There’s a new Batman in Gotham, and he would probably vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
In October, DC Comics will launch Absolute Batman, a new series. In it, the iconic crime-fighting character Bruce Wayne is no longer a millionaire vigilante who combats evil by night. Instead, Wayne is a guy who lives in poverty and takes on the wealthy, who, in this new iteration, are the real problem in society.
The Joker, Two-Face, the Penguin — in Absolute Batman, the rogues’ gallery is all guys that Wayne grew up with. Wayne wasn’t raised in a mansion but in Crime Alley. Wayne’s father is not a rich doctor and philanthropist but a school teacher at a state university. The Batman is created not as a result of a botched crime but by a mass shooting — at a zoo.
As comic book reporter Joe George put it, “In other words, this is a complete reinvention of Batman for a new generation of readers. Not the tony crimefighter of the 1930s, but a rough and tumble underdog who sees chaos, not order, as a way to deliver justice.”
Another journalist, Rich Johnson, goes further: “This Batman is taking the very sane approach to someone determined to make change, to deal with those from above, in the helicopters or yachts and their pawns, rather than those running the gyms, casinos, or brothels. Just like Jesus, Batman lives with the criminals. Because there are much bigger threats, much higher up, that threaten everyone.” While “the standard Batman would have a big problem with this … Absolute Batman is someone else,” Johnson added.
This new direction, written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Nick Dragotta, is a change from the perception that, if anything, Batman would be right-wing.
The argument was first made in reference to Frank Miller’s 1986 masterpiece, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This entry in the superhero series tells the story of an aging Batman who comes out of retirement to wage war on a city plagued by lawlessness and gang violence. The Dark Knight becomes the strongman leader of his own clean-up-Gotham mutant gang.
One critic of The Dark Knight Returns was Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus, published in 1987, has become part of American literature. In a 1996 interview in the Comics Journal, he blasted The Dark Knight as “a rather fascistic Reagan-era hero.”
Spiegelman also indicted the artwork of the legend Jack Kirby (1917-1994), who almost solely gave birth to the superhero comics renaissance of the 1960s, arguing that Kirby’s work has fascistic undertones: The heroes are built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and such archetypes express “the triumph of the will, the celebration of the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect,” Spiegelman claimed.
More recently, journalist Jerry Boyer claimed that the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises is an argument against left-wing rebellion. “The third film in the Batman series is a direct polemical assault on the French Revolution and its political heirs,” the conservative Boyer wrote, “which includes Occupy Wall Street and perhaps Barack Obama.”
Then came 2016 and the political rise of former President Donald Trump. Damien Walter of the Guardian saw a direct line between Batman and Trump: “It’s not much of a leap from Miller’s masked strongman to Donald Trump’s bid for presidency. Some may find the idea of the American businessman swinging from the rooftops clad in spandex hard to stomach, but the similarities are clear enough. Both storylines feature an aging billionaire lost inside a delusional fantasy of his own heroism, who truly believes that only he can solve the problems confronting the modern world — for Gotham’s mutant army see international terrorism.”
Ultimately, the best argument is that Batman is a conservative or at best a classical liberal. After all, liberals love cities and the idea of putting down roots despite the geographical disruptions that can come with capitalism. Bruce Wayne loves his home city. Even though it is crime-ridden and robbed him of his parents, he will not give up. In story after story, he insists that “Gotham is not past saving.”
It would be easy for the billionaire Wayne to live anywhere in the world, but like the liberal who refuses to flee during the postwar flight to the suburbs, he won’t give up on his home. An orphan, Wayne generously supports homes for other children who have lost their parents. He might even believe it takes a village to raise a child.
Also, Batman does not kill. This might be considered an argument against the death penalty.
These are all plausible arguments. But Batman as angry antifa thug? A transgender Superman may be next.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
