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Popular Culture Review
deeper, more convincing character by underlining the psychological trauma
caused by his parents’ murder, and what used to be a simple narrative
paradigm—the logical cause for Bruce Wayne to become Batman in order to
fight crime—has become a thematic leitmotiv in the more recent installments of
his adventures. The “dark” side of the Dark Knight has also been accentuated,
allowing a simple manichean conflict to lead towards deeper considerations
upon the nature of the law by opposition to the concept of justice, and ultimately
upon the very notions of Good and Evil. And thus, some specific instances of
Batman’s adventures are worth of scholarly attention, as is, for instance, Frank
Miller’s treatment of the character in The Dark Knight Returns, which
introduces an aging Batman evolving in a hostile environment, where the police
and public opinion are no longer on his side, and who is struggling to defeat the
younger generation of hoodlums; this particular interpretation of Batman could
indeed be considered as a “good,” canonically viable work, for not only does it
contain a very perceptive critique of the mass media’s power of manipulation,
but it also questions the actual function of superheroes in modem society.
In an attempt to accommodate the diverse simultaneous narrative threads of
superhero comic books within a coherent architecture, DC has established the
“multiverse,” and hence. The Dark Knight Returns and its sequel. The Dark
Knight Strikes Again are supposed to take place on a parallel Earth (Earth-31).
However, being a self-content, independent narration. Miller’s The Dark Knight
Returns is naturally separated from what we could be considered as the official
Batman series, that is from the typical adventures of the Dark Knight in the
serialized format, and therefore, one of the most culturally convincing
concretizations of Batman has been automatically alienated from the series as a
logical consequence of the factory-style production to which the medium is
submitted, as if the very nature of the comic book industry instinctively rejected
any type of originality by severely limiting any possibility for independent
artistic creation.
The existence of works such as the aforementioned The Dark Night or of
Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen demonstrates that the superhero
comic book genre is indeed capable of p roducing noteworthy artifacts; however,
it also reveals its capacity to regulate true creativity within the industry, for both.
Watchmen and The Dark Knight, remain somewhat isolated works; they were
conceived outside—and up to a certain extent, against—the industry’s
commercial trend and did not directly affect either the evolution of Batman, in
the case of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, or the future of superheroes at large
in Watchmen. The concept of multiverse, albeit diegetically interesting,
functions most of all as a marketing tool, allowing to establish some type of
logical connection between different narrative products but unable to organize
them in a coherent narrative structure, and so, the influence of Moore’s and
Gibbons’s Watchmen and Miller’s The Dark Knight upon the genre remains
mostly indirect. Both works occupy, therefore, a paradoxical place in the still
hazy canon of comic books, for they are generally recognized as important