Terrence Wandtke, Frank Miller Strikes Again and Batman Becomes a Postmodern Anti-Hero: The Tragi(Comic) Reformulation of the Dark Knight

(In The Amazing Transforming Superhero)

Ye gods, Wandtke loves his long titles. I think I'm just going to call my thesis "Reintroduction," and be done with it. No overlong subtitles, no contrived academic puns, just one word.

Anyway.

I don't actually have much to say about this chapter. It was an interesting comparison between the original Dark Knight Returns and the more recent Dark Knight Strikes Again from a Žižek-Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, but didn't really offer much for my purposes unfortunately, and seemed strangely out of line with the theme of the book, especially considering Wandtke is the editor.

There was a handful of dubious statements such as the suggestion that most superheroes other than the Miller's version of Batman never consider life without an alter-ego. Really? I'm having a hard time thinking of any superhero who never considered dropping the tights (figuratively speaking) and leading a normal life. That's practically Spider-Man's defining feature!

The best point made in the article was that DKR is best viewed as a modernist text, while DKSA is post-modern to the core, which is a very accurate assessment that could have used more development.

Terrence Wandtke, Introduction: Once Upon a Time Once Again

Wandtke's book is one of the few which deals directly with my topic, so I'll be reading pretty extensively from it in the coming week or two. Which isn't to say I agree with his stuff completely, but it's very useful.

His notion of a public which is willing to see superheroes constantly change with the times is an example of the reception aspect of franchises - franchises as a reading strategy which allows for and even expects change, in other words.

Wandtke uses revision, I use reintroduction. Revision (like evolution) is too limited and linear a term for my purposes: reintroduction comprises revision and reiteration.

Wandtke notes that the newest version of a superhero is always privileged. I wouldn't say privileged, but it is always presented as a legitimate instance of the hero... whether or not it is recieved as such is another matter entirely. Additionally, privileged implies that there cannot be multiple legitimate versions co-existing simultaneously, which is certainly not true in comics (although it often is the case in film franchises).

The notion that past versions of superheroes (and thus all past franchise texts) are never completely lost and continue to inform current versions is a good one, and is pretty fundamental to my thesis. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, Neil Gaiman's Dream might say; everything changes, but nothing is ever truly lost. Franchises are in many ways precisely the sum of their parts, a big, interconnected network of different (and same) meanings.


Luckily, superheros are vastly more complicated to discuss than action heroes.