 3 (by Steve Gerber, Val Mayerik, and Jack Abel) (March 1974). As usually happens with corporate-owned characters, their psychological development, ideological framework, and even biographies would veer far away from their creators' original intent. When Mort Weisinger and George Papp created Green Arrow in 1941, he was a generic, square-jawed, blond variation on Batman.  Nothing in Oliver Queen original appearances (or even those of the early Silver Age version) would have suggested that he would turn into an anticapitalist hippie in the 1970s, a mayor of his hometown in the twenty-first century, or, for that matter, a serial philanderer whose infidelities would continue to complicate one of DC most enduring love stories.

Nonetheless, Oliver Queen followed a path that is familiar to longtime superhero comics readers:  initially a blank slate, Green Arrow would have to be given some measure of complexity for him to function as the genre matured.  If anything, his leftward turn demonstrates just how malleable these characters can be when confronted with changing times. [1] But the Punisher and the Foolkiller are different, because each was, to widely varying degrees, initially rooted in social commentary.  Each character would, like Oliver Queen, change with the times, but these changes would reflect reader reactions and the evolution of popular attitudes about crime and justice.  Both the Foolkiller and the Punisher frequently blur the lines between satire and sincerity years before the slippage between irony and political extremism would wreak havoc with America's political culture.

The basic contours of the Punisher's evolution are well-known: a response to the vigilantism of Dirty Harry, the urban decay featured in the daily news, and Don Pendleton's popular paperback hero The Executioner,  the Punisher was introduced as a new Spider-Man antagonist with no anticipation that the character would ever achieve anything remotely like the popularity he has enjoyed for nearly five decades. The following year, Conway gave the Punisher his canonical origin in Marvel Preview 2 ("Death Sentence," with Tony DeZuniga on art): Vietnam veteran Frank Castle takes justice into his own hands after his wife and children are murdered by the mob.  As Kent Worcester so skillfully demonstrates in A Cultural History of the Punisher, Castle becomes both a right-wing symbol and an object of left-wing parody, each interpretation somehow coexisting with the other.  Worcester's readings of the Punisher are brilliant, and have minimized the need for discussing the Punisher at great length here. 

Though much less consequential as a pop cultural figure, the Foolkiller stands out for being less a cultural barometer than the outward manifestation of a particular writer's evolving sensibilities. Before his departure from Marvel, Steve Gerber was virtually the only writer to script Fookiller stories, probably because he was the only one who had any interest in doing so.  The character was briefly mangled by Steve Grant as part of an assignment to wrap up Gerber's dangling Omega the Unknown plot threads in a few issues of Defenders, and then again by Roger Stern in a forgettable issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (#225, "Fools ...like us!" by Stern, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Wiaceck), before Gerber's return to the company in 1990. After Gerber, the Foolkiller would make occasional appearances before Greg Hurtwtiz 2007 and Max Bemis' 2017 revamps of the character in successive adult-oriented miniseries.

The Foolkiller’s first victim really should have been his tailor

The Foolkiller and the Punisher are both killers with a code; the difference lies within the code itself. As an exaggerated response to popular panic over crime and urban decay, the Punisher is an extralegal remedy for ills that are clearly defined by his country's laws.  The Punisher may be judge, jury, and executioner, but what he is not is a legislator:  just as the traditional superhero is inevitably committed to upholding the (capitalist, legal) status quo, so too is the Punisher unconcerned with the nature of crime. Crime is an essentialized phenomenon that exists before the Punisher ever appears on the scene.

The Foolkiller, on the other hand, is interested in a different category of social ill, as his name suggests: fools.  Being a fool is not a crime; indeed, the entirely legal authority held by many a fool spurs the Foolkiller on to increasingly spectacular executions. Nor is there a commonly accepted definition of a fool that would allow a citizen (or a reader) to predict who might be the Foolkiller's next target. Other versions of the Punisher have popped up now and then, whether in different timelines, alternate dimensions, or even as a short-term replacement of the main continuity's character.  None of these have had the resonance of Frank Castle, because it is Frank's history, character, and perspective that define this particular variation on the vigilante theme. The Foolkiller, however, is a more malleable concept, and the multiple iterations of the character each rests upon his own understanding of what constitutes a fool.

Note

[1] Green Arrow is also an example of a successful revamp that fundamentally defines perceptions of the character from that day forward.  When Geoff Johns and the DC editorial staff were laboring to undo the mistakes of the New 52 (which, in Oliver Queen's case, rendered him nearly unrecognizable to comics fans even as he was more closely alligned with the hero of the CW's hit show, Arrow), he engaged his colleagues in a group exercise to define the basic features common to virtually every successful version of a DC character.  For Green Arrow, that was his van dyke beard, his abrasiveness, his politics, and his relationship with Black Canary.

Next: God's Executioner

Too Big to Fail

Who, after all, are the Mutants?  In addition to being a comics industry in-joke,  the name also reminds us of the metaphorical power that Marvel's mutants have always had:  as a non-existent minority, they can stand in for any marginalized population.  Of course, Marvel's early approach to this question was typical:  the X-Men and other mutants were open to metaphorical interpretation precisely because they were white. Without any of the baggage of a real, existing ethnic group, they were a means for the white reader to cosplay oppression.  Miller's mutants are something else entirely:  not white, not Black, Latino or Asian, but strangely almost beige. 

Street gang racial harmony, brought to you by Disney

It's an interesting, if unsatisfying, solution to a longstanding representational problem: my elementary school books in the 1970s featured children with an astounding range of skin colors (blue, orange, maroon), but none found in nature, while the 1990s hit adventure cartoon Gargoyles featured multiracial street gangs that resembled a downscale Benetton ad or a human resources dream team (one Black, one white, and one Latino gang member joining in harmony to threaten passersby).  Miller's approach was to drain all the gang members of color, and yet give them a slang that was heavily inflected by African American Vernacular English.   It's a clever dodge:  Miller can gesture towards blackness, but any assertion that the Mutants are meant to be Black must be made by the reader, not the author.

It also avoids the cringe-inducing visual of a giant white man (Batman) leading an army of young men of color.  Once the Mutants cosplay as the Sons of the Batman, they blend in with his color palette.  The result is a literalization of the theory that young men go feral without a father figure: no racial diversity will call Batman's paternity into question.  Meanwhile, decades of discomfort and cultural criticism about Batman and his relationship to the young boy(s) who follow him are put to rest.  First, he has a new, female Robin, with whom his dynamic is obviously paternal.  Second, Batman's closeness with young Dick Grayson or any of his successors facilitated Wertham's thesis that Batman and Robin were a "homosexual fantasy" (as do numerous hilarious old comics panels frequently shared online), but Batman in charge of an army of young men looks completely different.   His is both father and general, the central figure in a network of homosocial group bonding.  As a positive male role model, Batman lifts the Mutants up. In the words of the military recruitment slogan that was ubiquitous when Miller published the book, Batman inspires his "sons" to be all that they can be.

Iconography? What iconography?

How does Miller get both his skeptical characters and potentially skeptical readers to support this particular model of Batman(hood)?  The same way zombie movies require their viewers to (temporarily) approve of widely available firearms, or 24 establishes ticking-clock scenarios in which torture is justifiable and effective: developing a plot that becomes a fascist Batman's natural habitat.  No matter how dystopian Gotham City may have become, it is still a place where the virtues and vices of vigilantism are up for debate.  But after an electromagnetic pulse disables all of Gotham's technology, the city is reduced to the Hobbesian nightmare that has always lurked just beneath the surface.  The only force for order left is Batman and his teenage army. Miller draws a two-page spread of Batman and the former Mutants literally riding into town on horseback to save the city, recapitulating a cowboy trope that lies deep within American mass culture.  The appropriate response is modeled by the chief Batman skeptic in law enforcement: Ellen Yindel, Jim Gordon's replacement as police commissioner.  Asked by a cop if they should fire at him, an awestruck Yindel reponds: "No...he's too big" (check).

Phrasing!

Batman is, indeed, too big: larger than life, he is also larger than any of the city's now totally dysfunctional institutions. This is where vigilantism and fascism meet:  institutions are fundamentally inadequate for solving social problems. Only a big man (and his followers) can save the day. Batman further proves his point by fighting Superman to a virtual standstill, before interrupting the fight by faking his own death. In The Dark Knight Returns, Superman ("the big blue boyscout") is both the embodiment of a romantic heroic ideal (he even comes with his own idyllic scenery when he meets Bruce in his secret identity) and a government stooge.  The president (somehow Ronald Reagan is still alive and in office) is addled and under-informed, but Superman, being Superman, follows his orders. When he is nearly killed by the electromagnetic pulse, he restores his vitality by absorbing the life force of the natural world around him; Batman powers his exoskeleton to fight Superman by syphoning off most of the remaining electricity from Gotham's power grid.  Batman's natural environment is the city, but without much respect for its institutions. He drains the very infrastructure to get his way.

News alert! Rich white guy privatizes power grid

Despite his apparent death, the book gives Bruce Wayne a perfectly Batman happy ending:  with all the trappings of his civilian life destroyed, he and the Sons of the Batman can retreat deep within the batcaves, near the city but not of it.  To borrow Agamben's terms, Batman has ended his civil life (zoe) in favor of what, for him, is the sheer, unrestrainable power of bare life (bios).  He and his sons (and Carrie) have opted out of civilization, in a home base from which they can work to make Gotham better. Batman has abandoned government in favor of a militia.

Next: What a Fool Believes

Batman and Sons

The Sons of the Batman, whose unspoken acronym, "SoB," is both a slur and a signal of toughness,  are only the most obvious example of The Dark Knight Return's embrace of the cult of masculinity, in all its fascist implications.  Manliness has always been central to modern fascism, whether it be the Mannerbunde who paved the way for Nazism or the Nazis' own preoccupation with male group cohesion and the perfect male, athletic body.  The Dark Knight Returns is full of rugged, muscular male heroes, which in and of itself is not unusual for the superhero genre.

Indeed, the ubiquity of the perfect male superhero physique is part of the point.  The Dark Knight Returns shares a common fascist disinterest in traditional femininity in favor of a female androgyny that borders on the butch.  Both Ellen Yindell, the anti-Batman commissioner who succeeds Gordon, and Carrie herself sport short hairstyles that lend some ambiguity to their gender presentation. And, just as Batman has foils like Two-Face, who reflect back some of his salient traits in exagerrated form, one of the few women Batman every fights appears at the very beginning of Book Three, in a liquor store hold up accompanied by a news broadcast informing us that Yindel is taking over as commissioner that very evening.  The sheer volume of androgyny and cross-gendered presentation in this single scene is astonishing.  Batman is in disguise as an obese Black bag lady, while the robbers are a splinter group of ex-Mutants who, rather than joining the Sons of Batman, have cut to the chase and become Nazis. Granted, their Nazism has a strong whiff of the same cosplay in what Batman is engaging: the two men wear identical green uniforms that, while inspired by the Third Reich, end up looking a bit like the guise of some futuristic henchmen from a bad 1950s sci-fi adventure.  They sport the same blond buzz cut as their leader, Bruno, a tall, shirtless muscular figure with tattoos on their bare buttocks and breasts. Bruno can be read either as a transwoman (based on the shopkeeper's comment about her body ("Nice work, too. Can barely see the stretch marks," and his addressing them as "boys), as a very butch woman (the same shopkeeper refers to Bruno as "her," which, in the time and situation, strikes me as an unlikely courtesy on his part if she is trans). Either way, she and Batman are opposing visions of a feminine grotesque: the manly physique that frames a huge pair of breasts (Bruno) and the sheer excess of the fat Black female body that Batman pretends to inhabit.

This patently ridiculous fight between a bare-breasted androgynous Nazi and Batman the Black Bag Lady lampshades the most obvious omission in Miller's reproduction of Eighties-era panic over "urban" youth crime:  it is one of the few moments in the entire book when racial difference is rendered explicit.  Any representation of Gotham's juvenile delinquents could not help but be racially fraught.  Portraying them as, partially or primarily, people of color not only opens up Miller to charges of racism, it would create a visual dynamic to Batman's fights that would be open to racist appropriation regardless of authorial intent. On the other hand, making them all white would be to whitewash American history,  to deny the legacy of centuries of economic oppression, from slavery to quotas to redlining, that confined people of color to urban ghettos, widespread unemployment, excessive policing, and few options besides crime.  The racist stereotype of Batman's disguise as incoherent, obese unhoused woman is safety valve for the pressures of racial contradictions that are just underneath the surface of the book. 

Where’s Batman? Disguised as an obese unhoused woman, of course

Next: Too Big to Fail

Who's Your Daddy?

While there is something satisfying about calling violent criminals "mutants" during a time when Marvel's X-Men were in their ascendency, the Mutants are not simply a nod in the direction of the Marvel/DC rivalry.  When ordinary denizens of the Marvel universe hate and fear the X-Men,  their prejudice is unfounded; Miller's Mutants, though not literally the result of genetic drift, embody an older generation's fears of an incomprehensible, horrifying youth that have come to take their place.  By the 1980s, decades of moral panic about teenagers had intensified to such an extent that the 1950s depictions of "juvenile delinquents" looked tame, if not positively adorable.  In a decade scarred by the Reagan Era War on Drugs, the institution of mandated sentencing, fear-mongering over the crack epidemic and "crack babies," and a highly racialized media frenzy about violent, drug-related street crime, urban youth of color were framed as prone to violence, a problem allegedly exacerbated by the absence of father figures in their lives.

If anything, Miller's portrayal of violent youth gangs is not just reflective of the anxieties of his times, but borderline prophetic:  three years after Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was published, the vicious gang rape of a white woman in New York's Central Park would take the discourse of racialized crime to frightening new heights.  The five Black and Latino teens wrongfully convicted of the crime were said to have been engaging in an activity called "wilding", which consisted of random acts of violence against total strangers. Wilding (which turned not not to be a real phenomenon) was to be a key element in the rising moral panic over urban crime.

The primary antagonist in Book Two is ostensibly the adult leader of the Mutants, but the main focus of the story is on the children and teens who follow him.  "The Dark Knight Triumphant" is a mini-novel of, if not education, than mis-education by the media, failing social institutions, and deadbeat parents.  As is often the case in this graphic novel, the chapter approaches the primary moral questions by alternating conflicting examples: bad teens inspired by the Mutant Leader and the incipient heroism of the new, self-declared Robin. Carrie Kelly was introduced in the previous installment, in which Batman saves her from a Mutant attack. Now, while the news announcer reports on an anti-Batman petition "citing him as a harmful influence on the children of Gotham," Carrie puts on her new Robin costume for the first time. While the announcer reports that Jim Gordon has just shot and killed a 17-year-old Mutant who had attacked him in the chapter's first pages, Carrie makes her way out the window and onto the ledge.  Her parents, never actually seen on panel, lament what they see as another in a long line of instances of police brutality.  They are ex-hippies who watch TV and reminisce about Woodstock and Chicago, only occasionally remembering that they have a child.  When Carrie nearly dies in her attempt to climb down the building, who is to blame? Her stoned, irresponsible parents? Batman, for inspiring her? Like all the teens in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, she is not just choosing her own adventure; she is choosing her own father figure, and the pickings are slim.

In one of the many television broadcasts punctuating the chapter, Harvey Dent's psychiatrist, Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, explains that Batman is himself responsible for all the crimes he fights, thanks to his anti-social actions being popularized by the media.  Wolper (who, among other things, is an obvious parody of anti-comics crusader Dr. Frederic Wertham), is a proponent of the outdated "media effects" theory, which presumes passivity and vulnerability on the part of the media consumer:

Just as Harvey Dent--who's recovering steadily, thanks for asking--assumed the role of ideological doppelganger to the Batman, so a whole new generation, confused and angry...

--will be bent to the matrix of Batman's pathological self-delusion. Batman is, in this context--and pardon the term--a social disease...

Like Wertham, even as he draws spurious conclusions, Wolper is nevertheless on to something. His interpretation of Harvey Dent, while not exhaustive, is far from incompatible to Batman's own assessment of their relationship ("A reflection, Harvey"), while Batman: The Dark Knight Returns clearly supports the premise that Batman is having an influence, pernicious or otherwise. Yet, here, too, the argument is stacked in Batman's favor.  The Mutants are not just needlessly violent predators; their crimes show them to be nihilists whose worldview leaves no room for the future. One Mutant randomly kills a subway rider by planting a bomb in her purse after feigning to steal; the Mutant responsible is not a character at all, but simply a function, while the woman, Margaret Corcoran, gets an entire page of narration putting the reader in her head. She is an overworked, impoverished mother who has just found ten dollars that she intends to use for her son's art supplies rather than medication for her own pain.  Now her children are orphans. In another scene, a group of Mutants is holding a baby for ransom; one holds a gun to the children's head telling Batman "I'll kill the kid--/believe me, man, I will--" before Batman takes him down.  Batman may be fighting the youth of Gotham, but it is to protect an even younger, more innocent generation.

The chapter ends with a bloody, gruesome battle between Batman and the Mutant leader in a mud pit, complete with the over-the-top violence for which Miller has become famous:

Batman: You don't ...get it, boy...

This isn't a mudhole...

It's an operating table.

And I'm the surgeon.

[He breaks the mutant leader's leg]

Caption: Something tells me to stop with the leg.

I don't listen to it.

It's a case of terribly overwrought dialogue that would be perfectly at home in a B-grade action movie, but the metaphor clarifies Batman's purpose: his physical fight stands in for his attempt to cure the Gotham body politic.  In fighting the Mutant leader, Batman is showing his impressionable young (Mutant) audience who is the better father figure, and who is most deserving of emulation.  He has already won over young Carrie without even trying, and in any case, as a law-abiding teen (and a girl, to boot), she was never part of the demographic most linked with the panic over urban youth crime.  The Mutants, on the other hand, are almost exclusively male, and their submission to an alpha male leader fits the classic late twentieth-century paradigm of feral young men desperate for a father figure.  The scene of Batman kneeling over the Mutant leader's prone body is juxtaposed by one of the book's ubiquitous television screens, this time with a young man who appears to have Batman's symbol tattooed onto his face: 

The Mutants are dead---mutants are history. This is the mark of the future.  Gotham City belongs to the Batman.

[...]

Do not expect any further statements. The Sons of the Batman do not talk. We act. Let Gotham's criminals beware.They are about to enter hell.

Wolper immediately cites this speech as evidence that he was right all along:

Just as I predicted--the Batman has infected the youth of Gotham--poisoned them with an insidious excuse for the most violent anti-social behavior.

If we strip Wolper's words of their value judgments, he is right:  Batman has "infected" Gotham's youth.  Their switch of allegiance to Batman validate's both Wolper's media effects model (passive viewers are transformed by what they see) and the absent-father paradigm for gangs.  The Mutants/Sons of the Batman have no values or evaluative capacities of their own, and will follow the strongest man to win their attention.  Their very name indicates the centrality of masculinity to their group formation:  there do not appear to be any Daughters of the Batman.

Next: Batman and Sons

Fighting Crime or Curing Crime?

Appropriately enough, Batman's reemergence is paralleled not just by the return of his greatest foes (Two-Face, the Joker), but also by an ongoing debate on the possibility of rehabilitation. Indeed, it is the initial focus on Two-Face that helps establish the impression of a full-fledged ethical dialogue about superheroes and supervillains; if anyone is well-poised to bring up two sides of an issue, it is the scarred and schizoid Harvey Dent.  In a brilliant page that starts whose very composition emphasizes duality, Two-Face is reintroduced in a complex grid: the first row consists of four panels, while the second row has five, because the last panel showing the door to Two-Face's room is bifurcated down the middle. When we actually see a completely bandaged Harvey, the same bifurcation splits his body into two separate panels, with his surgeon at his right shoulder and his psychiatrist at his left.  Two different medical discourses have come together to cure him in body and mind, culminating in a series of three more sets of bifurcated images focusing on his face, before his face at last fits in a single, final panel, obscured by the mirror in which he sees his post-surgical image.  The panels themselves convey Harvey's putative cure and reassumption of a singular self.

The media reaction to Two-Face's cure is, naturally, divided, with Commissioner Gordon expressing skepticism about the end of Harvey Dent's criminal career, and Bruce Wayne, who sponsored the treatment, arguing for the virtues of medical and psychiatric intervention and, above all, a second chance.  Here Batman's dual identity mirrors Harvey's own: as Batman, he fights and imprisons Two-Face, and as Bruce, he tries to rehabilitate him.  But Batman's very return to the public stage causes the Joker to wake up from his decade-long catatonia, a fact that implicitly supports the view of Harvey's psychiatrist, who insists that Batman provokes the manias and obsessions of the members of his rogue's gallery.

Both Batman's supporters and detractors clearly recognize that his return is, at the very least, an incitement to debate.  In the first of several excerpts from a Gotham television stations regular on-camera debates between two pundits (one is a man named Morrie, while the other is an obese Lana Lang from the Superman comics--Lana was a journalist in pre-Crisis DC continuity), Morrie calls Batman a "social fascist," to which Lana responds: 

Then why do you call him psychotic? Because you like to use that word for any motive that is too big for your little mind? Because he fights crime instead of perpetrating it?

Morrie: You don't call excessive force a crime? How about assault, fat lady?  Or breaking and entering? Huh?

The set up is a parody of the long-running Sixty Minutes segment "Point Counterpoint" (as well as an homage to Saturday Night Live's own hilarious parody), so the animosity might be expected. But Lana is the cooler head here, as Morrie's name-calling ("fat lady") indicates. Their debate launches a four-page examination of Batman's violent methods and their repercussions, with an ambulance-chasing lawyer insisting that Gordon release his client, who he insists is not a criminal, but a victim of Batman's "criminal assault" on his person.  We know (and Gordon certainly knows) that the man is guilty, but Batman, in ignoring procedure, has left Gordon no other choice but to let him go.  This only gives Batman access to the criminal once again.  The man crashes through a window trying to avoid Batman, shouting "I got rights." Batman's response is that of the classic vigilante who knows that the system does not work:

You've got rights

Lots of rights.

Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy.

But right now you've got a piece of glass shoved into a major artery in your arm.

Right now you're bleeding to death.

Right now I'm the only one in the world who can get you to a hospital in time.

Miller immediately follows this monologue with another "both sides" response to Batman: first from a supporter, who hopes that he "goes after the homos next," and then from a detractor, who calls for the rehabilitation of criminals before admitting he would "never live in the city."  While the book's thrills most obviously come from Batman's extreme actions, the first issue still appears relatively even-handed in its depiction of the pro- and anti-Batman debate.  But the issue's conclusion metaphorically previews the resolution of the debate.  With Harvey Dent as the antagonist, the entire installment has focused on dualities, from Bruce's  and Harvey's dual identities to the opposing views on superhero vigilantism.  Early on, the book seems to promise that the dichotomy between good and evil can be resolved in favor of the good, with Harvey's surgery restoring his face to its previous, unblemished form. But in the end, we learn that Harvey sees the exact opposite when he looks in the mirror: a monstrous face that no longer includes a scar-free half.  The beauty of Two-Face as a villain rests in the promise that a dichotomy can be momentarily resolved (by flipping a coin), but endlessly deferred (as represented by Harvey's divided face). By contrast, both Harvey's surgical cure and his delusion augur an ultimate end to dualism:  one side is going to win. By the same token, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns will play with dualism over the course of four chapters, but in the end, will come down firmly on one side of the coin.

But beating Two-Face has limited utility in determining Batman's value to society after a decade's absence.  The first and third chapter are replays of Batman's greatest hits:  fighting Two-Face and the Joker. The Joker in particular only returns because Batman did, leaving open the possibility that the hero's only significant role in his declining years is to clean up the messes that survived along with him.  They are baroque, fanciful villains from a bygone age, with costumes, a gimmick, and little resemblance to how crime was portrayed at the time Miller made The Dark Knight Returns.  The even-numbered books highlight a new kind of menace, one that resonated with the anxieties of the 1980s:  the ultraviolent youth known as the Mutants.

Next: Who's Your Daddy?

Destruction or Deconstruction?

If, as Rick Hudson argues, Watchmen is the "exemplary Menippean and dialogic text with the graphic novel" medium (that is, using the characters and the plots in which they find themselves as a testing ground for trying out competing ideas),  Batman: The Dark Knight returns is something different. The multiple points of views, examples, and arguments are not so much in dialogue with each other as they are like motifs in a symphony: recurring, evolving, and combining and recombining as point and counterpoint in the service of the larger overall theme. The titles of the four books that make up the collected edition sketch an arc that, while formally accurate,  is deceptive on the level of theme and ideology.  The odd-numbered books have titles whose relevance is indisputable:  "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Hunt the Dark Knight, " respectively.  They are descriptive rather than evaluative; both the returning and the hunting are definitely happening. But the even-numbered books are another matter: "The Dark Knight Triumphant" and "The Dark Knight Falls."  In terms of both the actual events and their ideological ramifications, these titles could just as well be swapped:  In book two, Batman both falls (to be rescued by his new Robin) and triumphs (he beats the Mutant leader), while in the last book, he "falls" (throwing the fight against Superman and faking his own death) and triumphs (living to carry on his crusade outside the unrelenting media glare).  By the end, Batman has also both lost and won the larger questions about the appropriateness of vigilantism as an alternative to failed institutions: he has lost, in that, in the face of state persecution, he has been forced to abandon the life he built for himself over the course of four decades, and he has won, in that the book ultimately reinforces his world view.

Rereading The Dark Knight Returns from the beginning, but decades after its first release, reveals both the source of the book's reputation for a relatively even-handed presentation of the morality of vigilantism and the heavy thumb Miller puts on Batman's side of the scale.  Before TDKR, Batman had never been presented as quite so broken. On the very first page, he miraculously survives a race car accident in a scene whose narration stresses Bruce's insistence on flirting with death, while his dream about falling into the Batcave when he was still a little boy demonstrates a history of trauma that actually predates his parents' murder. The set piece is an iconic sequence that intersperses the slow-motion shooting of his parents that precedes multiple images of his mother's pearl necklace being pulled by the gunman until it snaps; the necklace is repeatedly interpolated with images of adult Bruce's horrified face and tight close-ups of TV news anchors reciting the latest urban atrocity. The visual metaphor is clear:  Bruce, like the pearl necklace, is on the verge of snapping.

Visually, the entire first book conspires to show just how hemmed in Bruce is by his current life.  During the race car scene, we only get a partial picture of various parts of his face.  After turning off the television that inadvertently brought him back to the scene of his parents' death, Bruce knocks a statue off a pedestal while walking across a multi-panel grid showing the storm brewing outdoors.  The statue crosses over four different panel boundaries, while Bruce himself, racing forward, is more than a single panel can contain. When he does finally don the Batman costume for the first time in a decade, Miller continues to play with the contrast between confining panels and Batman's body, but where before, the emphasis was on constraint, now we have the first inkling that Batman is "too big" for the panels that tell his story. When Miller at last shows us Batman's entire body in a full-page spread, the hero again exceeds his borders--larger than life, he dwarfs the television screens that appear along the right side of the page.

The point is that, while the first book does a remarkable job reminding the reader that Bruce is essentially damaged goods, it is in the service of ultimately reinforcing the legend.  Many of the best superhero comics of the 1980s have been labeled "deconstructionist," usually alluding to a misunderstanding of what Deriddean deconstruction was all about. The assumption is that "deconstruction" is a synonym for "destruction," and "reconstruction" is the opposite.   Deconstruction works in contrast to mere destruction: it breaks things down, shows their internal contradictions, but builds them back up again while incorporating an awareness of the shaky foundations on which it is built. Deconstruction incorporates reconstruction, but with a critical difference.  This is what Miller does with Batman.  The process always leads to a reaffirmation of Batman's greatness.

Next: Fighting Crime or Curing Crime?

The Politics of Reading against Your Own Politics

Nonetheless, one need not read The Dark Knight Returns anachronistically to conclude that the book does, in fact, come down on the side of a politics that at least flirts with fascism.  In and of itself, this would be an interesting finding, but what really makes The Dark Knight Returns  such an intense and complicated reading experience is how the book gets there. Miller's first big Batman story is not a straightforward apologia for vigilantism, and to the extent that it veers towards fascism, it does so in such a circuitous way, involving so much debate and dialogue, that one could easily be left with the impression that The Dark Knight Returns manages to maintain itself suspended between two opposing points of views. My point is not that Miller is trying to write a fascist work, or even held fascist beliefs, but that the composition of The Dark Knight Returns leads the reader down a path of normalized fascism, even if the process might be inadvertent or barely perceptible. In doing so, The Dark Knight Returns not only interrogates the issues central to the superhero genre, but also serves as a case study in the capacity of an adventure narrative to make readers and viewers at least temporarily occupy political subject positions that they might otherwise find abhorrent.

The greater the contrast between one's personal politics and the ideology inherent in a pleasurable narrative, the easier it is to notice.  For me, that moment of understanding came when hate-watching Fox's long-running TV drama 24 (2001-2010, 2014).  24 gripped its viewers with a novel format and even more novel conceit: every one-hour episode was equivalent to one hour within the narrative itself, advancing a plot that unfolded over the course of one twenty-four day (and one twenty-four episode season). Before each commercial break, a digital clock displayed the time while the screen subdivided into four smaller screens, each showing different characters in different situations, as if the television were a security monitor.  But it also encoded a politics that justified both the televised representation of total surveillance and the secondary status of human and legal rights.

Yes, I want this show guiding the Supreme Court

The hero of 24 was Jack Bauer, an on-again, off-again agent for the U.S. Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU).  Though the show was supposed to take place in a world of our own, Jack had two outlandish, but unacknowledged superpowers: the ability to make anyone do what he wants in the heat of the moment by shouting a command twice ("Drop your weapon! DROP YOUR WEAPON!") and the magical good fortune of owning cell phones that always got perfect reception. He also had an unwavering sense of purpose: if the only way to get the information needed to prevent a terrorist attack was torture, then so be it.  Jack and his colleagues repeatedly torture suspects (not all of them guilty), and even are themselves subjected to torture (Jack most of all).  While experts generally agree that, aside from the crucial moral questions torture poses, it is also rarely effective at producing reliable intelligence.  Yet on 24, this is not the case:  again and again, the day is saved thanks to secrets elicited through violence and threats. In 2007, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited 24 in justification of so-called "enhanced interrogation":

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand."Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Scalia's citation of a fictional television drama to justify his legal opinion was shocking, but the content of his opinion was not:  no one really expected Scalia to turn into a defender of individual human rights in relation to the U.S. state security  apparatus. Politically, Scalia was 24's ideal viewer, in that he came to the show ready to believe in the efficacy and legitimacy of torture.

But 24 was not just a niche show for neocons; it was a hit with a broad fanbase.  What did it mean for liberal viewers to watch 24?  The inherent discomfort was not that the show portrayed torture in a positive light, but that, unless the viewers were actively resisting the narrative every step of the way, for the sixty minutes they were watching 24, they were trapped in a compact with Jack Bauer.  Because Jack was right, and because torture did work, the only way to enjoy 24 was to assent to the admissibility of torture within the confines of this particular narrative.  The problem was not that Antonin Scalia was a fan; the problem was that being a fan meant temporarily being Antonin Scalia. We root for Jack Bauer to torture the perps because we know that this will stop a bomb from going off or a president from being assassinated.  In a court of law or a philosophical debate, one can come up with countless scenarios in which a suspect is tortured, and many of them will not lead to torture's justification. But 24 is a fiction whose scenarios are specific, limited, and framed precisely in the best possible terms for making torture acceptable. 

This problem is not limited to 24, obviously, but it is firmly connected to questions of genre, and certain adventure genres rely on tropes that lean politically rightward.  Is anyone really going to advocate for gun control during a zombie apocalypse, when the people who survive are precisely those who have access to guns?  Or for putting Batman in jail when Gotham is overrun by ultraviolent criminals?  In stories about heroes fighting crime, the deck is usually stacked in favor of a conventional notion of what, exactly, constitutes a crime and what might be an appropriate punishment.  Even when a superhero comic does call into question some of the more dubious aspects of our criminal justice system, or, for that matter, the appropriateness of putting on a mask and taking justice into one's own hands, the readers, creators, and owners of these characters all share a vested interest in seeing their adventures continue.  Whatever our personal politics, when we read Batman, we want to see him beating up the bad guy. Even Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, whose future setting frees it from both the confines of continuity and the necessity of leaving open avenues for endless storytelling, only flirts with killing off its main character.  It ends with Batman very much alive, and available for more stories in the future.

Next: Destruction of Deconstruction?

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

After his initial run on Daredevil, Frank Miller went to DC to produce (among other things) the four-issue miniseries that would bring him his greatest fame: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986).  Written and pencilled by Miller, with inks by Klaus Janson and stunning colors by Lynn Varley, The Dark Knight Returns continues to exert an outsize influence on the superhero genre. Of the big three graphic novels to break into the media spotlight in 1986, this was the only one to focus on a familiar corporate property.  Though it was not part of the official DC continuity, it redefined Batman for a generation, giving rise to an in-continuity interpretation of the character as an emotional stunted, misanthropic manipulator who drives everyone away.  The aesthetic of the book (combined with the influence of Watchmen) spawned an entire era of "grim and gritty" comics, with little room for anything lighthearted. The Dark Knight Returns has been adapted as an animated film, served as the inspiration for elements of Christopher Nolan's cinematic Batman trilogy, and eventually established an entire Frank Miller subcorner of Batman continuity that included Batman: Year One and multiple unfortunate sequels (Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again  (2001), Batman: The Dark Knight III - The Master Race (2015), and Batman- The Dark Knight Returns - The Golden Child(2019)), as well as a bizarre, unfinished prequel series drawn by Jim Lee: All-Star Batman & Robin: The Boy Wonder (2005-2008). [1] The world of The Dark Knight Returns has also been established as one of the multiple earths in the recent iterations of the DC Multiverse, appearing in the last issue of the Dark Nights: Metal event (2018) as well as an anniversary issue of the regular Batman comic (Batman vol 3 135; legacy number 900).  And on top of all that, it directly inspired a storyline in the 1980s that ended with the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd. [2]

The Dark Knight Returns is also very much a product of its time.  On the surface, this is a statement that says nothing: what artistic production is not a product of its time?  But Miller's graphic novel was the most successful comic book embodiment of the discourse surrounding urban crime in the 1980s. I am not making the claim that The Dark Knight Returns accurately reflects actual crime during this particular period, but that it is dedicated to reproducing "urban crime" as an idea or story that haunted the American media with only a limited basis in reality. The Dark Knight Returns is not a dystopia, but it is a comic book representation of a then-current understanding of urban life as a dystopia in the making. Watchmen is also invested in the question of crime, but in a manner that allows no one understanding of criminality to dominate (Rorschach, the Comedian, and Captain Metropolis all understand crime differently, while Dr. Manhattan barely understands it at all).  Fittingly, it is Rorschach who is the product of a particularly dark understanding of crime and the city; his origin, after all, is rooted in the murder of Kitty Genovese.  But as important (and as mythologized) as that murder was, it was not a current event by the time Watchmen was published.  The Dark Knight Returns does not bother to go back decades to make its case; the criminal blight in Gotham City is, to borrow the catchphrase of the Law and Order franchise, ripped from the headlines.

“No thank you, I do not want to dance the Batusi right now”

The Eighties preoccupation with senseless urban violence, feral youth gangs, and lone (white male) citizens taking justice into their own hands also makes it the perfect time for the superhero comic to reconsider its relationship to crime, justice, and vigilantism.  Over the course of the character's history, Batman had alternated from grim fighter against street-level crime to sci-fi action hero to wacky camp icon. Starting in the 1970s, multiple creators had begun the job of returning Batman to his less fantastical roots, first Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams (primarily in the main Batman title), then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers on their brief, acclaimed Detective Comics run in 1977-1978. Since then, the street-level Batman was the dominant version. But after all this time, what did that mean? When Miller first took over Daredevil, he declared that the action took place in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, an area first featured as a Marvel crime zone in Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes's late 1970s series Omega the Unknown. Gerber and Skrenes were quite pointed and specific in the establishment of Hell's Kitchen as a neighborhood worthy of its name, but the kind of crime that took place in Miller's Daredevil was either timeless or deliberately retro (Miller's noir stylings meant that some of the gangs looked like they stepped out of a time machine).  Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was the first time that Miller seriously engaged with crime as it was imagined to exist in the 1980s, even if the setting was roughly twenty years in DC's future. [3]

By having Gotham descend into criminal chaos in Batman's years-long absence, Miller is able to use his version of Batman's home town as a crucible both for Eighties notions of criminality and for the question of vigilantism.  Establishing where, exactly, the book lands on the vigilante question is a matter of some controversy, partly because of Miller's clever and complex narrative structure.  Much of the action is commented on by a running Greek chorus of television screens, featuring experts and ordinary people sounding off on the appropriateness of Batman's actions.  The result is a sense of actual dialogism: the vigilante question is engaged from multiple points of view, potentially leaving room for the readers to draw their own conclusions. In the decades since the book's publication, there is a temptation to assign a right-wing argument to The Dark Knight Returns, due to Miller's belligerent, xenophobic turn after 9/11.  Such a reading is unfair, in that it assumes a kind of crypto-fascism on Miller's part  and does not allow for the possibility that his views have changed over the years. 

Notes

[1] All-Star Batman has survived primarily as a meme, thanks to Batman's initial conversation with Dick Grayson in the Batmobile:

Dick: Who the hell are you anyway, giving out orders like this?

Batman: What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman.

[2] He got better, but it took a long time.

[3] An exception might be made for the two-part Daredevil story co-written with Roger McKenzie, involving schoolchildren on Angel Dust.  But this was just an Eighties variation on a decades-long tradition of scary stories about one demonized drug or another.

Next: The Politics of Reading against Your Own Politics

Deny! Deny! Deny!

Secret identities have been willingly and unwillingly revealed in comics for decades, and in nearly all cases (eventually, even Daredevil's), a writer comes along who finds a way to put the genie back in the bottle.  But Bendis did something new: not only did he continue to explore the effects of Daredevil's outing throughout his entire run, he even ended it with Matt in prison.  Two things made Bendis's approach to the secret identity question unique:  first, the development of a real-world media context, and second, an eye towards the legal ramifications of Matt's new status.

When Daredevil's secret identity was leaked to the Kingpin in Born Again, the threat was less to his secret than it was to his ability to function in the world.  In classic supervillain fashion, the Kingpin, rather than going public, or simply having Matt Murdock killed, initiated a slow, methodical program for dismantling every aspect of Matt Murdock's life. In the aftermath, the next fifteen years of Daredevil stories would see Murdock and Kingpin in a kind of detente, with the Kingpin keeping Daredevil's secret identity to himself.  But Bendis brings a down-to-earth perspective to secrecy that rarely overlaps with the superhero secret identity trope:  secrets tend to get out.  As reporter Ben Urich, who at times functions as Bendis's authorial mouthpiece, puts it when Daredevil asks, "You think someone knows who I am?": [2]

You mean somebody else? /Other than me? /Oh--and the Kingpin? Foggy? Karen? Spider-Man? Elektra?/../ And every girl you ever make goo-goo eyes at...

<...>

Listen, Matt, my whole career as a reporter is based on one simple principle: people talk./ Maybe the cat's out of the bag. (Daredevil vol.2 30, Bendis with art by Alex Maleev).

Sammy Silke, an upstart in the Kingpin's organization, is livid that Matt Murdock is always off-limits, and even more livid when he realizes that not only is Matt Murdock Daredevil, but a significant number of the Kingpin's men are aware of the fact and refuse to discuss it ("Does this strike anyone else as vaguely insane?" (Daredevil vol.2 30).  Silke does eventually out Daredevil, but not as part of a successful scheme; in fact, he shares the information in the aftermath of the total failure of his coup attempt.  Apprehended by the FBI, Daredevil's secret identity is the only card he can play. Even then, the FBI leadership declines to go public; another leaker gives the story to The Daily Globe.

Devastated, Matt contemplates admitting the truth, but his partner, Foggy, makes clear exactly what is at stake by framing the question in terms closer to the real-world context of the media and the law:

Foggy: "Oh Matt--

Come clean?

What are you talking about?

Matt Murdock tries cases as a lawyer...

... and as Daredevil, he's a vigilante?

Working either side of the law?

This means Matt Murdock defrauded the American justice system by faking a trial against Daredevil.

And that's just the most recent example.

Matt--you can't.

You can't come clean.

You can't come out.

First? You'll get disbarred.

And then...then you go to jail. (Daredevil vol.2 33)

The initial resolution of this dilemma is a brilliant step forward for superhero comics, complicating the philosophical underpinnings of the genre while simultaneously exposing one of its greatest ethical weaknesses. Foggy explains the plan of action:

We deny! Deny!  Deny! 'Til we're blue in the face.

I saw we get up on the highest tree and we scream: Liars!

We sue everyone in sight until their heads spin off the top of their bodies.

We're going to own that dishrag of a paper.

What is this? Is this news? What they did? No.

In resolving to fight the story as lawyers, they undermine the simple dichotomy of truth vs. falsehood. What matters is not simply the truth, but what people believe, and, more important, what the law determines.  The courts will adjudicate the veracity of the argument, based not on actual truth (to which they have no direct access) but available evidence combined with a persuasive narrative.  Technically, this strategy would only be legal if Foggy didn't know his client was lying, but, again, one would have to prove his prior knowledge in court. 

Daredevil or DareTroll?

It's a dirty, compromising set of tactics, one that suggests that the contrast between the ethics of law and the ethics of vigilantism might not be so clear-cut.  There is nothing heroic about it. It sullies both the law and superhero vigilantism, because it also reminds the reader of a basic fact about superheroes with secret identities: they are liars, and they are lying constantly.  The fact that one of those identities is an attorney only makes matters worse.

For the next several years, Matt Murdock's secret identity as Daredevil will be an open secret, something assumed but never proven, until the police finally get a sample of Daredevil's blood. At that point, Matt Murdock is disbarred and imprisoned, and it will take an improbably set of plot twists for the next writer, Ed Brubaker, to get him out and clear his name, and an even less probable plot twist for Mark Waid to have Daredevil's secret identity forgotten by the entire world.  But that is not the point.  Just as no dedicated comics reader could really believe that Superman was permanently dead when Doomsday killed him in 1992, few would have expected Daredevil's public identity to be maintained as the status quo (indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Bendis, Brubaker, Diggle, and early Waid runs was that it lasted for fifteen years).

Bendis is the first  Daredevil writer to take the law/vigilante question seriously, and he succeeds by letting the two genres intersect in a fashion that makes sense for each.  The Law proves more flexible and subject to manipulation than earlier writers had allowed, while the superhero genre learns to function in a gray zone that complicates the usually binary proposition of the secret identity. We still root for Matt; he is the title character, and his glaring character flaws make him appealing to follow. Bendis brings the secret identity drama close to the "real world" than ever before, and the result obliges readers to make the provisional peace with the attenuated morality of both of Matt's professions.

Next: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Nothing to Lose

When Miller returned to the title nearly three years after completing his initial run, law became important through its near-total absence. Having discovered Daredevil's secret identity, the Kingpin uses every lever available to him to dismantle Matt Murdock's life, piece by piece, including having him disbarred.  For the first time in the series' history, Matt is no longer an attorney. He suffers a complete mental breakdown, losing control in both of his identities.  Born Again (Miller's second Daredevil run) does not suggest that it is specifically the loss of his license that drives him to the brink (it is only one in a series of humiliations, culminating in the bombing of Matt's brownstone), but it is an appropriate bookend to the story's resolution.  Matt's entry into the law was motivated by his father and his father's death; his "rebirth" comes when he is rescued by a nun named Maggie, who turns out to be his previously unmentioned, presumed dead mother. Now we learn that she visited him in the hospital right after his accident, and he felt the cross dangling from her neck.  He feels it again at the convent where she revives him from his injuries and illness.  Before this point, Matt was never depicted as specifically Catholic, thought his Irish descent made Catholicism a reasonable guess; now, it is his Catholic faith that sustains him.  He has moved from the law of the father to the grace of the mother, and no longer needs the legal profession (it will be years before his license and status quo ante are restored).

Karen Page, the former secretary/girlfriend whose addiction-fueled confession of Daredevil's secret identity set the entire process of Born Again in motion, is tormented by guilt while Matt helps her through heroin withdrawal.  But Matt, who has already come out on the other side of his life-changing ordeal, does more than forgive her:

--"Nothing," he'd said, Matt did, when she told him what she'd done--

--"I've lost nothing!"Matt said, and laughed like a boy" (Daredevil 232, written by Miller, with art by David Mazzucchelli).

That "nothing" that he has lost includes his career, and by extension, an entire avenue of storytelling that has been a part of Daredevil since the first issue: courtroom drama. Not only will Matt no longer have to balance the competing needs of lawyering and vigilantism, but the comic itself has liberated itself from an ethical minefield based on a generic mismatch. Superhero comics generally do a bad job with courtroom drama (Daredevil included), for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which is that the creators (and, presumably the readers) don't care as much about it as they do about spandex costume drama.  That is just as well, because the two genres are fundamentally at odds: courtroom drama  relies on the importance of procedure. This does not meant that the creators or the consumers value legal procedure above all else; the soap opera component of most television law shows makes this proposition laughable.  But the law is to courtroom drama what the stanza is to poetry:  a set of clear and predictable limitations for creators to rely on, exploit, and use creatively.

The pleasures of the superhero vigilante story come from indulging in the opposite impulse.  Vigilantes circumvent the very procedure that can be the object of fascination in the legal drama; they are guided not by the law, but by justice. Each approach has obvious flaws: proceduralism can let the guilty go free, while vigilantism, when taken to its extreme, can become mob justice or even fascism.

Matt can and must appear in a courtroom, but for Daredevil, the courtroom is his kryptonite. Silver Age comics constantly flouted the legal system, with superheroes testifying in their costumed identities, or having shapeshifters pretending to be one of their identities so that they could both appear in the same place at the same time.  Small wonder that, when Spider-Man reveals his secret identity to the world during the Civil War crossover, the ramifications are more than personal. As Peter Parker, he has made a living photographing Spider-Man for The Daily Bugle.  The newspaper's publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, follows up on his quite reasonable second impulse (his first was to faint from shock): he sues Parker for fraud.

One of the long-term ramifications of Born Again was the tacit understanding that Daredevil the comic is at its best when Matt Murdock is at his worst.  After Miller, the best writers to take on the book have responded to the Miller challenge: how can I destroy Matt's life more than Miller did?  Not long after Brian Bendis began his run, he found the answer: outing Matt Murdock as Daredevil.

Next: Deny! Deny! Deny!

Punchable Villains and Billable Hours

Early on, Lee and his collaborators establish a pattern for Matt Murdock's double life: in the third issue, "Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!" (Lee and Joe Orlando),  the Owl contacts Matt to hire him as his attorney; Matt agrees, but investigates and eventually defeats him as Daredevil.  For the purposes of this particular story, Matt's double identity is rather typical superhero comic fodder; the contradictions of law and vigilantism never actually materialize.  But things get more complex and more interesting in the following issue ("The Unbelievable Purple Man!"), when Lee and Orlando introduce a villain with the power to control people's minds, Zebediah Killgrave.  As Lee's description of him indicates ("the most off-beat, far-out, ding-dong , rootin-tootin' crackerjack super-villain you just ever did see"), Killgrave is still a far cry from the terrifying sociopath known to readers of Aliasand viewers of Jessica Jones decades later, but he does pose a set of unique challenges for both Matt and Daredevil. Killgrave is not simply a villain; he is a person who is entirely immune to all rules of human interaction, let alone the law. He robs a bank by simply asking for the money; his powers of persuasion do the rest. When he is arrested, and inevitably hires Matt Murdock (apparently Marvel's only defense attorney) as his lawyer, the judge notes Killgrave's claim that no crime was committed: "The money was freely given to him!" 

Killgrave, The Purple Man: More proof that even the campiest comics character can eventually be updated and made terrifying

Thus Killgrave is a challenge not just because he can control people's minds, but because the use of his powers makes the law irrelevant--the perfect opponent for a lawyer who puts on a costume in order to skirt the letter of the law he has sworn to uphold.  Matt is stymied at every turn; Killgrave's powers mean that his day in court will only happen if he feels like it, and that no one in the legal system could successfully judge his actions. As Daredevil, he is somehow able to resist Killgrave's brainwashing, but is boxed in by Killgrave's habit of throwing innocent, mind-controlled civilians in his way (including his secretary and love interest, Karen Page).  The only way Daredevil succeeds is through the combined expertise of both his identities:  Matt the lawyer comes up with the idea of secretly recording Killgrave's casual confession of his crimes, but it is Daredevil who is in a position to trick Killgrave into incriminating himself.  In addition, his immunity to Killgrave's mind-control makes more sense thematically than it does on the level of plot:  a villain whose powers are rooted in his purple skin meets his match in the embodiment of blind justice.

When Frank Miller redefined Daredevil in the early 1980s, he did not put any particular emphasis on Matt Murdock's legal career.  In his initial run on the title, Miller treated Matt's work as a function of his secret identity. The contrast between vigilante hero and attorney at law was not of particular interest when the writer/artist was so busy expanding Daredevil's world to include ninjas, the Kingpin, an old mentor (Stick), and a former lover-turned-enemy (Elektra).  Miller deepened the character of Matt Murdock significantly, but his focus was on the man's emotional and psychological damage.

The one minor exception was a one-off comedic issue, "Guts" (Daredevil 185, with art by Klaus Janson).  The issue starts with Matt breaking the fourth wall, telling the reader that he cannot be Daredevil all the time: "Crimefighting alone won't pay the bills./ Lawyering will, though. So by day, I'm Matt Murdock, attorney at law."  This story will be about his law partner Foggy. Fat, clumsy, and silly, Foggy had always been played for comic effect, and here the joke is that Miller is applying his noir aesthetic to the adventures of the least noir character in the Daredevil stable.  Foggy is investigating a case of corruption that puts him in danger repeatedly, unaware that each time, Daredevil is saving him from behind the scenes. Again, it works because Foggy is always a figure of fun, but also because it shows the absurdity of placing a lawyer--an ordinary lawyer— in conflict with gun-toting criminals and mammoth-sized Kingpins.  None of it makes much sense--the Kingpin somehow doesn't recognize Foggy as an attorney rather than a gun for hire, but that is part of the point.  Foggy the lawyer is trying to be the protagonist of the wrong genre.

Stupid Humor Rule #113: Fat people always have to be shown eating. Because that’s all they do

Next: Nothing to Lose

Fighting (for) the Law

Chapter 3:

The Law vs. Justice

Fighting (for) the Law

Superheroes with secret identities tend to have day jobs that complement their more unusual activities: reporters, mild-mannered or otherwise, are well-poised to hear about a crime in progress, scientists of all stripes bring useful knowledge and even more useful gadgets to the fight against supervillains, and rich playboys have a great deal of time on their hands (and even greater financial resources to spend on their costumed adventures).   

There is, however, a small subset of superheroes whose fight against crime at first glance looks like an extension of their professional work, but actually functions as its antithesis:  lawyers and police.  Like military service, law enforcement is more likely to be part of a hero's backstory than their present: DC's Guardian and Marvel's Misty Knight are both former cops who are no longer constrained by police regulations.  Some superheroes exercise their powers as part of a science fictional law enforcement agency, which also tends to give them more leeway than ordinary earth cops (the various Green Lanterns; some versions of Hawkman, Bishop of the X-Men). 

Only a few actually combine ongoing police work with superheroics: Dick Grayson (Nightwing) served in the Bloohdhaven police force for a brief time; Barry Allen (The Flash) is a forensic scientist with the Central City Police Department; various versions of the Spectre (Jim Corrigan) continued their detective work even after becoming the Spirit of Vengeance, and, more recently Renée Montoya has combined her costumed activity as The Question with legitimate police work, even rising to the rank of Gotham City Police Commissioner.  It's unsurprising that so few superheroes are in the police force, since the contrast is not particularly exciting: who wants to read a story about a doorman who moonlights as a security guard?

Lawyers are also far from overrepresented among secret identities, but they have had more staying power. At DC, Kate Spencer has alternated between being a district attorney and a defense lawyer while also killing criminals as Manhunter.  Image Comics in the 1990s published the adventures of Shadowhawk, who was a lawyer before he put on a costume. At Marvel, Jennifer Walters has been the rare character to maintain both a legal career and a heroic identity (She-Hulk), but this is often in the service of imagining what the practice of law would look like in a world of superheroes (while usually maintaining a much more light-hearted tone than in the standard Marvel fare).  The most famous, and enduring, lawyer/superhero combination is Marvel's Daredevil (Matt Murdock), whose legal career has been a defining feature since his introduction in 1964.

Of course, no one was reading Daredevil to learn about the practice of law (or at least, let's hope not).   Rather, the law existed as a counterpoint. Though it would take years to be more fully developed, primarily by Brian Bendis, the conflict (or at least, contrast) between the law and vigilantism is a running theme of Daredevil.  Initially, it is hampered by Lee's haphazard representation of the legal system. Not only does Matt attend law school as if it were a four-year undergraduate program right after high school, but the issue ends with Matt and his law partner Foggy agreeing that they should not take an accused murderer's case because "from the police report [Foggy} was convinced he's guilty!" (as if guilty defendants did not have the right to counsel).   

In addition to being an attorney, Daredevil is also blind. Not the first blind superhero nor the last (DC's Doctor Midnight preceded him by decades), the combination of his disability with his career is a bit too on the nose ("Justice is blind"). He needs both of these details to make him stand out as a new character; the marketing for the first issue is at great pains to compare him to Spider-Man. The cover proclaims: "Remember when we introduced...Spider-Man/ Now we continue the Mighty Marvel Tradition with....Daredevil!!", while the splash page, showing Daredevil leaping against the backdrop of the cityscape, appeals to the instinct of the budding comics collector:

Remember this cover? [over a picture of the first issue of Spider-Man] If you are one of the fortunate few who bought this first copy--you probably wouldn't part with it for anything! / Now we congratulate you for having bought another prized first edition! This magazine is certain to be one of your most valued comic mag possessions in the month to come!"

Apparently, justice is also color blind

Daredevil has to be enough like Spider-Man to to capitalize on the wall-crawler's appeal, but also different enough to warrant his own series. Lee and co-creator/illustrator Bill Everett do this not only by making Matt Murdock a blind lawyer, but by giving him an origin story that mirrors Peter Parker's own.  Where Peter was an unathletic bookworm, Matt was pushed into serious study by his father, developing his athletic abilities in secret. Uncle Ben was Peter's model for power and responsibility (his costumed career), while Jack Murdock was the driving force behind Matt's civilian identity. 

Peter's origin contains three important turning points: gaining his powers, failing to stop a crime (and thereby inadvertently causing his uncle's death), and resolving to use his abilities for the greater good.  Matt instinctively acts to prevent a tragedy, pushing a blind man out of the path of a runaway truck and losing his sight to a radioactive cylinder that hits him along the way. Since the radioactivity grants him heightened senses, the origin of his powers overlaps with the demonstration of his refusal to stand by and watch (something he will literally never be able to do again). The determination to be a costumed superhero comes when he loses his father, like Peter's loss of his Uncle Ben, but again with a twist:  Peter is honoring Uncle Ben's wishes and memory, while Matt, by resorting to physical violence, is only honoring his father's wishes in the breach.

Matt's entire life is defined by this double bind: his father's injunction to avoid violence in favor of school and, eventually, a middle-class profession, and his lifelong need to act, to intervene, and to set wrongs right.  As a result, Daredevil is a walking, swinging, embodiment of Lacanian theory:  his actual father's explicit limitations on his individual agency turn into a neurotic manifestation of all that he is supposed to repress (his physicality, his heroism).  He dons the original (hideous yellow and red) Daredevil costume in response to his father's murder, and any satisfaction gained by inadvertently causing the death of the man responsible is haunted by the fact that he is doing exactly the opposite of what his father wanted.  The irony is intensified by the fact that Jack Murdock's decision not to throw the fight (despite the Fixer's instructions) is motivated by Matt's presence in the audience; Jack had strayed from his own principles, but redeemed himself for the sake of his son.  Matt can never be fully redeemed; the double bind imposed by his actual father then gets transferred to his professional life: every night he patrols as Daredevil, he is violating the law he has sworn to uphold (even if it is in the name of the justice to which the law is supposed to aspire). [1]

Note

[1] Miller complicates the scenario in his retelling of Matt Murdock's origin and early years, Daredevil: The Man without Fear (illustrated by John Romita, Jr. 1993-1994). In addition to shoehorning the retcons he made during his first Daredevil run (Elektra, Stick), he includes a scene of domestic violence. Still a little boy, Matt runs home to brag to his father about winning a fight with a bully. Mike smacks him, and Matt runs away. The captions convey his thoughts: "Dad hit me. / It was wrong. / Dad was wrong. / And if even Dad can be wrong, then anybody can do bad things. Anybody at all. / The only way to stop people from being bad is to make rules. Laws. /Somewhere in a long and lonely night the boy's course is set. / He will study the rules. / He will study the laws." The narration of the scene, along with the image of Matt staring out into space, echoes the origin of the other corporate superhero on whom Miller would make his mark: Batman.  But it is almost a parody, in that it is the origin not of Daredevil, but of Matt Murdock, attorney-at-law.  Where Bruce Wayne swears to uphold justice as a vigilante in response to his parents' deaths, Matt Murdock resolves to study law in response to his father's violence. 

Next: Punchable Villains and Billable Hours

Second(ary) World Problems

It stands to reason that, as superhero comics grew more complex and skewed more adult, their ethical framework would start to wear thin. Developing out of an artistic practice of literal caricature, the early superhero comics were never intended to function as anything like a realistic representation of the world that produced them.  Discussing the comics form, Scott McCloud calls cartooning "amplification through simplification," a phrase that could just as well apply to superhero comics' approach to content and theme.  The Lee/Kirby/Ditko innovations of 1960s Marvel brought the genre a few steps closer in line to the "real world," but picking up any Marvel comic from, say, 1963, and reading the dialogue aloud would demonstrate that several steps still remained.  This may sound like a value judgment, and to some readers and critics, it would be. My point is rather than a growing awareness and dissatisfaction with the disjuncture between the world of Marvel and DC and the proverbial "world outside your window" would push corporate comics in the direction of increased realism and, as we see in the case of the drug-themed comics of the 1970s, "relevance."  Yet this "realism" ages just as quickly as do the hairstyles and clothes. An unfriendly reader will find at least as much to mock in an O'Neil/Adams "Hard Travelin' Heroes" Green Lantern / Green Arrow story as in an issue of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four.  Jumping ahead to the twenty-first century , Brian Bendis's Mamet-inflected, hypernaturalistic dialogue is another likely candidate for retrospective snark. 

Certainly, there is no reason to make a fetish of realism, as though verisimilitude were the single determining criterion for assessing or enjoying a work of art. Nor is a fictional world's resemblance to the "real" world essential for making a point about justice, ethics, behavior, or metaphysics, as any number of works of fantasy demonstrate.  The problem for superhero comics comes when the gap between the allegorical fantastic and the faithfully representational becomes just narrow enough that the exploration of an ethical problem cannot be satisfying according to the demands of either mode.  Superhero comics can fall into the ethical equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. Here, though, the problem is not a visual depiction of something human that is still un-human enough to provoke an uncanny response, but rather a setting or exploration of an ethical problem that is neither fanciful enough to be allegorical or fabulous nor mimetic enough to feel like an adequate vehicle for tackling a significant, real-world question.  Mutants can be rounded up in concentration camps in nightmarish dystopian futures as a story about the horrors of genocide, but Dr. Doom cannot stand at the ruins of the Twin Towers and shed a tear through the eye slit of his iron face mask.

As a vehicle for addressing real-world problems, these superhero comics fall into another trap: perhaps less an Uncanny Valley than an Uncanny Foggy Moor.  Here the gap is between earnestness and camp. Lex Luthor, Captain America, Ultimate Captain America, Ms. Marvel, John Hawksmoor (of the Authority), Ultimate Thor, the Squadron Supreme's Nighthawk, have all been American presidents in one continuity or another. The Kingpin, Luke Cage, Green Arrow, and Mitchell Hundred (Ex Machina) have all been mayors, Iron Man has been Secretary of State, and the pre-Crisis Batgirl went from librarian to congresswoman practically overnight. Just how seriously are we supposed to take this?  Batgirl's 1972 congressional campaign is another patently ridiculous attempt to portray youth culture, but later examples, such as Green Arrow's stewardship of Star City and Luke Cage's time as mayor of New York, make more of an effort at credibility.  Grant Morrison's "President Superman" may well be the best compromise: he and those around him take his presidency completely seriously, but, since he comes from an alternate Earth, readers are not expected to follow the month-by-month adventures of a president who repeatedly sneaks out of the Oval Office to repel alien invaders or knock asteroids out of a path towards our planet.

That’s Congresswoman Batgirl to you, sir

When Marvel made New York City the setting for the adventures of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and virtually every other superhero they published, it was an innovation. It made National (DC), with its Metropolis, Gotham City, Central City, and Star City,  look staid and old-fashioned for its unwillingness even to pretend to be engaging with our world. Over the years, however, DC's creators and editors leaned in to the advantage of their fictional settings. The familiar adage that Metropolis is New York City by day and Gotham is New York by night made sense for Superman and Batman, and eventually allowed each of the cities to be developed in directions that would have been impossible for a believable, if fictional, New York.  For a time, Metropolis was infused with future tech that made it literally the "city of tomorrow," while Gotham suffered a cataclysmic earthquake that cut it off from the rest of the world and turned it into a post-apocalyptic No Man's Land.  New York would occasionally be used, but some creators instead took further advantage of the opportunity to create new fantasy cities that would have their own character and facilitate their own particular type of storytelling:  when James Robinson and Tony Harris created a new Starman in the aftermath of Zero Hour, they situated him in Opal City,  designed to host the mystery and nostalgia that informed the storytelling. At their best, DC's fictional cities facilitate their own chronotopes:  a story in Gotham would not unfold the same way in Metropolis.

Here, as in so many other cases, Watchmen shows a possible way forward.  Moore and Gibbons positively revel in the derivative nature of the world they created:  as a distorted version of a commercially unsuccessful superhero universe (Charlton) that itself could credibly be called a variation on DC core concepts (the street-level hero, the god, the martial arts girl), Watchmen is more of a tertiary than secondary world.  The fears that grip the population are the same as those that animated so much of the political discourse of the time: the book was serialized in 1986, the year in which it also took place, and global nuclear war was an ever-present, if low-level, possibility.  But Moore and Gibbons allowed their world to be substantively changed by the presence and actions of its protagonists, with American winning the war in Vietnam and Nixon somehow still in office twelve years after his real-world resignation.  The themes of Watchmen did not require the readers to accept that it took place in a reasonable facsimile of their world, but the logic behind the plot and the characters' actions did not strain credibility.  Though unfolding in the medium of comics and steeped in the lore and traditions of the superhero narrative, Watchmen tapped into the kind of world-building familiar to readers of high-quality science fiction:  suspending disbelieve is possible and desirable because, once the reader accepts the novum (i.e., the thing that makes the work science fiction rather than mimetic) the rest of the world falls into place.  The superhero comics discussed in this chapter labor under the burden of multiple, proliferating nova, with simply too many fantastic and generally inexplicable elements to make them a believable secondary world.

The odds, then, are stacked against a corporate superhero comic adequately reflecting or representing a "real world" problem.  Creators have to reckon with the limits of the permissible, which, depending on the time and circumstances, can be a matter of industry self-regulation, company policy, or the spoken and unspoken expectations about the contents of comics.  The seriality of these comics could, at least in theory, work in favor of ethical exploration, but the inevitable changes in creative and editorial teams and the sheer accumulation of detail and lore (continuity) are significant, and almost inevitable, obstacles. Finally, the tension between the fantastic, sometimes campy elements of superhero comics (the costumes, the rhetoric, the tropes) and the seriousness or scale of the chosen problem is a tonal challenge that, if not insurmountable, must at the very least be daunting. 

It is a historical accident that most mainstream comics make no use of lower case lettering; when the quality of printing and paper is low, the upper case is a guarantor of legibility.  But it is also emblematic of the problem:  regardless of subject matter or attempted tone, these comics shout at the reader at the top of their voice. One could say the same about opera--like so many aspects of medium and genre, it is as much a feature to be used as a limitation with which to grapple.  Like the borders of a comics panel, the bombastic character of superhero comics is so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible to the reader, or it can be used more playfully in a manner that one cannot help but notice.  And, like the panel border, it can be all the more noticeable in its occasional absence, a reminder of what readers have come to expect without question.  The corporate superhero genre functions within the invisible borders that separate it from the world that produced it, with results that are usually appreciated best when the reader has tacitly assented to the creative dissonance on which the comics rely.

Next: Chapter 3: The Law vs. Justice

Move Fast, Break Things

The use of mind control is a glaring moral failing, but it also highlights the limitations of the superhero genre.  What is left for superheroes to do if there is no one else to fight?  Since the Adventures of Superman radio series (1940-1951), the Man of Steel's job has been described as a "never-ending battle" (initially for "truth and justice," but by the time the show moved to television (1952-1958), it was "truth, justice, and the American way"); this is a phrase that can be applied to the superhero genre write large. Superhero stories are generally serialized; there can be no end to the battle not just because crime continues in the "real world," but because the corporate imperative to maximize profit and the public appetite for more stories makes true endings inimical to the storyworld. In attempting to solve their world's problem, the Squadron becomes the problem, not just because they are curtailing freedoms, but because the rules of the genre require that they have someone to fight.

Resorting to brainwashing also highlights the basic problem with both superheroes and this particular attempt to change the world:  the Squadron is either unwilling to, or (more likely) incapable of reflecting on their own ideology.  As heroes, the fought "crime," upheld the status quo, and therefore were subject to being mislead when their leaders proved corrupt.  As utopian dreamers, they have not bothered to develop a theory or working model of society. They act like technocrats, and in the absence of anyone above them to provide guidance, they can only see the most obvious problems.  This is one of the few points where their approach converges with that of Watchmen's utopian schemer, Adrian Veidt.  Veidt prides himself in following Alexander the Great's approach to the Gordian knot:  it is to be simply severed rather than unraveled.  The metaphor has its appeal, but it carries with it a fundamental denial of complexity.  Veidt should be smart enough to know better; the Squadron, despite the presence of scientific geniuses in their ranks, does not have the wherewithal to realize that they are leaving basic philosophical questions unasked and unanswered.

Poor Tom Thumb! He creates a totalitarian mind control device, and what is the thanks he gets from his teammate? A bigoted slur

The fundamental cluelessness of the Squadron Supreme makes them frustrating, but it an integral part in making their miniseries work, just as the book's indebtedness to continuity, while making Squadron Supreme a difficult reading experience for the uninitiated, allows it to stake a claim that Watchmen cannot.  Though both books started as twelve-issue series, Watchmen deliberately departs from the traditions of serial superhero storytelling.  As ambiguous as its final panel is, the book nevertheless comes to a true conclusion. Watchmen deconstructs the serial superhero comic in a format that lends itself to a beginning, middle, and end.  Squadron Supreme, though telling a more or less complete story, has to address the conventions of the superhero as part of Marvel's neverending narrative flow; even the book's sequel, whose title (The Death of a Universe) promises finality still manages not to provide a true ending to the characters' adventures.  

The Squadron may have started as a parody of the Justice League, but it morphed into an ongoing satire of two key elements of the superhero genre:  the hero's lack of engagement with the systemic questions that frame their adventures, and the expectation that the hero will always win.  The Squadron Supreme exists to lose, and to lose again and again.  Were it not for the seriality of their adventures, any given Squadron Supreme story could function as the superhero equivalent of tragedy:  not only does the Squadron collectively suffer from a tragic flaw (their political and philosophical naivete), but by the stories' end, the body count has reached near-Hamlet levels.  The Squadron Supreme miniseries abruptly tries to change its tone in the very last panel, moving from the morgue to the delivery room for the birth of Arcanna's baby, but the shift is too little, too late. There is little room to assert that Squadron Supreme has a happy ending, or, for that matter, that the team itself has any prospect of an optimistic conclusion to any subsequent adventures.  If Sophocles, instead of writing the plays that survived to our day, had written a series of Oedipus dramas that each somehow ended with the title character once again putting out his own eyes, the result would have prefigured the saga of the Squadron Supreme.

Next: Second(ary) World Problems

A Magnificent Failure

The failure of Squadron Supreme is also its brilliance, because it is turned into a theme at various points throughout the book.  This is also where Gruenwald's continuity obsession pays off: yes, we have pages of exposition and summary in the first issue, but it is in the service of establishing just how bad things have become on the Squadron's world.  Despite Gruenwald's own never-ending fannish enthusiasm, Squadron Supreme excels at bringing the jaded sensibility of fan who finds that superheroes are in decline.  The first issue does a remarkable job of transforming a metafictional superhero malaise into the condition of the superheroes themselves.

Defeated even before the series began, the Squadron spend much of the first issue continuing to fail.  Hyperion tries to stop the team's orbital headquarters from tumbling to earth, but manages only to steer it away from populated areas. In case the reader missed the metaphor, Hyperion and his colleagues make it crystal clear:

Hyperion: Maybe it was meant to come crashing down on our heads....like everything else has come crashing down on the Squadron lately.

Whizzer: I know what you mean, pal. The satellite, the world--we've all seen better days.

It doesn’t take a giant metaphor to hit you over the head…. oh, wait

The rest of the Squadron is no better off. Power Princess, Nuke, Captain Hawk, and Arcanna try to stop a food riot, but only make things worse. Golden Archer, Lady Lark, Nighthawk, and Tom Thumb manage to put out some fires caused by exploding gas mains, but they know that similar disasters are playing out all over the country. When the Squadron finally assembles, both Hyperion and Nighthawk lament that this situation is "all our fault," with the Whizzer confirming that the rest of the world is in even worse shape than the United States.  The despair is palpable, and the book is slipping dangerously away from superhero territory and into the direction of a Democratic focus group during the Trump administration.

What they need is what the best superheroes provide: inspiration. So it falls to Power Princess, the Squadron's stand-in for Wonder Woman, to argue that the heroes are thinking to small. She grew up in a utopia; why can't the Squadron turn the rest of the world into a paradise?  Hyperion quickly agrees, and soon the entire Squadron votes on a "Utopia Project" that is not content with merely stopping the bad guys:

Hyperion:  We should actively pursue solutions to all the word's problems---

---abolish war and crime, eliminate poverty and hunger, establish equality among all peoples, clean up the environment, cure diseases and---

---even cure death itself!"

“Right on!” “Boo, death!”

It's an astonishing leap--just three pages ago, the Squadron was whining about the hopelessness of their situation, and now they're going to put a stop to death.  Only Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk), still technically the president after being controlled by the Overmind, makes an impassioned argument against the plan. [1] As the team's version of Batman, he is the sole non-superhuman in the Marvel version of what has come to be called DC's "Trinity" (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman), so it is only right that he be the voice of the opposition.  But the scene is clumsy and rushed.  In the previous chapter, we saw how Moore and Gibbons used each of the Watchmencharacters to embody a philosophy (Existentialism, Objectivism), but even in the scenes that make their views most explicit (the first and only meeting of "Crimebusters" and Dr. Manhattan's final confrontation with Rorschach), they never speechify or even truly debate.  But a more charitable reading of the speed with which the Squadron leaps into the utopia program points to the deficiencies of the superhero genre:  these characters are simply not designed to refrain from taking action, and will always choose intervention over introspection. 

In trying to think big, the Squadron Supreme (the team) displays an astonishing lack of imagination; whether or not Squadron Supreme the miniseries does as well is an open question. Their ideas are bold, to be sure, but hatched too quickly and never really thought through. Much of the plan is to transplant the idea and technology of Power Princesses homeland, Utopia Isle, in the broader world. But in its form, the plan looks more like a repetition compulsion: not only are the Squadron taking over the world (again), but the key weapon in their arsenal is also their Achilles' heel: mind control.  Instead of simply fighting the bad guys, they will use advanced technology to turn them from adversaries into team mates.

At this point Squadron Supreme could have turned into a dystopian nightmare about the rise of an irresistible form of fascism, but that would have required the book to broaden its focus to the general populace. Ordinary people are only of interest to the narrative to the extent that they intersect with its super-powered protagonists:  they are necessary in the first issue in order to establish how bad things have gotten, but, otherwise, they show up (less and less frequently) as the Squadron's friends and family. Small wonder that Hyperion becomes functionally blind halfway through the series; his multiple forms of advanced vision have never allowed him to perceive the most basic facts that are in plain sight. Equally ironic is the cause, a fight with his evil, extradimensional doppelganger:  the Squadron is its own worst enemy.

Note

[1] Amphibian also votes against it, but, unlike Nighthawk, he agrees to defer to the will of the majority.

Next: Move Fast, Break Things