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What Frank Miller’s superheroes are telling us.

Frank Miller stunned the world of comics when, back in 1985, he created a new vision of Batman in his Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. The image of a psychopathic Batman stalking the streets of a gigantic, crumbling Gotham, and resorting to terrorist tactics in order to capture criminals was totally fresh, and rather disturbing. Miller penned a couple of sequels to The Dark Knight, such as Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which further explored the deranged psychology of his noirish hero. Now, with All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder Volume 1, Miller returns to the creation that made him famous, in an attempt to explain—in his own gritty way—the means whereby Batman came to acquire his famous sidekick.
   
In Miller’s version, Batman meets Robin as Dick Grayson, a twelve year old boy who performs as an acrobat in the circus along with his parents. During the performance, a hired gunman kills Grayson’s parents, and Batman, who has had his eye on him for a while as a possible protégé, seizes his opportunity and abducts Grayson from the circus, making off with him in his Batmobile. He takes Grayson to his bat cave and leaves him there to fend for himself—apparently intending him to have some sort of a vision quest experience, as had once happened to himself—and Batman tells him that if he wishes to become a superhero, he must come up with a mask and a persona.
   
When Batman leaves him alone in order to set out across the rooftops of Gotham in search of criminals upon which to prey—and he does indeed—“prey” upon them, often breaking their bones and mutilating them—Grayson decides that one of Batman’s compound bows reminds him of Robin Hood, and so he decides to become the masked and hooded character known as ?Hood.? When Batman returns, he yanks away the hood and tells him he will be known as “Robin,” not “Hood.”
   
The Justice League, meanwhile, has heard about Batman’s abduction of a twelve year old boy, and they are very concerned about how this will further damage the reputation of the superhero community. Green Lantern is selected to become the liaison, and he summons Batman to a meeting. As Miller imagines it, Batman despises Green Lantern (envying his super-powerful ring) whom he considers to be even dumber and more shallow than Superman, but he agrees to the meeting. He makes the mistake, however, of taking Robin along with him, for during a heated argument between the three of them, an overzealous Robin nearly destroys Green Lantern’s windpipe, and Batman is forced to do an emergency tracheotomy to save his life. He realizes that he has failed as a protector and teacher for Robin, and that the two have a long road ahead of them if Robin is ever to become anything like a suitable sidekick.
   
This is only the first volume of what promises to be a much longer series, and so it is mostly concerned with setting up a larger plot: the Joker, for instance, puts in only a brief appearance as a serial killer who summons Catwoman to a meeting; Batgirl shows up as a wannabe superhero who annoys Batman, while on another occasion he has to rescue Black Canary from being murdered by a gang of thugs.
   
In Miller’s masterful portrait study, Batman is a borderline personality who prefers his own company and absolutely despises all other superheroes (indeed, he can barely even tolerate Robin’s company). He is not a joiner of any group whatsoever, and will have nothing to do with the Justice League. (Miller portrays Wonder Woman, too, as something of a loner, for she hates men and can barely stand the company of her former lover Superman, whom Miller depicts as her castrated errand boy).
   
It is all great fun, for one can see how Miller deliberately enjoys reversing all the traditional comicbook stereotypes and giving them something akin to depth, if not exactly three dimensionality. For these characters are actually displaced tropes and types out of noir detective novels, like those of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Miller has simply crossed traditional superhero comics with literary noir figures and the end result is rather pleasing to behold.
   
Nowadays, the genres are slowly coming to resemble each other more and more, a phenomenon that typically occurs during the end phases of cultural cycles, when gods and cults go crashing syncretistically into one another and stealing each other’s attributes. At the end of classical music, Wagner creates opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total art” that crosses theater, music, literature and painting into a polygeneric synthesis. At the end of the Classical Civilization, likewise, Christianity emerges as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk religion that incorporates rites and motifs from all the competing mystery cults. Now, with the graphic novel under the sure hand of Frank Miller, it, too, is becoming something of a Gesamtkunstwerk that is devouring all the other genres.
   
In Miller’s universe, there is not much difference between superheroes and supervillains. Indeed, when Green Lantern says to Batman, “You’ve already got half of them calling us criminals!” Batman’s response is: “Of course we’re criminals. We’ve always been criminals. We have to be criminals.”
   
Miller’s “superheroes” are rogues, vigilantes and outlaws who break the law just as much and just as often as the “villains” whom they hunt. They are essentially fascists who have circumvented due process and all its carefully linear, rational processing that has been designed to preserve the idea that citizens have rights. But in the universe according to Frank Miller (and others) the bad guys have no rights, for they are brutally beaten and maimed on the spot by the superheroes who hunt them. It is important to notice this, because these stories seem to be recording a collective impatience with legal machinery, and a readiness to use force and brutality as a means of solving our problems.
   
What Frank Miller’s universe is showing us, then, is the decline of democracy and the spiraling down of its values in an age when America is increasingly coming to resemble Rome during the period of the disintegration of its Republic into civil wars and the anarchy that gave rise to the Caesars.

We need to pay attention to the graffiti on the walls of our crumbling inner city streets that comicbooks represent, for they are communicating more than just slick “entertainment,” but are accurate forecasters of coming changes in the political and social weather patterns.
   
But then, who wants to read comicbooks about law-abiding superheroes who carry criminals to jail cells and leave them there? Where’s the fun in that?

Comicbooks and graphic novels serve as us as vital extensions of the Id, dramatizing “forbidden” scenarios that the innermost depths of the psyche would like to participate in (at least vicariously). They open up portals to the dark recesses of the collective American soul, revealing in the forum of a public medium what it would most like to see happen. To fulfill a similar purpose, the Romans invented the Colosseum. Let’s hope that comicbooks will fulfill this need and not exacerbate it into an ever increasing desire to see these rehearsals played out in the world of reality. The Romans didn’t have comicbooks, but maybe if they’d had, they wouldn’t have needed gladiatorial spectacle.
   
At least, let’s hope so.