Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller

The Dark Knight Returns is the story of 55-year-old millionaire Bruce Wayne, retired after years of crime-fighting as his alter ego, Batman. Wayne now seeks his thrills from motor racing, but something in him isn't quite satisfied with his new existence. He still feels the need to go out on the streets and do the dirty work, to have a heroic death, and above all to avenge his parents' brutal murder at the hands of a gang of thugs. And when a decaying Gotham City is attacked by an extremely violent gang called the Mutants, this provides the perfect pretext for Wayne to don the Bat costume again and return to the life of a vigilante.

Maybe you can tell something about a society by the kind of heroes it chooses. You can say I'm reading too much into this, but the idea of an invincible multimillionaire who goes around cleansing the streets of underground scum has always seemed a bit suspect to me. Earlier societies gave us Robin Hood, a guy who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Now we have Batman, a hyper-rich guy who beats up the poor. I can't help but get the feeling that Bruce Wayne's millions would be better spent on helping oppressed people rather than on beating the shit out of them. Does Batman ever stop to think about why there is so much crime on the streets?

Come to think of it, does Frank Miller? Not if this book is anything to go by: it displays an attitude towards crime and social ills that is marginally to the right of Mussolini. In Miller's Gotham City, crime is carried out either by thoroughly evil masterminds or by the mindless yobs who follow them. Trying to rehabilitate criminals is a hopeless task: they are all inherently evil and there is nothing that can be changed. Two-Face and the Joker are released from a rehabilitation hospital and immediately embark on a killing spree. The doctors who treated them and their left-liberal media sympathisers are held up to ridicule, portrayed as weak, vain and deluded. In Miller's world, it is the 'liberal elite' who are the real culprits. They fail to see that crime is due to individual evil, that crime must be stamped on, that criminals must be punished and punished hard. In their foolishness they think a vigilante like Batman is the real criminal. Liberal media commentators criticise Batman, but straw-man arguments come out of their mouths, which are later proved wrong. Only Batman, and the methods he employs, can stop crime spiralling out of control.

The crime wave is seen from an hysterical fascistic viewpoint. The city is beset by waves and waves of brutal, violent criminals who commit one horrific crime after another. We are manipulated into finding them as hateful as possible. These remorseless killers attack old people, kill children for no reason, and blow up a devoted mother. The devoted mother of an aspiring comic artist, no less! How could they! The criminal gangs resemble no criminal gang ever seen or likely to be seen on Earth, of course, but the implication is clear: this is what happens, people, when you get soft on crime.

There is very little concept of society in Miller's book. In Gotham city, people are in it for themselves. Batman's crusade is entirely personal: he fights crime not to remove it from society, but as an act of revenge for his parents' death. If he felt sufficiently avenged, would he pack it all in and retire to his mansion? Other characters are the same. Commissioner Gordon does what he does only because he thinks of his wife. People only act for personal reasons, not for the greater good, and this is seen as entirely right and natural.

People in Gotham City are generally hopeless. The gang members are so stupid that they would follow anyone who looks like a strong leader: there is no point in educating them otherwise. The liberal media and rulers are totally ineffectual. The ordinary people are weak and dispirited, incapable of bunching together. They need a strong, inspiring leader to unite them.

Enter Hitl-, sorry, enter Batman. Here we have a true Nietzschean superman, a man who is truly above the concept of morality, a man whose deeds cannot be judged by mere mortals. Here we have a man whose ends really justify his means, as Commisioner Gordon rather distastefully hints. Here, in short, we have a neo-fascist wank fantasy.

Now don't get me wrong, Batman could be material for a fascinating character study. We could explore the implications of a revenge-driven morality; the sincerity of his desire for revenge; the contrast between a millionaire vigilante and the criminals he fights; the moral and social consequences of violent vigilantism; and many other questions. The Dark Knight Returns explores none of these, however. Rather, it assumes that everything Batman stands for is right, and proceeds from there. Batman must avenge his parents. Criminals must be attacked.

The book for the most part proceeds along tried-and-tested comic-book conventions. There are four chapters, each of which builds up to a big fight. So we have Batman vs. Two-Face, Batman vs. Joker, etc. For a book that was trumpeted as one of the first superhero character studies, Bruce Wayne/Batman doesn't seem to have much of a character at all. In the beginning, he's a bitter, revenge-obsessed psychopath, and he stays that way all through the book.

As well as being a badly-drawn character, Batman is a badly-drawn character. In fact, the artwork in The Dark Knight Returns is surprisingly terrible. A lot of the drawing looks rushed and sloppy, and annoyingly inconsistent. Some characters have cartoon faces, others moderately realistic ones. I have to wonder why Bruce Wayne bothers with the mask disguise at all, since his face seems to be different in every frame. The full-page spreads, which seem to be the comic-book equivalent of guitar solos, are usually simply embarrassing and tend to show up Miller's shortcomings. And what's up with Batman's physical proportions? He's about the size of two Schwarzeneggers put together! I'm sorry, but any 55-year-old guy carrying around that amount of bulk would be in pretty bad shape in my universe. Clark Kent, who also appears in the book, is even more absurdly proportioned. He has a pair of shoulders you could hang two wardrobes on, and blends in about as discretely as an elephant. Don't you think his colleagues at the Daily Planet would have twigged something? That maybe he was a bit, y'know, super?

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Watchmen is another take on 'superheroes with character', and a much more successful one. The story, set in an alternative mid-1980s, deals with a number of former costumed heroes, retired since their brand of vigilantism was outlawed in 1977. When one of their number is murdered, some of the heroes become suspicious. Is there a plot to kill off former heroes, or is something much more sinister afoot?

The storyline of Watchmen is essentially a melodrama: we are taken into the lives and love-lives of the present-day heroes and their counterparts in the 1940s. But it's a superior melodrama. We get the sense that we are watching real lives, characters we genuinely care about. As you would expect, the heroes aren't the most stable people on the block, but they all manage to elicit some sympathy. Rorschach, who combines an ink-blot mask with the trenchcoat, fedora and sardonic commentary of a film-noir detective, is a particularly fascinating character. He is a right-wing psychotic who hates women, but at the same time he has a cast-iron sense of personal morality, and carries out his work with a messianic zeal. The story of his unhappy childhood makes him a tragic figure, and ultimately he is perhaps the only hero to escape with his integrity intact. Other memorable characters include Nite Owl, a former hero who is now grown sad, lonely and overweight, and The Comedian, a cynical thug who now works as a contract killer for the US government.

Watchmen deals with the costumed hero phenomenon plausibly and for the most part realistically. We see and understand the various motivations the people have for dressing up and fighting crime. The heroes tend to be either flamboyant extroverts who like the attention (Silk Spectre I, the Comedian) or loners who only find self-respect in their crime-fighting alter egos (Nite Owl II, Rorschach). Because it takes a certain kind of character to become a costumed hero, frictions run high between them. Hero gatherings are usually a clash of Superman-sized egos, tense undercurrents running beneath the smiling group photographs.

Unlike Batman in The Dark Knight Returns, whose deeds are above those of mortal men, the Watchmen heroes must live in the real world. The 1940s heroes are agressively marketed by a promoter, who loses interest when the hero fad dies out. One of the present-day heroes makes money by selling action figures of himself. Many members of the public think the heroes are a bit ridiculous: their attempts at policing during an NYPD strike are met with derision. Some heroes are employed by the US government to carry out assorted dirty work. One hero, the godlike Dr. Manhattan, becomes a key asset for the American military in the Cold War.

With Dr. Manhattan I have to sound a note of disappointment. He's an interesting character, and he provides a lot of the story's comic relief, but I think it's a pity that a supernatural element had to be included. None of the other heroes have any superpowers, and barring a few high-tech gadgets here and there, they are the sort of costumed vigilantes that could be feasible in real life. In the end, I don't see what the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan added to the story. I'd like to see a totally down-to-earth and realistic treatment of costumed heroes, and Watchmen missed out on doing this. But this is a minor criticism.

While The Dark Knight Returns ended up being a celebration of macho violence, Watchmen is the opposite. There are relatively few fight scenes, and none of them cast the heroes in a particularly heroic light. You get the sense that Moore is as appalled by the brutal methods of Rorschach and The Comedian as he is by the crimes they fight. The Gordian Knot is a recurring metaphor in the story. Alexander the Great's swift and brutal solution to the knot was to cut it with his sword. Is vigilantism a similarly swift and brutal solution to the Gordian Knot of crime - a 'solution' that sidesteps the problem itself? This comes to a head in the final chapters when one of the characters attempts a Gordian Knot solution to the problems of the then-raging Cold War. Things are left undecided in a wonderfully amoral ending, leaving us to question whether the ends of the heroes justify their means. Who is to decide where crime-fighting ends and crime begins? Who watches the Watchmen?

As a book, Watchmen would be interesting but unspectacular, but as a comic book, Watchmen becomes a work of art. It plays to the strengths of the medium, using devices possible only in comics to tell and comment on its story. The same sequence of pictures is often supplied with two parallel commentaries, one straightforward and one metaphorical. Many of these metaphorical commentaries come from a comic-within-a-comic, 'The Tales of the Black Freighter', which is itself a striking parable about how the blind pursuit of good ends can lead a man to commit terrible deeds. Conversely, the same commentary is often used to narrate two parallel sequences of pictures, shown in alternate frames, revealing underlying similarities, or 'fearful symmetries', between ostensibly disconnected events.

'Fearful Symmetry' is another recurring device in Watchmen. In the chapter of the same title, the layout is symmetrical around the centre pages, and the events in the chapter themselves display an inverted symmetry. Rorschach the hunter becomes hunted; Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre go apart, then together; Ozymandias, almost killed, becomes a killer. It's a neat effect. It also brings to mind William Blake, whose ideas on the interdependency of good and evil are touched upon here, in the suggestion that the costumed crime-fighters are dependent on costumed criminals to fight. More could have been made of this, I think.

Dave Gibbons' artwork is excellent throughout, a huge improvement on Frank Miller's efforts in The Dark Knight Returns. The drawing is technically superb: characters are realistically proportioned and look consistent from frame to frame. It isn't flashy and has no special effects, but I think this aids the storytelling: anything more would be a distraction. The artwork also conveys a sense of life and movement. Facial expressions are outstanding. When Nite Owl looks back at the departing Silk Spectre, his face is a perfect expression of muddled despair and hope and unrequited love. When Rorschach sees himself in the son of his prostitute landlady, his face is a perfect expression of something I don't think the English language has a word for.

Reading Watchmen often feels like watching a film: Gibbons frames his scenes in a noirish, cinematic style, and he has a director's eye for subtle detail. The details buried in each scene can be rewarding. For example, in one scene, Captain Metropolis presents a crime-fighting plan to the other heroes. Looking at the plan reveals some of the 'crimes' the Captain is worried about: anti-war protests and 'black unrest'. Here, in one frame, is more insightful commentary on superheroes than can be found in 200 pages of The Dark Knight Returns.

All in all, Watchmen is a hugely entertaining read, and complex and intricate enough to merit a few further readings. I had always suspected that comics could produce worthwhile art, but now at last I have some evidence. I hope there are more like it.