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The Revisionary Superhero Narrative
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
116 The Revisionary Superhero Narrative geoFF kloCk Reprinted with permission from How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, 25–52, by the Continuum International Publishing Company. Geoff Klock © 2006. in his introduCtion to BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, alan moore gives the reader the first hint toward understanding the relation that this work has with the complex tradition in which it participates. He writes: [Miller] has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine the character without contradicting one jot of the character’s mythology. Yes, Batman is still Bruce Wayne, alfred is still his butler and commissioner Gordon is still the chief of police, albeit just barely. There is still a young sidekick named Robin, along with a batmobile, a batcave and a utility belt. The Joker, Two-Face and the Catwoman are still in evidence amongst the roster of villains. Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.1 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is the first work in the history of superhero comics that attempts a synthesis of forty-five years of preceding Batman history in one place. Prose summaries giving a sense of how the Dark Knight has been portrayed over the decades have already been written.2 To avoid redundancy, let me cite one example of Batman’s contradictory portrayal as emblematic. The adventures of a superhero are published serially, and thus continuity is established from episode to episode, as in television. Unlike television , however, the serial adventures of individual superheroes have been running for decades, and as fictional characters these heroes do not age. Batman, for example, has remained a perennially young twenty-nine-year-old since his appearance in 1939, even though the environment in which he fights has changed month by month to remain contemporary. The revISIonary Superhero narraTIve 117 While certain writers and artists have had long runs with a single character, each superhero has had a number of different writers and artists over its run, crossing decades in american history. since no single creator is essential to the continuation of any given character across the run of a series, many successful superhero titles are still in publication. Comic books are open-ended and can never be definitively completed, as even canceled titles might be revived and augmented by creators. This creates a number of interesting paradoxes that the revisionary superhero narrative will deal with uniquely, as we will see. The reader is given to understand, for example, that the Batman fighting crime in 1939 saying, “Well, Robin, he was a pilot during the war”; the cherry, goofy, campy 1960s Batman reciting the proverbial “Good job, old chum” (the basis for the adam West Batman television show); and the solitary, grim, nearly psychotic, nocturnal 1980s Batman who watches Ronald Reagan on television are one and the same continuous character. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is a radical move in the history of the superhero narrative because it is the first work that tries to compose a story that makes sense of its history, rather than mechanically adding another story to the Batman folklore. It must participate in the tradition in order to be recognized as a Batman story, but it consciously organizes that tradition in such a way as to comment on forty-five years of Batman comic books. This serves to complicate the assumptions and structure of that tradition. This is why, as alan Moore notes, every aspect of the Batman that every reader knows so well finds expression here. This reworking organizes the Batman canon’s contradictory parts into a coherent whole. The Dark Night Returns is one of the most important works in the tradition of superhero narratives because it is the first strong misreading of comic book history, specifically the history of Batman. Miller’s work, and some of the work of those around him, can be located near Harold Bloom’s concept of revisionary literature, which Bloom describes as “a re-aiming or a looking-over-again, leading to a re-esteeming or a re-estimating. The revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as to aim ‘correctively.’”3 Bloom’s theory of revisionism is useful in understanding the way recent superhero narratives function, but the important moments will be where superhero comic books differ, rather than line up...